Fantasy Basketball Advice

There’s a lot to like about the Grizzlies. They’re the reigning Cinderella squad of the NBA, their logo is among the best in sports, they put a great town on the league map after years of embarrassing failure and they have, not one, but two players on their team that pronounce their English names with a French accent. Xavier Henry and Darrell Arthur have names that shouldn’t scare anyone off. Ex-AY-vee-er and DARE-uhl. No biggie. But these guys? These guys are unique and they pronounce their name accordingly. ZAH-vee-ay and Dah-RELL. So very French. There’s a good chance that either of these players could be the first guy off the bench next season or out of the 10-man rotation completely. Again, what’s not to love about a team with that much swing? We’ll regard Henry some other time. Today, let’s look at what makes Arthur a king among fantasy basketball sleepers.

Right off the bat, it’s worth noting that Arthur jumped from a 10.9 PER in his first two seasons to a 15.7 as a 22-year-old. Noted! (Totally worth it.) He improved hugely in every single category other than TOV and RBD by a ton in 2010. He went from averaging .437/.590 in his first two seasons to .497/.813. T’weren’t no fluke, neither. He averaged more minutes and took more shots and free throws per game last season than in either of his first two. This tells you (and you, and you, but not the guy behind you because he’s just trying to steal your wallet!) that he not only saw more minutes and action, but he did more with the minutes he saw. Arthur’s scoring slingshot from 10.9 points per 36 in his rookie and sophomore seasons to 16.3 last year. Meanwhile, Arthur owners got 1.5 stl+blk out of a guy who was probably on the waiver wire for all but a month of the season. It’s true that Z-Bo and Marc Gasol were both hurt during portions of last season and that Arthur bumped his stats a ton in October, November and March because of it, but that’s kind of the point. Guys get hurt in the NBA. And right now, other the guys that aren’t hurt might skip the country to play overseas. Either way, you’re not going to draft Arthur in the fourth round, but he might be a steal in the 14^th. He was a steal for fantasy owners last year and people have a way of not learning lessons after the first try.

I’m not sure how it works in the NBA, but in school or places of employment, your name partly determines where you fit in. No one clique ever really has two guys with the same name. Occasionally, there would be two dudes named Brett or something, but one of them always goes by a nickname or his last name. No one ever said, “Brett H. can ride with me, Brett R. called shotgun in the Jeep.” Seriously. I defy you to prove that sentence had ever been uttered before just now. So I don’t really know how the name thing works within the league. The league can’t hold two Dirks, I know that. It just can’t. Same thing with LeBron. There are four high-quality Kevins in the league, but Love is the only one without at least two nicknames. You have to assume that when the Raptors drafted Jonas Valanciunas from Lithuania, Detroit Swede Jonas Jerebko was capitally peeved. Both Jonas’ (Jonai?) are in the 6-foot-10, 240 range, surprisingly athletic, play for weak northern teams, and have names my grandma will almost certainly mispronounce, fitting similar sounds into the right amount of syllables. I’m thinking she’ll call one Jonesy Valencia and the other Jordan Jibco. Despite missing the entirety of the 2010 season Mr. Jibco showed massive potential after his rookie season and was touted in most leagues as a sleeper to target in the final rounds of you draft. Then you did and then you immediately had to drop him. Along with his motivation to be the league’s best Jonas, here’s why Detroit might have a sleeper not named Brandon Knight on its roster.

It’s hard to tell what the Pistons are going to look like at the start of the season; new coach, half a roster that is both old and likely immovable, and a few young guys around whom the team never intended to build. So that’s pretty sweet, huh Detroit? Like it or not, Daye, Monroe, Jerebko, and Knight are the future of this team.* I have faith that the Pistons can’t be worse than they were last season. There were too many management errors, too much in-fighting, too many stubborn missteps that turned a simple underachiever into one of the league’s laughing stocks. The Pistons will turn to their youth. Between the possibility of injury and the sapping of their older players’ skills, they’ll have to turn to their youth. Jerebko only averaged 28 minutes in 2010 and was only involved in 16 percent of the plays when he was on the court and he still managed 9/6, with  a steal and 1 3ptm+blk per game with good percentages. He’ll play most of his time at the four-spot, where he’ll open the floor and cause a lot of bangers problems. The downside will be his underwhelming rebounds and his fouling put him in the jackpot a few too many times as a rookie, but then again, he was a rookie. Now he’s a sophomore with a junior’s amount of experience watching the NBA function. I don’t think he’ll come out shiny and polished like Blake Griffin did after his rookie furlough, but watching the game for a year helps. Playing for a directionless Pistons team that will likely try to roll its old line out there more than it should, won’t help. I also don’t think that tact will last. Detroit’s old line is busted and a few of them might be gone before the season starts. The window for Jerebko to repeat his 26-28 mpg is there and I think mild improvements in scoring and defense after a few months of re-acclimation are a given; something in the range of 1 3ptm/ 11.5 pts/ 6 rbd/ 2 ast/ 1 stl and a return to the final flyer pick in your draft seems about right.

