I don't think Bill Simmons has a hunch. It's an opinion and numbers on a sheet aren't really necessary for an informed decision based on observation.
There is a lot to be said for stylistic preferences as well as just outright preference in players. Some liked Magic and some liked Bird. Different positions and approaches to the game. Shaq or Kobe. There are tons of people who don't like Hardens game and couldn't care less about his stats.
Bill likes Bagley, but he prefers Luka. Sometimes even someone jumping off the screen to you is subjective and not a right or wrong situation.
I'll buy that. I watched the Suns game and was surprised when Grant said Bagley got his career high and even more surprised to find out he'd scored 32. He did have that one very impressive drive on Ayton where he got by him with a spin move and finished with his right hand and he did knock down an open three but a lot of his other shots were forces that ended in free throws. Stylistically speaking, Bagley is a drive straight at the basket and flip it in type of player. He's big and athletic so it works out for him, especially against a team like Phoenix which just continues to looks like they all hate playing together for some reason. Don't get me wrong, 32 points on 10 for 15 shooting is
damn impressive any way you get it, especially for a 19 year old. And the results are what matter, not how hard you're working to get there. But I don't see the talent oozing off him so much as I see a super athlete who's still learning to play the game. I'm not going out of my way to dismiss him -- if he develops into the best player in the draft that's enormously good fortune for this franchise -- it's just that subjective evaluation thing.
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The other thing that I think gets missed in the "what about Tyreke" example so many people bring up is that we all
knew Tyreke couldn't shoot. It was a very obvious flaw in his game right from the beginning. And anyone projecting stardom from his 20-5-5 rookie season (and we all were!) understood that he had to develop a reasonable three-point threat for that to happen. It never even crossed my mind that it would take him 7 seasons to get there. The cautionary tale with Tyreke is regarding a player who fails to develop their skillset. It's not like there was any mystery why he slowly became less effective. Once teams knew he wasn't a threat from the perimeter they started playing him to drive and that took away his one weapon. Everything else that went on (pushing him to SF, loading up on other ball dominant guards, drafting a high usage big man who ate into his touches) was ancillary to the big problem which is that you can't consistently fool defenses who know you're driving to the basket on every possession. What impresses with Doncic is his skillset and remarkable ability to make good decisions under pressure. This is a totally different situation. I'm sure he'll have his own difficulties to work through, but it's difficult to spot any obvious flaws right now.
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I don't think it's that simple. I've been watching basketball (and other sports) as much and as long as Simmons. I often think I know, and sometimes I do, but I often don't really know. Difference is, I can admit that. Furthermore, while we can see something in a player, you can't know for sure that player A is better than player B less than a year into the process. That's more my point.
I ended up being right about Steph Curry over Tyreke Evans. But it didn't look that way after year 1 or probably even year 2. And while I felt Curry was going to be good, I had no clue he'd be the transcendent player he's become. But I've been on the other end of it too. I was convinced 18 yo Kobe Bryant was going to be humbled when he entered the league back in 1996. While it did take him several years to get going, how ridiculous does that opinion look now?
I have no doubt that Luka is going to continue to improve and remain one of the best players from this past draft. And while he might be, it's far from a sure thing that he's still going to be better than MB3 or Jaren Jackson or Trae Young (or whatever other name someone would like to add to the list) next season or 3 years from now. Just like Tyreke v. Steph or Fox v. Mitchell, Tatum, Ball and Kuzma. The tide may change.
Tyreke Evans was only a few months older than Luka is now when he averaged 20/5/5 and won ROY in 2009/10. Fans forget how upbeat everyone was after that first season. Same even goes for Jason Williams and all his creativity and flashy play in 1998/99. But neither player achieved the level many thought they knew was in store for them while other players from the respective drafts surpassed them.
So circling back to my point, as much basketball as BS has seen over 40+ years, he should know better than to rush to judgement. Not about Luka being a good or even great player, but about the KINGS making a mistake. He doesn't know that yet. None of us do.
Part of Bill's schtick is sounding confident in his opinions. I feel like a fair amount of his obliviousness is an act. Or if it isn't, than it's more that our culture rewards the flashy take rather than the nuanced (ie TLDR) approach. I don't even think the argument here is Doncic vs. Bagley so much as it is Doncic vs. everyone else. Nobody comes into the league and is instantly their team's leading scorer, leading playmaker, and go-to option in crunch time unless the team is horrible and they're just force-feeding them the ball because they have no other options. Dallas had Dennis Smith Jr, Harrison Barnes, and DeAndre Jordan and fancied themselves a playoff squad with Luka as a complimentary piece. He's totally reconfigured their entire outlook in half a season. The whole "Sacramento made a mistake" reaction shouldn't be seen as any kind of knock on Bagley as a prospect. It's really just another way of saying that what Luka has done this season is almost without precedent. He's going one-on-one against the best individual defenders in the league nightly and embarrassing them. You can also tell he's getting worn down as his shooting splits have declined for 4 months in a row. He is probably going to hit some kind of a wall at some point but first impressions count for something and his has been spectacular.
