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Playing time for development

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idiot

Well-Known Member
Several years ago, during the Core 4 days of Utah Jazz lore, an idiotic theory was going around SLC.dunk that for young players to properly develop they needed to have at least 2000 of NBA playing time in a year.

While I think it's fair to say that theory was overblown, it's interesting to note, given ideas about playing time for young players and desiring players on similar timelines, that there have only been 3 teams in NBA history to have 5 players 24 and younger (according to NBA.com's stats) that have received over 2000 minutes in a single (same) year. It's not an easy feat, what with injuries and other priorities. Among our 24 and under players only Keyonte surpassed 2000 minutes last year (and just barely). As a point of comparison, 104 players regardless of age played over 2000 minutes last season in the league (about 3.5 per team on average).

What are your hopes/expectation for minutes played for the young guys this year? Do we have a chance to have 5 players 24 and under receive 2000+ minutes for only the 4th time in NBA history? We have 8 players of the appropriate age (Collier, Williams, Filipowski, George, Hendricks, Sensabaugh, Kessler, Juzang). How many minutes do you think they need (overall, or per game) to develop properly? How many do you think they'll get?

Bonus points for anyone who can identify the three earlier teams/coaches.
 
It's a good question. I think it's somewhat specific to the types of players and types of skills you're aiming to develop, but ultimately I think the answer is kinda boring....It doesn't matter much. In the chicken/egg question of "do players develop into better players because they get better minutes, or do players get more minutes because they are better" I'd definitely side towards the latter. I don't think we need to hit X amount of minutes for optimal development, and I don't the vets taking away time from the younger players is likely to have a consequential impact one way or the other. It is infinitely more entertaining to watch the young guys play, so I will be hoping for that, but I don't think it will make a big difference in the long term.

If there is something that I worry about, it's bad habits and I think those bad habits can be formed both in the G-League and on a tanking NBA team which are both terrible, unserious basketball situations. I think, for example, the Rockets young guys got more benefit last season than the year before (is that one of the teams?) because they were playing real basketball with some real players. If we just forget about lotto balls (please miss me with the HOU future talks), I think that would be kind of the ideal environment to develop. The team is both somewhat competitive and young players get ample playing time. It worries me when I hear Hardy say things like "we didn't focus on defense". How is someone like Keyonte going to defend better when neither he or the coach have interest in it? Having said that, I still don't think it's too consequential. Talent will shine through no matter the situation.

As far as expectations, I expect a lot of G-League for Collier/Flip. This is especially the case for the first half of the season and/or before we pull the plug again. Keyonte will probably lead the team in minutes barring injury with Kessler, Williams, and Hendricks being the other guys getting significant minutes. Kessler is almost like a vet at this point, but I guess he fits into there somewhere. Not sure if he gets pulled during tanking times or not. Methinks the FO is much higher on Williams than Hendricks, so I'm expecting a large boost to Williams' minutes even if his current level doesn't necessarily warrant that.

I think we will have one total player play 2K+ minutes and it will Keyonte with a chance that we have zero.
 
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KqWIN said:
If there is something that I worry about, it's bad habits and I think those bad habits can be formed both in the G-League and on a tanking NBA team which are both terrible, unserious basketball situations. I think, for example, the Rockets young guys got more benefit last season than the year before (is that one of the teams?) because they were playing real basketball with some real players. If we just forget about lotto balls (please miss me with the HOU future talks),
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Yes, great guess. It was one of those three teams, under coach Stephen Silas, with the prize being Amen Thompson in the draft.
 
idiot said:
Yes, great guess. It was one of those three teams, under coach Stephen Silas, with the prize being Amen Thompson in the draft.
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HOU is an interesting case study. From a pure development standpoint, I'm not sure if it helps or hurts to have FVV there. He is an awesome player who gets them organized....but maybe Shep and Amen are better getting more minutes?

