No, Brandon Jennings won't win NBA Rookie of the Year -- the Sacramento Kings have a news conference scheduled Thursday to announce Tyreke Evans as the winner.But as I argued during the regular season, and as we're seeing during the Milwaukee Bucks' surprising postseason run, the experience Jennings is getting is more meaningful than that of his rivals in the great rookie point guard crop of '09, including Evans and Stephen Curry.
There's one basic reason for that: Jennings has had to mold his game to fit the needs of a winning team trying to make the playoffs and advance, rather than run up numbers on a lottery squad. Evans and Curry are tremendously talented players who may ultimately have better careers. But if I were running a playoff team, Jennings is the one I'd want on my roster this spring because he's the only one who's actually learned how to do all the little stuff.
Since he's on a good team in a demanding environment, Jennings' mistakes are penalized with much harsher sanctions. If Evans or Curry jogged back on defense or took a bad shot, it was no harm, no foul: The Kings and Warriors were probably going to lose anyway and had nobody better, so the kids weren't asked to sweat the small stuff. By the end of the season, in fact, their teams seemed more concerned with those players having marketable stats than whether they were developing winning habits.
Jennings, on the other hand, was forced to learn the hard way. I saw his Bucks in Portland in January, and when he was overpowered by the bigger Andre Miller, Milwaukee coach Scott Skiles yanked him from the game early. When I asked Skiles afterward what Jennings could have done differently, the coach gave a one-word response: "Try."
As a result of that periodically harsh medicine from the demanding Skiles, Jennings' development is further along in many respects than that of Curry or Evans. And his quickly evolving game has been on full display in the Bucks' shocking first-round series against Atlanta, one in which Jennings is showing off his mastery of the little things.
Yes, he's averaging 20.8 points per game in the series, and that's impressive, but that's the one part of his game in which I question his ability to sustain the performance. Jennings shot 37.0 percent on 2-pointers in the regular season and 37.1 percent on inside shots -- in this series, he's at 49.2 percent and 52.8 percent. Those numbers are probably a fluke; in all likelihood, he won't sustain such high percentages for long until he improves his touch.
Unlike Evans or Curry, however, he doesn't have to post big offensive numbers in order to be an effective player. For starters, Jennings has run the point with savvy belying his years, committing just seven turnovers in five games in the postseason. He's still not a classic drive-and-kick guy, but in his year spent taking his lumps in Italy and his season under Skiles, he's learned how to play nearly mistake-free basketball.
And then there's the defense. Jennings is miles beyond Evans and Curry in this respect, and that explains why his on-court versus off-court defensive stats are the best of the three -- even though Jennings' faces much more difficult comparisons via this stat because his teammates actually guard people. The Kings were 21st in Defensive Efficiency and the Warriors 29th, while Jennings' Milwaukee team, by contrast, was third.
Jennings is undersized and took his lumps at times at the defensive end of the floor early in the season. But he has steadily improved by necessity, and because he's been held accountable all season, his defense this series has been consistently good and at times phenomenal. I watched Game 3 and thought it was the best I'd ever seen him defend, but he was just as good in far more trying circumstances in Game 5.
Atlanta repeatedly isolated Jamal Crawford against Jennings, a matchup in which the rookie conceded 6 inches, but apparently Jennings learned from Skiles' critiques. He stood up Crawford on a post-up late in the third quarter, and rejected one of his shots to end the quarter, helping the Bucks survive an offensive malaise that saw them trail by as many as 14 points.
Those two plays, in fact, were the centerpiece in a stretch that defined Milwaukee's overachieving season. The Bucks gave up just six points in six minutes with Luc Richard Mbah a Moute at center, Luke Ridnour guarding Marvin Williams, Jennings on Crawford and Jerry Stackhouse on Josh Smith. About the only decent matchup the Bucks had was John Salmons on Joe Johnson. Yet they tried like crazy, and it worked. That group forced two shot-clock violations and surrendered just three baskets in nine trips, setting the stage for the Bucks' dramatic 14-0 run late in the fourth quarter to steal Game 5 in Atlanta, 91-87.
Atlantans will point out that a confluence of unusual events had to come together in the fourth quarter for Milwaukee to get Game 5. That list starts with Josh Smith and Jamal Crawford both missing point-blank shots after they'd cleanly beaten defenders, continues with two spectacular fourth-quarter saves of balls headed out of bounds by Ersan Ilyasova, and ends with Joe Johnson, who had committed five fouls the entire series and had fouled out twice in his previous 398 games as a Hawk, fouling out.
(Eerie coincidence: Johnson hadn't fouled out since 229 games ago on Jan. 5, 2008, against New Jersey. That game was at home, the Hawks were winning entering the fourth quarter, and they lost because they gave up a 15-0 run in the fourth.)
Nonetheless, it was Jennings and the Bucks who won this game, and while some unlikely events helped them along, it was their visibly superior effort at both ends that allowed them to take advantage.
"They just played harder than us on both ends of the court," Johnson said afterward, and nobody raised his voice in disagreement.
Jennings' effort at both ends was a big part of that, and as a result he's poised to become the only player drafted in 2009 starting for a second-round playoff team. In fact, only two other rookie rotation players -- Wes Matthews, who starts for Utah even though he was undrafted, and San Antonio reserve DeJuan Blair, who was a second-round pick -- will participate in the second round if present advantages hold over the next four days.
If history is a guide, the odds favor Jennings and the Bucks to advance: Teams without home-court advantage win the series 74.0 percent of the time when they're up 3-2. In 63.6 percent of cases, they close it out with a win in Game 6.
So Evans will pick up his Rookie of the Year trophy Thursday, and Curry will likely finish second in the voting, and those are good choices: It's likely that in the long term Evans and Curry will be bigger stars than Jennings. But watching Milwaukee's 20-year-old rookie defend, take care of the ball and manage games like a 10-year veteran, one has to think he'd be the point guard you'd pick if you had to win a game this May.
Source: http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2010/insider/columns/story?columnist=hollinger_john&page=PERDiem-100429
Interesting take.
