With No. 1 overall pick Zaccharie Risacher facing No. 2 overall pick Alex Sarr on Wednesday night, we need to talk about this rookie class. Summary: it wasn’t good. If you thought this was the worst class in recent NBA history, there’s a group of experts who seem to agree with you:
NBA coaches.
The way it’s going, we might be witnessing the worst class to enter the NBA in the history of the league. Rookies were glued to the bench in ways we hadn’t seen. And even when the Frogs play, the team hardly trusts them for any real responsibility.
You know about the Freshman 15, when first-year college students inevitably put on 15 pounds of partying and pizza.
Allow me to introduce you to the other Freshman 15. No freshman has scored 15 points in a game this season. Nada
Fifteen points is not a high bar, especially in today’s friendly environment where no one bats an eye at a team scoring 140 points. And yet, no rookie pro player has cleared that 15-point threshold — not Risacher, Sarr or anyone else drafted in the lottery. According to Stathead.com, we’ve never gone this “deep” into the season with a rookie failing to score a paltry 15 points in an NBA game.
Last year, two rookies scored 15-plus in their first game, San Antonio’s Victor Wembanyama (15 points) and Dallas center Dereck Lively II (16 points). In the second game of the season, two more names were added to the list, Charlotte’s Brandon Miller (17 points) and Chet Holmgren (16 points). Third game of the season, another name: Gradey Dick, who scored 16 points for the Toronto Raptors. In each team’s first three games, rookies crossed the 15-point plateau a total of eight times last year (Holmgren, Miller and Wembanyama did so multiple times).
But this season, that same number is zero.
Since 1970, we’ve typically seen about nine such performances at this point in the season, sometimes as many as 17. The 2014-15 season represents the previous low mark that recorded just one 15+ point game in the opening week, and it was done. from noted non-scorer Orlando’s Elfrid Payton. This season? We’re still looking for our very own Elfrid Payton.
Coaches across the NBA just don’t trust the Rooks to do much of anything.
The consensus preseason Rookie of the Year pick Reed Sheppard rode a pin for Ime Udoka’s Houston Rockets. The Kentucky product played 15 minutes on opening night, but has seen his playing time dwindle in each game since, down to just three minutes in Monday’s win over the Spurs. The shooter has shot just 4-of-12 in 38 minutes so far.
Zach Edey, another popular choice for Rookie of the Year (including yours truly), started every game for the Memphis Grizzlies. That’s the good news. The bad news is everywhere else. The 7-foot-4 center recorded more fouls (15) than field goals (14). He recorded one more block than his 5-foot-8 teammate Yuki Kawamura, and Kawamura has zero. With all the foul trouble and general ineffectiveness, Edey averaged just 16 minutes per game, the league’s lowest among any full-time starter.
Atlanta’s top overall pick, Risacher, has shown flashes of promise, but the 19-year-old came off the bench in the team’s first two games — a rarity in the annals of No. 1 overall picks — and shot a terrible 38.3 percent. true- shooting percentage in his first foray into professional American rings.
In Charlotte, the seventh overall pick, Tidjane Salaun, also did not start in his first two games; he actually didn’t even play. A DNP Coach’s decision for the team’s first two games, the French teenager clearly did not earn the trust of first-year head coach Charles Lee. And it’s not like the Charlotte Hornets’ roster reminds anyone of the 1996 Chicago Bulls.
By the way, has anyone heard from Rob Dillingham? The eighth overall pick in Minnesota hasn’t even entered a game yet. In retrospect, John Calipari looks charitable after he brought Dillingham off the bench at Kentucky last season. Chris Finch didn’t have his number called once, and the same goes for the team’s other first-round pick Terrence Shannon Jr.
The tanky Wizards were the boldest team in the rookie department. Coach Brian Keefe started the team’s two announced lottery picks Sarr and Bub Carrington in the season opener against Boston. But even Keefe could not endure that situation for long. After two blowout losses, Jonas Valančiūnas replaced Carrington in the starting line-up to give Sarr some muscle up front. After three games, Carrington scored three, 10 and 13 points.
