The 82 v 16 answer isn’t binary but still says a lot about one’s hoops philosophy How much of player playoff performance is explained by: (i) the current regular season (ii) the previous year regular season (iii) their most recent postseason BRef AIOs used as performance proxy

Net rating/lineup data has (for better or worse) become a go-to form of player analysis on here I’ve been interested in how coaches can influence that data by how often they ask players to keep “bad” lineups afloat Here’s how often players play in bad lineups + how they perform

For the purposes of this post, a “bad lineup” is a lineup where three or more players on the court have a DARKO that is below the median team DARKO, only including the players who appeared in the game that day Bad is obviously team relative here

While my article is going to focus more on when to re-adjust expectations in a negative sense, it’s also interesting to see how fast a star can be born Here are the top 20 projected DARKO peaks from the last 30 years based on a player’s first 1143 NBA mins (the .5 R^2 threshold)

The big miss here is obviously Bron but he was also thrown into the fire in a way unlike anyone else, which likely stunted his projection Of over 1700 players drafted from 96 to 25, LBJ was the single fastest to hit the minutes threshold, averaging 40 MPG over 29 games to do it

Cody Williams is example 1,000,000 of why you shouldn’t be the first team to try to develop the raw, "project" prospect That said, his brother was also a late bloomer who wasn’t ever particularly impactful, relative to age and competition, until the equivalent of Cody’s 4th year

Historically, after 2691 minutes (Cody’s MP), about 55% of the variance in peak impact can be explained by what we’ve already seen (age, draft capital, past performance) My projections think Cody PEAKS as the equivalent of the 182nd best player. Ironically, right below Rob Dilly

Russ’ defensive rebounding is an underrated part of his offensive value here. Some say statpadding, but being able to play fast + get into offense ASAP is a tangible advantage Ex. in ‘18, OKC possessions after Russ REBs had a 1.14 PPP, 16% higher than when teammates got a board