Regarding Steph Curry, he very nearly won ROY that year too. Tyreke got off to an early lead and the buzz around 20-5-5 became insurmountable but Curry matched him from about February to the end of the year and probably even outplayed him the last few weeks. He ended up signing a below market value extension because he had so many problems with his ankles that kept him out of games but his ability was already apparent in his rookie season. What most of us failed to realize is that Steph wasn't going to have to adjust to the league, the league was going to adjust to catch up to him. We hadn't seen a player attempt 11 threes a game before and make 45% of them. Most of us probably would have said that wasn't possible. In both cases, you could already see the outline of who each player was going to be. Steph kept improving while Tyreke more or less stayed the same. And that's the big thing with most of these players. The great ones never stop getting better.
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Internet culture has really warped both the media’s and the fans’ appreciation for the long view. Everybody MUST offer their take NOW, and that take is the DEFINITIVE take. There’s power rankings and rookie ladders and week-to-week examinations of goings-on all across the league. Even the least noteworthy teams receive coverage that would have been unheard of twenty years ago. Columnists have to feed the content machine, after all. And the fans are ravenous to consume as much of it as possible regardless of utility or quality or perspective. Declarative statements are a dime a dozen online, and most of them simply do not hold up to scrutiny as time passes.
Add this to the fact that the NBA has expanded to include 30 teams, and the talent has correspondingly spread out (yes, even when accounting for the league’s “superteams”). This has caused a whole lot of rookies to enter the spotlight a helluvalot sooner than they might have in a different era. Expectations are much greater as a result, and the hyperbole rises accordingly. It mutates a great freshman season from Doncic into a “generational” one, and a slow burning season from Marvin Bagley into a referendum on the Kings’ front office, despite the fact that neither player’s ultimate trajectory is set in stone, and with almost no consideration for the surrounding context.
The biggest change in the internet age has been that the demand for content now is enormous. You don't wait for Sportscenter now, the highlights are all instantly available almost as soon as they happen. If you want people returning to your site (which is how these media companies generate revenue) you need to be constantly pushing out
something. It's not all going to be fantastic content -- that level of quality control is not possible on a 24/7/360 timeline. So yeah, that does push people to give an opinion on everything before they've seen the big picture. I don't think hyperbole is a necessary result though.
Consider this... Russell Westbrook is well on his way to averaging a triple-double for the third season in a row and nobody really cares at this point. Initially there was skepticism around Harden's scoring output being legitimate considering the changes to the rules which have all benefited offensive players with the ball in their hands. Players don't have control over the standards of the era they play in. Is Harden rising to greatness in a run-and-gun era any less legitimate than what Kobe did in his era or MJ and Magic before that? Is anyone really arguing against Steph as the greatest shooter of all time anymore? I feel like we measure greatness primarily by comparing players to their peers. It doesn't matter if Shaq was better than Kareem or not, he was unstoppable in his time. If you trust nothing else, you can at least trust that great players rise to the top regardless of circumstances. This is the very quality that makes them great, it's teleological.
So when a player comes into the league and plays with the swagger of an All-Star instantly that
is noteworthy. That doesn't happen every year. In the last 25 years, the only rookies to come into the league with comparative immediate success were Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan, Lebron James, and Blake Griffin. Obviously we don't know what's going to happen yet in the future. Time has shown that some auspicious beginnings are better than others. The fully-developed college star (ie Emeka Okafor) typically plateaus faster and lower while the 19 year old prodigy (ie Dwight Howard) is still developing their game and their body. Tyreke was so otherworldly good at getting to the basket that he defied the scouting reports and thrived as a one-option scorer for an entire season. But if you think Luka is just having a great rookie season and the "generational" hype is merely hyperbole, I really think you need to take a second look. People flipped out over Jayson Tatum last year when he averaged 14 and 5. Ben Simmons stuffs a stat sheet but has yet to make a three point shot in a season and a half. The need to have a rookie of the year race does create a fair amount of manufactured hype. I don't think that's the case here, however.
But he has accomplished more than Evans, for sure.
