10 December 2014: Brigham Young Cougars guard Kyle Collinsworth (5) during a game between Utah and BYU. Utah defeated BYU 65-61 at the Marriott Center in Provo, Utah. (Newscom TagID: iconphotosfour062873.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]
1) Passing the basketball is important. It’s that simple. If we’ve been paying attention to the Warriors of the last few years or the Spurs or the Bulls of the past or many other champions, we see that the best teams often share the basketball. However, one of the most difficult parts of that equation is finding player at positions other than Point Guard with legit passing skills.
That’s one of the things that makes Golden State, with Curry, Green, Iguodola, Livingston, Bogut so unique. These guys can all pass. And they could all conceivably share the court.
2) The Passing Skill is one of the things that makes this draft somewhat unique. We have a number of players at different positions that have shown some signs of life as passers. Ben Simmons, Brandon Ingram (in the games, it’s clear his innate understanding for the openings the defense gives him is better than that of a player like Harrison Barnes), Wade Baldwin, Kris Dunn, Gary Payton II, DeAndre Bembry, Denzel Valentine, Patrick McCaw, Chinanu Onuaku, Daniel Ochefu, Fred Van Vleet, Tyler Ulis, Nic Moore, Kay Felder, Ron Baker (for a wing), Malcolm Brogdon (also for a wing), J Warney, Thomas Walkup, Terry Tarpey, Robert Carter Jr., Caris LeVert, Alex Caruso, Jordan Fouse and even players like Demetrius Jackson, Cat Barber, Dejounte Murray have real reasons to believe they might pass the ball at the NBA level, mostly having to do with athelticism, shooting ability, and a reasonable ability to pass in college.
That’s almost 25 players, just pulling from college players, and I’m sure I missed some.
3) One not mentioned is Kyle Collinsworth, a 6’6″ or 6’7″ College PG who is most likely to translate to Wing at the NBA level. I have long thought that converted PG have the potential to be some of the best Wings. Though it’s not done all that often. Jeff Hornacek is perhaps the best example in recent times of a conversion being highly successful.
4) What we’ll see from Collinsworth is a very rare combination of rebounding, passing, defense, success at getting to the hoop and success from the mid-range. He might have two or three of the best such seasons in the Sports-Reference database. Which, one would think, should make him an easy pick in the draft.
So what is confusing to people about Kyle Collinsworth? It’s his age.
5) Collinsworth is old. Not for a person, but for a college basketball player. Like Dennis Rodman, if Collinsworth is lucky enough to make the league, he’ll be one of the few with an age-25 rookie season.
This is probably the reason he likely won’t get drafted.
6) Though if we try to extrapolate an aging curve for Collinsworth from the measurements we do have which might allow us to better judge him against his peers, we’ll see that he’s comparable to a lot of very good players. And there’s even possibly a little upside here. Which is pretty good for a player who might not be selected.
First, Before We Look At The Old Guys, There Be Some Crazy Young Players (all Per-40 numbers from Sports-Reference)
1) These are some players to whom I’ll compare Kyle Collinsworth due to slightly overlapping skill-sets. Though the comps don’t always work because all of these players have an Age-18 Freshman season.
2) Elfrid Payton had an Age-17 Freshman season. That’s something to keep in mind going forward. Elfrid Payton is super young, extraordinarily gifted athletically and even showed a few signs of improving his jumper last year. (A slight rise in FT% from 55% to 59%, to accompany a rising 3P%, from 26.2% to 32.6%. Of course, the numbers on his long twos, which are much more likely to be shots off the dribble, tanked so not all the signs were positive.) Which is to say, he’s the kind of player we underestimate because it seems like he’s been around forever.
Payton will only be in his Age 22 NBA season next year, despite it being his 3rd in the league. And he came out as a junior.
3) To put into context how crazy that is, Kris Dunn was in his Age-22 season this year.
4) Kyle Collinsworth in his Age 24 season. Obviously, Payton still has quite a lot of possibility for growth, and no one should expect Kyle Collinsworth to be on a similar growth curve to Elfrid Payton.
I wanted to include this table just to make this much clear.
Old Guys Like College Basketball Too and Some of Them Even Per 40 Stats
1) There are very few players with an Age 23 or Age 24 college season. This is old. The NBA is wary of these players for a reason. They are playing against significantly younger competition for one, and it could be argued, secondly, that were they good enough, they would have been drafted at 21 or 22.
2) What we will see later is that Kyle Collinsworth probably was good enough, and had he not had an ACL injury during the NCAA Tournament, he’s a player who should have been on the NBA’s radar as a 22 year-old sophomore.
3) The reason he was a 22-year old sophomore is because he went on a Mormon mission, which caused him to miss his Age 20 an Age 21 seasons. This should not be held against him.