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*If the “Knight and Daye” combo doesn’t stick (it totally needs to stick), I’ll spend all next summer working to get Milicic back in Detroit for the Darko Knight combo.

I’m going to have to be careful here, so as not to convince you Gary Neal is a cherry, when, in fact, he’s closer to a lemon. Do people even call good things “cherries” or did I just make that up? I’m not good with food metaphors as evidenced by my comparing Gary Neal to a lemon. He’s not really a lemon, either. More like lemon zest; tasty, but certainly not the most important ingredient on your plate. Last season Neal was a bargain basement find in deep leagues, a 26-year-old rookie who drained a relative ton of threes and gave owners above-average percentages for a SG (.451/.808). Gregg Popovich didn’t really understand what he had during the first 17 games of the season, but by December 1, he was well on his way to averaging 23 mpg/ 1.7 3ptm/ 11 pts/ 2.5 rbd – not bad for a guy most owners didn’t own at any point in the season. He wasn’t one of his team’s first offensive options, didn’t attack the rim enough, offered precious few secondary stats and is at the age that suggests this is his peak. Frankly, I don’t see much of this changing next season. Whew! Way to sell it! So to recap: Neal is an old lemon, with no more than one tool in his kit on a team that can afford not to use him. And look, here comes Sgt. Sarcasm. Hey Sarge, what do you think about Gary Neal? He sounds like a winner! The only concern now is whether he’ll still be available in the third round or if you’ll have to reach for him in the second! Way to go Sarge! You’ve done it again! Anyway, here’s what we can expect from Gary Neal in 2012 and what makes him a fantasy sleeper.

He was used very evenly in his rookie season, seeing his fair share of touches (20.6 USG%), but little else. This was in a season where Richard Jefferson missed only one game, Manu Ginobili was healthy for all but two and Tony Parker for all but four. The median age for those guys is 31 and if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on that trio missing a heckuva lot more than seven combined games next season. Besides George Hill, Neal developed into the go-to backcourt reserve. His late-season development (his APG doubled from 0.9 before the All-Star Break to 1.8 after it) mingled with his underrated efficiency (Only made 25 fewer threes than Ginobili, despite playing 741 fewer minutes; had the third highest FT% among qualifying Spurs; averaged the fourth best per36 scoring among qualifying Spurs after Parker, Ginobili and Duncan; and among the nine Spurs who averaged at least 19 mpg last season, only Matt Bonner had a lower turnover average (0.4) than Neal (1.0) and sprinkled with the lemon zest of Spurs injuries probable next season, it wouldn’t be ridiculous to predict incremental increases across the board from Neal. Figure 26 mpg/.465/.815/ 1.7 3ptm/ 12.5 pts/ 3 rbd/ 2 ast from a guy you can probably pick off waivers sometime in November, or in any other month for that matter.

If there were a sixth man in the NBA who appeared in every one of the season’s 82 games, but was only on the floor about half the time throughout those contests despite averaging 13/5, with .541/.707 and more than a steal every time out, the first thing you’d say is, “Adam, why all the secrecy? We all know from the title these are Thaddeus Young‘s stats.” And before I could recover, you’d follow up with, “Oh yeah, and why is he only playing 26 minutes a contest?” There we go. That’s more like it. I figured you’d lead with the minutes per game thing. Then you’d ask, “Is ‘Thaddeus’ a family name passed down from generation to generation? Because it really seems like an old-timey name – kinda sad, really. Or thad, if you have a speech impediment.” Then I’d dumbfoundedly blink at you like I just got mule kicked by a … well, a mule, I guess. By now I’ve gotten the duct tape out, applied it to your mouth and have prepared to tell you why Young should be a huge fantasy basketball sleeper in 2011.

