There’s a long and probably unresolvable debate in basketball over how much of a player’s development is due to the team environment and how much is intrinsic to the player, and likely would’ve happened in most NBA settings.
I probably lean more to the intrinsic development than most, but I acknowledge that is probably an unprovable point. A big part of this is the belief that there is more inherent variance between the young prospects entering the league than there is between teams. The other factor is the inherent difficulty in changing another person’s behavior, academic and parenting research has often found it difficult to replicate successes or produce anything like a magic one size fits all formula.
In part it is unprovable, because at best we could maybe estimate an average percent of improvement or isolate certain skills. There will always be individual variance, guys who thrive despite of a bad team situation or unlikely success stories that maybe needed just the right environment to happen.
But there are bigger obstacles in trying to measure even a broad average contribution of development environment vs intrinsic player development. I have been considering running an analysis of young player performance after they change teams compared to the expectations set by their prior performance. There are obvious issues with selection bias in such a study, teams don’t let go of budding stars. D’Angelo Russell and Jahlil Okafor are on the Brooklyn Nets precisely because they underperformed in their first NBA stop.
But, it goes further than that. There are tricky questions about how sticky early development, whether good or poor, is to a player’s long term career. In economics this is sometimes called path dependence, the idea that there is a hangover effect from initial conditions that extend their influence into the future and maybe hard to undo.
With good development practices it’s easy to see path dependence; if a player learns to extend their range to three pointers they are unlikely to forget on their next team, if a player learns team defensive concepts he should know them on another team. But, even here it’s possible that a less favorable environment will undo good development, for example, in a selfish offensive environment a player may elect to take more pull up twos rather than move the ball.
And just to be clear:
Line Up Fit <> Development
I think most people know this instinctively, but it can sometimes get confused when people talk about how one team situation may affect a young player over another. Going from a team with plenty of shooters to one with cramped spacing may well influence the player’s efficiency, but that effect can also bounce around from line up to line up on the same team.
In practice what we’re mostly interested in though is poor development, and can it be undone in a better environment. There are a few reasonable questions that come to mind.
- Lost Time: Is like language, are some skills easier to teach at a younger age?
- Shaky foundation: How much do skills build on each other? If a player fails to make improvements at one stop can they catch up later?
- Bad habits: When, if ever, do bad habits on the court become too ingrained to change?
- Loss of confidence: For some players, pretty clearly, lack of success at early on can sap their confidence on the court. Emmanuel Mudiay who has gone all year basically unable to talk to the media in Denver is a good example of this. How many players is that a primary issue? How much more likely is that to change somewhere else?
So even if there is a significant team component to development, we may not be able to pick up the effect looking at “second draft” onto new teams. The player’s development path may have already been permanently altered.
