Cling Kong

When I was looking at a list of potential ‘most improved player’ candidates [1], I stumbled across a season that’s being overlooked. Perhaps because he’s playing in the Pacific Northwest for a .500 team (might as well be Skull Island), but there’s been a notable lack of chatter about just how good Donovan Clingan has been this year. And I was excited to look into it, because there’s nothing I love more than confirming my priors.

Let’s start from a bit of ‘first principles.' More possessions are good. If I were to break down who the most underrated players in the NBA were, it’d be the ones who don’t turn it over and who do get offensive rebounds.

Here are the top 3 offensive rebounders [2] through Sunday (3/22):

Donovan Clingan	307
[3]
Rudy Gobert	270
Moussa Diabate	236

Offensive rebounding is awesome[4], and an easy way to become a useful offensive player quickly. But Clingan doesn’t only scale tall buildings, he also fires from deep — shooting 4.1 3PA/36 (well above the 2.9 3PA/36 positional average). Now I’m not saying he’s some sort of sniper, but he’s making 33% of them, and 68% of his FTs, and the fact that the team wants him to take them (while trying to win games!) shows me what they think of his prospects from there.

Should he be standing at the top of the key firing 3s? Well, the Blazers are an anemic offense (23rd) in need of spacing, and his offensive rebounding has stayed elite, sooo... sure? It’s good to have a bit more optionality, and someday it could be extremely valuable. 

But big guys should do big guy stuff, like protect the rim, which Clingan is very good at. Per NBA.com, here are the top players in the league at the difference between the opponents' FG% and their actual FG% at rim. 

PLAYER	FREQ%	DFGA	DFG%	FG%	Diff%
Chet Holmgren	44.3	6.3	49.5	64.1	-14.6
Ivica Zubac	36.9	5.7	52.6	64.8	-12.2
Neemias Queta	39.2	5.1	51.7	63.4	-11.8
Evan Mobley	45.9	7.6	52.5	64.1	-11.6
Jaden McDaniels	38.7	5.6	52.6	63.4	-10.8
Donovan Clingan	33.5	6.8	53.9	64.6	-10.7
Derrick White	36.2	5.3	52.7	62.4	-9.7
Victor Wembanyama	35	6.1	55.4	64.9	-9.5
Rudy Gobert	37.7	6.4	54.8	63.7	-8.8

This is a fairly unsurprising list of some of the best rim defenders in the NBA. Of course there are more granular ways to express this, but we're keeping it simple and broad here: he's an elite rim defender. Although I don't have specific data on this because rim protectors with this kind of pedigree are fairly rare, it feels like a low variance skill to improve. He'll always be huge, he'll always try hard, and he'll only get better at timing and recognition. I could imagine Clingan's overall defensive impact not being as high as Gobert due to his lack of foot speed (switching on defense is a massively underrated skill of Gobert's), but it would be surprising if it wasn't in the same stratosphere. And there's only upside on offense, especially for a 22 year old.

Speaking of his age, let's try to get an idea of where this is going.

Player	Age	FGA	FG%	2PA	2P%	3PA	3P%	FTA	FT%	TS%	ORB	DRB	TRB	AST	STL	BLK	TOV	PF	PTS
Donovan Clingan	21	15.5	.526	10.0	.633	5.5	.332	5.0	.681	.6	8.0	12.3	20.2	3.8	1.0	2.8	2.1	4.1	21.5
Rudy Gobert	23-24	11.0	.624	11.0	.625	0.0	.000	8.5	.622	.6	5.9	13.3	19.1	2.1	1.1	3.9	2.9	4.6	19.0

In my pre draft article, I mentioned Gobert as an upside case. That seemed reasonable: Gobert is a 3x All Star, 4x DPOY, 4x All-NBA, and perpetually one of the most underrated players in the league. He's played in 84 playoff games, including back to back conference finals appearances in the loaded West.

But I'm updating my prior: at this point it would be disappointing if Clingan wasn't better than Gobert. Gobert was probably an underrated offensive player in his prime, featuring some offensive rebounding and above the rim spacing, but he wasn't a very versatile one. He had no outside shooting, he struggled on the short roll with his lack of passing, and his FT shooting was so bad he's gotten hacked intentionally at various points.

Clingan's most likely outcome at this point? Probably something like Marc Gasol, who peaked as a fringe top 10 player; a defensive anchor and an offensive hub. He'll be a different kind of player, but it's a reasonable comparison.

I’ll leave you with one final thought: The Hornets passed on Donovan Clingan at 6 in 2024 for Tidjane Salaun. I'd imagine that's going to sting for a while.

[1] The dumbest fucking award, yes, but one that’s fairly easy to quantify by looking at a handful of advanced stats and pulling out an aging curve graph. Among the candidates: Jalen Duren, Collin Gillespie, Ajay Mitchell, Michael Porter Jr., and Clingan

[2] Intentionally using totals here because this is a stat that takes a lot of effort which tends to emphasize specialists and makes it difficult for guys to play a lot of minutes

[3] This space intentionally left blank for dramatic effect. I mean seriously, look how big that gap is 👀👀👀

[4] The NBA agrees: after cratering in '21-22, offensive rebounding is up for four consecutive seasons

A Fringe Top 5 Ja(y)len

There are 1230 NBA regular season games every year. A decade ago when I was playing NBA DFS every night, I might have watched a quarter of them. But probably more like a tenth. And these days, it’s less than half that. Short of a combination of living in your parents’ basement and that device that holds your eye open from the movie SAW [1], there would be no way to watch them all.