Of the more than 450 active basketball players in the league, there are exactly two players who, in a single season, have played more than 2,000 minutes, started fewer than five games, ended with a PER greater than 18.4 and were younger than 23 when they did it. Young is the first. A dozen years ago, a 19-year-old Kobe Bryant was the other. That’s it. No one else. Before we go any further, no, I’m not claiming Young is or will ever be Bryant. The next year, when Bryant turned 20, he started every game and averaged 20/5/4 in the lockout-shortened season. Young won’t average those numbers. The caveat in these stats isn’t the exceptional PER of both players, or the age, or the minutes. There were 70 other players who fit that triplet of criteria. It’s the games started. Bryant was in his sophomore year at 19. Young just finished up his fourth year at 22. This alone suggests we’re comparing apples to slightly bruised plums here, but still … Young was in serious contention (statistically) for this year’s Sixth Man Award and might have been a bigger part of the conversation had he appeared more often than 13 minutes a half. He was versatile all season, playing 2/3 of his time at the four and the other third as Philly’s swingman and it’s that versatility likely to earn Young more minutes in 2011 (this could easily happen in the following two ways: 1) Philly drops Iguodala’s 37 mpg from last year in hopes of keeping him healthy, 2) Brand plays more center, leaving fewer minutes for Spencer Hawes, who couldn’t score a bucket if he walked into a KFC and threw a fifty on the counter). I don’t think Young plays a ton more minutes per game, probably about six. But even if his 2010 per minute averages remain locked in next year, Young would still jump from 13/5/1, with a steal to 16/6/1, with an extra steal every four games. Add in his .508/.716 career averages with almost certain upside to produce better than that, and you’ve got yourself a 10th round pick that a lot of people won’t be looking at until after the 12th.

In 73 games last year, rookie Marcus Thornton averaged 14.5 points, 1.6 threes and percentages of .451/.814. “I’m listening,” you decided back in August. “Not bad,” you figured back in September. “Kaboom,” you shouted to no one in particular back in October. Your random shouting was weird, but not your belief in the Holy Grail Marcus. In 2009, Thornton didn’t see the floor until the ninth game of the season, he didn’t start until the 44th game. “That won’t happen again,” you thought to yourself and said out loud once in the men’s room at a Chili’s because you thought there was no one there, then got all embarrassed when you realized there was a dude in the stall and he now knew how you felt about Thornton’s role for 2010. He went from averaging 18 mpg in the first two months of his rookie season to 35 mpg in the last two months, then back down to 16 mpg through December of his sophomore season, getting traded to Sacramento and once again averaging 39 mpg in the last 24 games of his season. “What the eff,” you mutter under your breath, careful to self-censor the cursing in case an unnoticed toddler is standing within earshot. Anyway, what makes Thornton a good bet to begin, middle and end well in 2011? Let me count the ways.

Actually, no. No need to count. There’s really just one way: Per36. Thornton was worth a lot to your team toward the end of last year (22/5/4, with 3.7 stl+3ptm per game), he’ll be worth less next season, but not a ton less. Playing with the Hornets as a rookie in 2009, Thornton averaged 20/4/2, with 3.4 stl+3ptm every 36 minutes. In the 46 games he played with the Hornets in 2010 his per36 was a similar 19/5/3, with a 3.1 stl+3ptm. Then he went off to Sacramento to be the second-year Tyreke Evans that Evans was too hurt to be and ended up with a per36 of 20/4/3, with a 3.5 stl+3ptm. Those are three very similar lines coming from three very varied (stutterer!) playing situations. This tells me the fault was not wit the player, but with the game. Last year in my sleeper post on another site, I said this about Thornton: “Only a team of utter buffoonery would play this guy fewer than 30 minutes anyway. I give the Hornets a 50-50 shot.” I’m going to say the same thing about the Maloof-run Kings in regards to Thornton in 2011. It doesn’t help that buffoon and Maloof already kinda sound like the same word. With Evans likely healthier in 2011 than he was in 2010 and DeMarcus Cousins one year closer to being dominant, I don’t see Thornton’s run of being “the man” in the California capitol extending into next season, but I do see him as the team’s best shooter a solid third option and a player who once every few weeks will go off for a big shooting night. I don’t think 16/4/3, with 3.5 stl+3ptm per game is expecting too much from a third-year guard on a team with (almost literally) nothing to lose.