And here’s the crazy thing: Carrington is your starting points leader! The Pittsburgh product has averaged 8.7 points per game so far this season and that makes him the leading scorer in the rookie class. yes, single digits. To answer the question posed by NBA voice of the gods My research shows that there has never been a rookie class without at least one player who averaged double-digit scoring.
This isn’t just about points per game. Sarr and Carrington are No. 1 and No. 2 in most minutes per game among rookies, and they haven’t even played 30 minutes in a game this season. In case you were wondering, there’s also a pseudo NBA record in that category. Through a team’s first three games, we’ve never seen a season in which a rookie hasn’t logged more than 30 minutes in at least one game, according to Stathead.com tracking. By comparison, there were 19 such cases as recently as 2021-22 – the Cade Cunningham class.
On Tuesday night, Utah rookie Cody Williams logged 29 minutes and 58 seconds in the team’s fourth game, making him the first Rook to touch the 30-minute plateau. Although a handful of teams have yet to play their fourth game, having a single 30-minute appearance from the rookie class at this point would also be unprecedented. We haven’t actually had fewer than five such games from the rookie class since 1964-65, according to Stathead.com.
So what is driving the great Newbie Recession of 2024? Many NBA drafters urged patience with this draft group that lacked home run talent like Wemby, Zion or LeBron. They are also young. There were more 18-year-olds drafted in the lottery (three – Salaun, Carrington and Nikola Topić) than those who could legally buy Bud Light in the United States (two – Zach Edey and Devin Carter).
Speaking of Carter and Topić, it certainly doesn’t help that those two lottery picks were sidelined by injury. Three other first-rounders, Toronto’s Ja’Kobe Walter (no. 19), Denver’s DaRon Holmes (no. 22) and Utah’s Isaiah Collier (no. 29) are working back from physical ailments as well. But injuries happen every season, and rookie classes are not immune to such setbacks.
The most obvious explanation is that this group just isn’t that good. It happens. Perhaps the closest comp is the 2000-01 class after Kenyon Martin was selected #1 overall by the New Jersey Nets. The Cincinnati phenom led his rookie class in scoring with a paltry 12.0 points per game, but that can be partially explained by him recovering from a broken leg suffered in his final season as a Bearcat. (Marc Jackson — not Mark — actually posted a 13.2 scoring average in 48 games for the Golden State Warriors if you want to count that, but there’s an important caveat to his rookie status: He was 26 years old.)
My research on raw historical data suggests that ranks as one of the worst draft classes in NBA history, counting only three eventual All-Stars in the group and none making more than one All-Star appearance. Five of the top seven picks were washed out of the league by the end of the decade. There were slow starts in that class as well, and it proved to be more than just an aberration.
There is a glimmer of hope for this 2024 crew. Remember Elfrid Payton and the 2014-15 rookie class that struggled out of the gate? Little did we know at the time that two 2014 recruits who didn’t play the entire game season – forget the first few games – then would go on to become MVPs. Those players? Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokić. Embiid sat out two seasons with injury issues and Jokić was sidelined overseas for a season before Denver’s second-round pick made his in-state debut in October 2015. For that matter, you can count Julius Randle in that group of redshirt stars from the 2014 class. The seventh overall pick suffered a broken leg in his very first game in the NBA, prematurely ending his rookie season, and as we know now, he would later engrave his name on three All-Star teams.
Maybe the class of 2024 will be like that of 2014. Looking deeper into the data, the first week of starter production has little to no correlation to career performance. Sometimes it portends incapacity, sometimes not. After all, 18-year-old Giannis Antetokounmpo also received a couple of DNP CDs at the dawn of his Hall of Fame career, too. Teenagers almost never arrive as good NBA players out of the gate, a fact that provides a tonic to some disgusting moments from Risacher and Sarr, who both won’t turn 20 until April.
Maybe Risacher, Sarr, Sheppard and the rest of the rookie class will hit the ground running soon, and this bumpy start will feel like a distant memory. But to average double-digit scoring, the coaches have to at least let the kids eat. So far that doesn’t happen much. At the very least, let’s hope a freshman will party in the next few days and put on a Freshman 15 for us all. Maybe Risacher and Sarr do it on Wednesday.