When an old school basketball player suggests that they use “the eye test” to tell you that someone is good, what they’re really saying isn’t that they’ve watched more basketball than you, or that stats are dumb (trust me, they love points per game!), it’s that they are better than you at watching basketball [2]. And they might even be, but that’ll never be a substitution for being mediocre at watching basketball and understanding how to scale that mediocrity to the entire season. 

I know, I’m in the third paragraph and I haven’t even started telling you why Jaylen Brown is the worst “MVP Candidate” in my lifetime. Patience you must learn.

With Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokic, and Victor Wembanyama teetering on the (stupid) threshold of necessary games played to win MVP, it feels like there’s been more talk than ever about MVP ballots (also, you know, anything to talk about the fact that a third of the league is actively trying to lose games). And there is a certain dialogue around getting votes for MVP that is useful and important to the NBA record books. There’s a 5 person ballot and the results will appear on basketball-reference forever. There’s All-NBA teams that mean something to tell us about the story of the season (still true no matter how many times Julius Randle erroneously makes the second team). I’d love for the history books to have at least some accuracy! 

Which is why, for the love of god, can we please stop talking about Jaylen Brown as an MVP Candidate. Or if we do talk about him as that, can we talk about him as by far the worst MVP Candidate we’ve ever had. 

In a team sport, the simplest way to figure out who is good is to see whose team performs well with them on the floor. If you have a large enough sample, you can juxtapose it with how that same team performs with them off the floor. This is, of course, some caveman logic, but its simplicity doesn’t make it wrong. It is the basis of all respectable advanced stats. The further details of said advanced stats are not the foundation of this blog because I’m not going to reference any advanced stats. I’m just going to ask you to peel your eyes open and look at this list of the top 10 MVP candidates on/off stats per NBA.com’s MVP ladder. 

I know that on/off stuff is an extremely noisy and only a few thousand minutes of sample this season. I know Jaylen Brown isn't a 4th percentile NBA player. I admit that his skillset of being a shooting wing that doesn't get hunted on defense is valuable. I didn't even argue that Jayson Tatum should have been Finals MVP in 2024 even though it cost me money. I think Brown was a hair better than Tatum, and I certainly don't think it was a black mark on the history books.

...but please look at how much worse he is than everyone else on the list. If you wanted to look at a dozen stats and start excluding people from the MVP conversation, I'd hope that this would be your first stop.

One of the cruxes of the pro Jaylen Brown argument is that the Celtics are overachieving. That's very true, but not to the degree that people are making it out to be. I had them as a 45.3 win team, Vegas had them at 41.5 [3]. Though buoyed by extremely good health, the fact they are playing at a 59 win pace is shocking and a testament to the front office and coaching staff. I'm not saying they've solved shot selection, but I will say that they solved shot selection with their roster.

Jaylen Brown creates difficult shots at a reasonable clip. He has improved his efficiency while scaling up his usage [4]. He's a less bad passer than he used to be. I think I even saw him use his left hand once this season. He does important things for a very good Boston Celtics team. But it's extremely lazy to pick the best player on the team that's overachieved the most put them on the MVP ballot. It belittles the accomplishments of Derrick White, Payton Pritchard, and Neemias Queta. Be better.

You think Jaylen Brown is worth his contract because of position scarcity? I might not agree, but I'll humor you. You want to sneak Jaylen Brown on your third All-NBA team because he played a lot of games this season? Hell, I like availability! But I can't have people I respect talking about how he might make their MVP ballot, there are too many levels to this game.

Instead of talking about Jaylen Brown as a fringe top 5 MVP candidate, can we instead talk about him as a fringe top 5 Jalen? [5]

[1]

[2] I had someone tell me this a long time ago and I can never unhear it.

[3] I'd have never bet the over here because of roster construction issues and the chance that a bad or injury riddled start would have led to a gap year.

[4] Though he did keep scaling up his turnovers!

[5] 1. Brunson 2. Duren 3. Williams 4. Johnson 5. Suggs 99. Green

Unprotected Rep: Fixing Tanking in the Modern NBA

I am an expert at games. Poker in my 20s, DFS in my 30s, and along the way a top 10 player in the world at a bunch of obscure games you’ve probably never heard of. The word “game” can be misleading, as game theory can be applied to markets and all sorts of adult sounding things, like optimal tanking strategy in the NBA.

From a macro POV, I’ve thought for years that there weren’t enough tankers, that ¼ of the league should be tanking instead of ⅙ of it. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to get to ⅓ of it, but this appears to be a very strong draft, and as Ricky Bobby once said, “If you ain't first, you’re last.”

