Winning rookies like Matthews lose out
I’m not sure what criteria was used by the NBA assistant coaches who voted for the Rookie Challenge, but it certainly didn’t favor first-year players who contribute to winning teams.
Only four rookies in the NBA currently average 20 or more minutes on teams with records above .500, but just one of them earned an invitation to play for the freshman squad during All-Star Weekend next month.
Congrats, James Harden of Oklahoma City.
Other rookies who’ve earned regular-rotation minutes with good teams – namely, the Jazz’s Wesley Matthews, Denver’s Ty Lawson and Toronto’s DeMar DeRozan – will have to settle for the consolation prize of knowing they’re helping their squads make a playoff push.
Take a glance at the just-released nine-deep rookie roster, and it sure looks an awful lot like the list of leaders for minutes per game. It’s eerily similar. It’s almost as if the coaches decided to choose the eight rookies who are playing the most minutes and then threw a dart to pick the final player.
It just so happens that dart landed on a bull’s-eye named DeJuan Blair, the Spurs’ power forward who supposedly doesn’t have any knees but certainly has an uncanny, Paul Millsap-like ability to rebound and affect games.
Blair, a mid-second-round pick from Pittsburgh, averages 18.3 minutes a game. That ranks 14th for rookies.
The rookie who plays the most is Tyreke Evans (37.1 mpg), followed by Brandon Jennings (34.3), Stephen Curry (34.1), Jonny Flynn (29.8), Jonas Jerebko (27.8), Omri Casspi (27.6), Taj Gibson (24.5) and James Harden (23.1).
And those nine are your rookie representatives.
The next three, Nos. 9-11, were left out despite their solid play on solid teams. Lawson averages 22.3 minutes, Matthews puts in 22.2 mpg and DeRozan plays 21 a night.
Interesting.
Granted, you can easily make the arguments that the best rookies usually go to the worst teams in the NBA, that the top performers get the most minutes and that the league’s assistant coaches know who deserves to be in this contest.
You might think, though, that rookies – especially Lawson and Matthews – would have won some extra votes for winning.