I found it interesting that several "youth movement" types of teams decided to add veteran/established talent to their roster. SAS is a young team who added vets who can play and DET was very open about wanting to surround their young guys with vets and they have a ton of them. WAS, POR, and CHO have also added some form have veteran/established talent to their rosters. There also hasn't necessarily been this massive sell off from any of the bottom feeders. IMO, part of this is due to the flattened lotto odds....but I also think we're seeing NBA teams valuing some degree of veteran presence over force feeding minutes to young players.
 
Give the young guys all the minutes!

Sent from my CPH2451 using Tapatalk
 
KqWIN said:
HOU is an interesting case study. From a pure development standpoint, I'm not sure if it helps or hurts to have FVV there. He is an awesome player who gets them organized....but maybe Shep and Amen are better getting more minutes?

I found it interesting that several "youth movement" types of teams decided to add veteran/established talent to their roster. SAS is a young team who added vets who can play and DET was very open about wanting to surround their young guys with vets and they have a ton of them. WAS, POR, and CHO have also added some form have veteran/established talent to their rosters. There also hasn't necessarily been this massive sell off from any of the bottom feeders. IMO, part of this is due to the flattened lotto odds....but I also think we're seeing NBA teams valuing some degree of veteran presence over force feeding minutes to young players.
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Interesting you mention SAS's change of course. Last year's version of the Spurs was a second team with 5 24-and-younger players with 2000+ minutes each. Got them Stephon Castle, but also a pretty ugly year despite having Wemby. They likely realize partly that having so many young players playing so many minutes together isn't really the path to anything. I don't really know that they had much improvement among the young players, aside from the Wemby unicorn.
 
idiot said:
Interesting you mention SAS's change of course. Last year's version of the Spurs was a second team with 5 24-and-younger players with 2000+ minutes each. Got them Stephon Castle, but also a pretty ugly year despite having Wemby. They likely realize partly that having so many young players playing so many minutes together isn't really the path to anything. I don't really know that they had much improvement among the young players, aside from the Wemby unicorn.
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I think Pop definitely added to the awfulness as well. They were doing a lot of experimenting and definitely weren't trying to win as many games as possible. That's what I expect from Hardy this year, we won't be playing to win as many as possible either. There is a balancing act between getting freedom and developing bad habits. I think Wemby is awesome, but there are some people talking about his bad habits and that's a legit concern. It may be the case that you can get away with that kind of team for some amount of time (and there is a benefit to it), but you start to push your luck if it's that way year after year. DET doesn't have a Wemby, but I think they were similarly concerned about some ill effects and tried to address it this off season.

I actually think a concern about a lot of our young players is their motor/effort levels, I would say it's a key area to focus on for almost all of them....So I'm interested to see how that develops. Seems like it will be more difficult the more unserious our play is.
 
This has worked out well for OKC. This iteration of the team has not had 5 players 24 or younger play 2000 minutes, but that is mainly becuase SGA aged out last year. If you look at their last few season, their young talent have gotten tons of minutes from the moment they got there.
 
KqWIN said:
It's a good question. I think it's somewhat specific to the types of players and types of skills you're aiming to develop, but ultimately I think the answer is kinda boring....It doesn't matter much. In the chicken/egg question of "do players develop into better players because they get better minutes, or do players get more minutes because they are better" I'd definitely side towards the latter. I don't think we need to hit X amount of minutes for optimal development, and I don't the vets taking away time from the younger players is likely to have a consequential impact one way or the other. It is infinitely more entertaining to watch the young guys play, so I will be hoping for that, but I don't think it will make a big difference in the long term.

If there is something that I worry about, it's bad habits and I think those bad habits can be formed both in the G-League and on a tanking NBA team which are both terrible, unserious basketball situations. I think, for example, the Rockets young guys got more benefit last season than the year before (is that one of the teams?) because they were playing real basketball with some real players. If we just forget about lotto balls (please miss me with the HOU future talks), I think that would be kind of the ideal environment to develop. The team is both somewhat competitive and young players get ample playing time. It worries me when I hear Hardy say things like "we didn't focus on defense". How is someone like Keyonte going to defend better when neither he or the coach have interest in it? Having said that, I still don't think it's too consequential. Talent will shine through no matter the situation.