There's nothing you can do to truly eradicate tanking short of some extremely serious reforms that I don’t see coming. Those reforms, like letting draft eligible players go where they want [1], or the Papal Conclave idea where decision makers vote on who should get top picks, seem to be unrealistic in my lifetime. Instead of a defeatist attitude, I'd rather focus on practical things that can be done (some of which you've definitely seen before, some of which perhaps you haven't). 

Limit, or do away with, pick protections. I’d argue the most ‘necessary’ pick protection is lottery protected. If a team trades for a player and it causes them to make the playoffs, yay! Now the other team gets a bad pick. Top 4 protected? Sure, just to stop the embarrassment of giving away something extremely valuable. But anything else is unnecessary. Though there are still some outstanding obligations, I don’t see why changing this going forward would have any adverse effects. In fact, in the future I think it would actually help teams get more deals done because there’s an understanding that it’s something you can’t even haggle over. 

Randomize every draft slot. It’s madness that the NBA realized that they should flatten the top 4 odds but didn’t realize that they should also “flatten” the odds for each subsequent pick. With the current format there is still a massive benefit to having a worse record (the worst record can’t get worse than the fifth pick, the third worst record can get as bad at the seventh pick). Who the hell is on the competition committee anyway?!

Make the rookie scale salary more accurately reflect pick value. This is extremely low hanging fruit. To get data to visualize my cause I took a look at some sample “NBA draft pick value" posts. I picked this one by Duncan Taylor because it used EPM as a baseline (a favorite all in one metric of this blog). If you put it alongside the current NBA rookie scale contracts, you can see the value of current rookie scale contracts is too flat (with $11.5m for the #1 overall pick and 2.3m for the #30 overall pick).

Just make the top pick earn $20m, the second pick $15m, the third pick 10m, and keep 4-30 the same. It more accurately represents the value of those picks and the pressure that should be on the teams making them.

See? Much better! In some years people wouldn’t even want the top pick if it meant having to pay Zachary Risacher way more than he’ll ever be worth (yes I know, the current system does that just fine 🙃). An added benefit: teams would have to be much more decisive about picking up third and fourth year options on rookie contracts for early picks, potentially allowing players who get off to slow starts to move somewhere they might have a better chance to develop. 

Now, of course the NBAPA would always be against this because the olds run the league in the same way the olds run the country! Call me ageist, but we gotta stop letting the oldest people make decisions in all facets of life. I'm not a hypocrite, you can send me out to pasture when I'm past my prime. The NBAPA head should be someone in their prime who understands that player value should mimic how much they make, not have it tail so aggressively such that teams get stuck with albatross contracts paying guys like Anthony Davis way more than they’re worth [2].

And finally, the most important solution: For lottery equity, have losses count at the beginning of the season, wins count at the end of the season [3], and randomize the day this takes place. I could figure out a more objective way to do this, but for now let’s assume the first half of the season we count losses, the last quarter of the season we count wins, and at some point between the 41 and 60 game mark we randomize where the schedule flips (don’t worry, we can overpay some suits from Ernst & Young to do it) and no one knows until the season is over. 

This would be extremely hard to game given the uncertainty of when the schedule flips, it would make it so that bad teams may even be incentivized to make mid season win now trades (as they actually did already this deadline– except this time they’d actually play the players they traded for).

The argument against is that teams would just tank even earlier. That’s fair and likely to happen, but to me it’s both harder to execute (every team, even the Pelicans and the Kings, has some hope in October), and even if teams do successfully execute it, they have to be much more honest about it. Giving away Colin Sexton and John Collins before the season was a realistic assessment of where the Jazz wanted to be this season (they knew they had to keep their top 8 protected pick). Make those teams that are clearly rebuilding show their cards early, instead of being able to late season tank after injuries (another positive effect– it would make it harder to do the one year drop downs when players get injured mid or early season, like the '97 Spurs or '20 Warriors).

And even if this does happen, and it plays out exactly how a naysayer would say, you’d still get quality games down the stretch while all teams are fighting for something in the silly season of March. This would help teams going forward into next season with more sober assessments of where they are. So instead of letting Jalen Green have a few big months against tanking teams and sign an extension that he’s not worth [4], you’d have real conversations about how an up and coming team was winning games against playoff teams. To me that’s just a better time of year for the games to be good anyway. 

None of these are drastic changes, just some low hanging fruit. Someone tell Adam Silver that he can hire aejones, inc. as a consultant and I’ll ask the best poker players in the world how they’d game the system, that’ll improve the incentive structure real fast. 

[1] This idea, with the worst teams getting higher salary for rookies, seems pretty good. I think the opportunity, and the money, would spread the talent around somewhat equally. It would actually reward competence too egregiously, and there's just no chance that the small market teams would ever agree to it. Alas, this would take an entire blog post to actually consider the pros and cons.

[2] An easy fix here: <5 years of service 27.5% max, 5-10 years of service 32.5% max, 10+ years of service 30% max (currently goes 25%->30%->35%, with award escalators)

[3] Perhaps wins should count as half as much as the losses, I haven’t really thought that through yet. I’ll give it a more thorough examination when the competition committee hires me. 

[4] Jalen Green catching strays, sorry bud, at least I didn't bring up the 40 year old girlfriend!