When looking at incoming NBA rookies, there's always the question of how quickly a player should contribute. If a player starts off fast – like Basketball Reference's Season Finder to figure out how out how teenage NBA players have performed in the past. I restricted my search to find players who were teenagers in their rookie season and posted at least five win shares.
If you’re wondering what a good win share total is, for reference, 89 players hit the 5.0 or higher mark this past season. All-Star caliber players are generally 7.0 or higher (41 players hit that mark this past season). The superstars – the All-NBA caliber – are usually 10.0 or higher. In total, 15 players hit that mark this season.
When I initially did my search, I put a low number (5.0 WS) and was expecting to have to raise the parameters. However, I only got five players back. Here they are.
Player | Season | Minutes | PER | WS | WS/48 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Dwight Howard | 2004-2005 | 2,670 | 17.2 | 7.3 | .131 |
Chris Bosh | 2003-2004 | 2,510 | 15.1 | 6.2 | .119 |
Carmelo Anthony | 2003-2004 | 2,995 | 17.6 | 6.1 | .098 |
Anthony Davis | 2012-2013 | 1,846 | 21.7 | 6.1 | .159 |
LeBron James | 2003-2004 | 3,122 | 18.3 | 5.1 | .078 |
That isn't a bad list of players.
In case you were wondering, there were two players from last season that were eligible for this list – the Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Sun’s Archie Goodwin. They had 1.2 and 0.2 win shares, respectively. A player like Goodwin drafted at the end of the first round won’t have much opportunity their rookie season, so that can possibly skew some results. Although, it is incredibly rare for a star-caliber player to come from that range anyway.
Last year’s draft class was significantly older than this year’s, as shown by only having two teenage rookies this past season. Here’s a list of players drafted in the first round who will still be a teenager this season: Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, Aaron Gordon, Dante Exum, Noah Vonleh, Zach LaVine, James Young, and Bruno Caboclo.
Of those players, all but Vonleh and Caboclo should get extensive minutes during this first year, if not an outright starting spot. So what should we expect? Well, we should probably expect some pretty steep learning curves.
Some final observations...