As far as expectations, I expect a lot of G-League for Collier/Flip. This is especially the case for the first half of the season and/or before we pull the plug again. Keyonte will probably lead the team in minutes barring injury with Kessler, Williams, and Hendricks being the other guys getting significant minutes. Kessler is almost like a vet at this point, but I guess he fits into there somewhere. Not sure if he gets pulled during tanking times or not. Methinks the FO is much higher on Williams than Hendricks, so I'm expecting a large boost to Williams' minutes even if his current level doesn't necessarily warrant that.

I think we will have one total player play 2K+ minutes and it will Keyonte with a chance that we have zero.
Click to expand...
Good post. The quality vs quantity argument is always very tricky, but it has definitely been proven over the years that quantity alone does not guarantee results.

I think finding optimal roles for players to develop in is very underrated. So many players are tasked to do stuff they are not good at to maximize their development. I personally think that is fine only if the player either has extreme high level of confidence or proven NBA skills to fall back to. This relates to the bad habit topic you discussed. And finding optimal roles also comes down to who they are playing with.

Kessler is a good example. In year 1 he had Conley to play with who knew how to operate PnR and get Kessler involved in the offense. It hasnt been mentioned much, but I think one major part why Kessler progress stalled was that we traded away Mike and were left with no one who could operate the PnR at a high level.

Real competition is also another thing many people underestimate. By real I mean not pitting two rookies who are still scrubs on NBA level against each other, but having actual hurdles that the rookies need to leap to win/keep the job. Competitive drive should be a thing that we will value anyways, so if you got a guy who has it he should be able to fight his way into rotation as long as the obstacles are not too high. Also if/when they get into the rotation, having guys behind them that could "steal their jobs" is equally important. I think pretty much everyone would agree that complacency is the worst enemy of development.
 
I think one of the most important aspects of playing basketball is confidence, and so when a young guy is developing you need to balance giving them opportunities that will challenge them with opportunities to succeed.

In general I think it's a good idea to give young guys a few consistent minutes each game, like 10-15 minutes, and then adjust that number up or down depending on how it's going.

Part of giving guys an opportunity to succeed is giving them teammates who can take sure pressure off of them.
 
SoberasHotRod said:
I think one of the most important aspects of playing basketball is confidence, and so when a young guy is developing you need to balance giving them opportunities that will challenge them with opportunities to succeed.

In general I think it's a good idea to give young guys a few consistent minutes each game, like 10-15 minutes, and then adjust that number up or down depending on how it's going.

Part of giving guys an opportunity to succeed is giving them teammates who can take sure pressure off of them.
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Very well said. I heard Locke talk on this topic last week and he made another point that I agree with. The young uns need to play well enough that they earn the right to stay on the floor when they mess up. You earn a longer leash and it has a lot to do with what they do in practice and the trust they build with teammates. He mentioned how Keyonte did that over the course of last year but Hendricks did not. Just turning it over to the young ones is not the answer IMO.
 
Hedda Gambler said:
This has worked out well for OKC. This iteration of the team has not had 5 players 24 or younger play 2000 minutes, but that is mainly becuase SGA aged out last year. If you look at their last few season, their young talent have gotten tons of minutes from the moment they got there.
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Right. The Thunder have given their youngsters plenty of playing time. They are one of several teams (though it still hasn't been a common occurrence) throughout NBA history giving 4 guys 24 and younger 2000+ minutes. Back in the days when Durrant/Westbrook/Ibaka were that age, OKC also did it a couple of times as well.

In doing the research, I'd estimate that approximately 1/3 of the time 4 young players reached 2000+ minutes, those players collectively turned out to be truly quite good, as likely is the case in both recent and past OKC examples. About 2/3 of the time, the players collectively turned out to be nothing all that special. But certainly, most of the players we'd regard as stars had their turns as part of the 24 and younger 2000+ minute list, often in multiple seasons.

Of course the question remains whether they became good because of the playing time, or whether they got PT because they were good (or some combination). It didn't work in every case, of course--Darius Bazley nearly reached the 2000 minute-mark one season.
 
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HermanG said:
Good post. The quality vs quantity argument is always very tricky, but it has definitely been proven over the years that quantity alone does not guarantee results.

I think finding optimal roles for players to develop in is very underrated. So many players are tasked to do stuff they are not good at to maximize their development. I personally think that is fine only if the player either has extreme high level of confidence or proven NBA skills to fall back to. This relates to the bad habit topic you discussed. And finding optimal roles also comes down to who they are playing with.

Kessler is a good example. In year 1 he had Conley to play with who knew how to operate PnR and get Kessler involved in the offense. It hasnt been mentioned much, but I think one major part why Kessler progress stalled was that we traded away Mike and were left with no one who could operate the PnR at a high level.

Real competition is also another thing many people underestimate. By real I mean not pitting two rookies who are still scrubs on NBA level against each other, but having actual hurdles that the rookies need to leap to win/keep the job. Competitive drive should be a thing that we will value anyways, so if you got a guy who has it he should be able to fight his way into rotation as long as the obstacles are not too high. Also if/when they get into the rotation, having guys behind them that could "steal their jobs" is equally important. I think pretty much everyone would agree that complacency is the worst enemy of development.
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I'm generally with you here.
 
Any takers on the third team in addition to 2023-4 Spurs (Popovich) and 2022-3 Rockets (Silas)? One hint (if I give any more, it will probably become too easy): the third coach has generally not been regarded as a successful NBA coach.
 
My prediction for minutes for the 24-and-younger crowd for the Jazz this year (baseline of 72 games --figuring in time missed for injuries; if I predict fewer games it's because of DNPs/G League). I might be out-of-my-mind optimistic on these:

George 72 games, 33 mpg, 2376 total minutes
Kessler 72, 29, 2088
Hendricks 72, 27, 1944
Williams 72, 24, 1728
Sensabaugh 68, 22, 1496
Collier, 60, 18, 1080
Filipowski 56, 22, 1232
Juzang 40, 13, 520
 
Play who plays well more, play who plays less well less. Reward defensive effort. Prioritize defense.

If you are playing a fellow tanker, sit your good players.
 
idiot said:
My prediction for minutes for the 24-and-younger crowd for the Jazz this year (baseline of 72 games --figuring in time missed for injuries; if I predict fewer games it's because of DNPs/G League). I might be out-of-my-mind optimistic on these:

George 72 games, 33 mpg, 2376 total minutes
Kessler 72, 29, 2088
Hendricks 72, 27, 1944
Williams 72, 24, 1728
Sensabaugh 68, 22, 1496
Collier, 60, 18, 1080
Filipowski 56, 22, 1232
Juzang 40, 13, 520
Click to expand...
I would love those minutes per game amounts.

Sent from my CPH2451 using Tapatalk
 
idiot said:
My prediction for minutes for the 24-and-younger crowd for the Jazz this year (baseline of 72 games --figuring in time missed for injuries; if I predict fewer games it's because of DNPs/G League). I might be out-of-my-mind optimistic on these:

George 72 games, 33 mpg, 2376 total minutes
Kessler 72, 29, 2088
Hendricks 72, 27, 1944
Williams 72, 24, 1728
Sensabaugh 68, 22, 1496
Collier, 60, 18, 1080
Filipowski 56, 22, 1232
Juzang 40, 13, 520
Click to expand...

In my quick minutes projections, I had it as follows:

George - 2165
Kessler- 1771
Hendricks - 1574
Williams - 1574
Sensabaugh - 984
Flip - 984
Collier - 787
Juzang - 590

You have a lot more minutes for the young guys....definitely possible, it just requires a lot less minutes for the vets than I had.


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