Indeed, it very well might have skewed his growth curve so that the seasons he might have had at Age 21 and 22, now took place at Age 23 and 24.
4) There’s no way to know this for sure. What we can tell for sure is that there’s a massive leap in intellectual understanding of the game and how Collinsworth can be effective on the court from Age 22 to Age 23. This spike in rebounds from 9.7 per 40 to 11.2 per 40 and Assists from 5.5 per 40 to 7.7 per 40 is not the kind of progression you expect from most players, even players that are so old.
5) One clear way to tell this is that most of the seasons that are at all similar to those by Collinsworth belong to players like Jason Kidd, Magic Johnson, Denzel Valentine, Anfernee Hardaway, Kyle Anderson, Luke Walton, and Jamison Brewer, who failed because he was only of average athleticism for a 6’4″ player and because he couldn’t shoot for shit.
6) Not shooting for shit is something that might scare us about Kyle Collinsworth, but when we look at his mid-range jump shooting numbers and scoring at the rim, we’ll notice that there are some reasons to be hopeful.
7) Now onto a comparison between Collinsworth and Kane, another player I liked despite his age, and one who didn’t get much of a chance. (He’s gone on to be decent but not great in a couple of seasons in Europe, at least by statistics.)
8) The first thing we notice is that aside from an uptick in 3P% for Kane his senior year, under the tutelage of Fred Hoiberg, Collinsworth is the far superior prospect on paper. Better rebounding, better passing, better peripheral defensive statistics, better Assist to Turnover Ratios on Average, better Free Throw Percentages, and considering the lack of three-point shooting, better True Shooting percentages.
DeAndre Kane did however have an athleticism advantage, whereas Collinsworth has a legitimate size advantage, possessing 2 or 3 extra inches in height.
9) Now that we’ve noted how good Collinsworth has been these last two seasons, let’s forget they existed. I’m going to make the arguments for the merits of Collinsworth as a prospect just using his Freshman and Sophomore season, Age 19 and Age 22. Except for one last point to be made about work ethic.
Collinsworth tore his ACL in the NCAA tournament his Sophomore year and was back for opening day his Junior year. That takes a lot of commitment. And beyond that, not only was he back he was a significantly stronger overall player. A Triple-Double machine, so while work ethic may be a mystery with most prospects, I have a guess that Collinsworth is a guy who will at least put in the honest effort to improve.
The Problem of the Missing Seasons
1) With Collinsworth, the major problem is his Age 20 and Age 21 Seasons. They don’t exist. Thus it becomes very difficult to compare Collinsworth to other prospects who came before him.
2) To deal with this, I have decided upon a half measure. I have Averaged Collinsworth Age 19 Season with his Age 22 Season to create a fictional Age 20.5 Season, which I have then compared to other players Age 20 and Age 21 seasons.
3) I have done the same thing with DeMarre Carroll‘s Age 20 season, which he missed after transferring from Vanderbilt to Missouri. Funnily enough, Carroll and Collinsworth’s fictional seasons are in many important ways similar:
4) In this imaginary scenario, Carroll was the better scorer, more efficient from Two-Point range and the better rebounder. Collinsworth was better from three and in passing statistics. While they were comparable with their peripheral defensive numbers. This is despite the fact that Carroll played closer to the basket due to being a college PF.
5) We should acknowledge though that Carroll is the better athlete of the two, both laterally and vertically. And while Collinsworth has shown some potential on defense, he will almost certainly have to play with great anticipation to be a plus on that side of the ball at the NBA level. It’s not that he lacks athleticism, but he also certainly isn’t an elite run-jump athlete.
6) Lastly, I’m not going to address this line that often in the comparisons below, since it didn’t actually happen. Regardless it is a somewhat reasonable way for us to imagine what might have happened and placing it against the lines of some other players might allow us to better understand just what Collinsworth’s potential might be.
Now onto the Per 40 Comparisons-Passing
1) Here we see Kyle Collinsworth’s Age 19 Freshman Season and his fictional Age 20.5 Season stacked up against many of the best 6’5″ to 6’8″ prospects of recent years, at least in terms of those who both passed and rebounded the basketball.
2) While we see that Kyle Collinsworth is on the lower end of the spectrum in both comparisons in terms of his passing, we do see that he does measure up to any number of NBA players and even to some who became stars.
3) One thing we shouldn’t forget is that Jimmer Fredette was on BYU during Collinsworth’s Age 19 season. And Jimmer Fredette was a very ball dominant PG. Which means that Collinsworth was in an off-ball rule, which in most cases suppresses passing numbers. This fact not only affects his Age 19 season, but his Age 20.5 Estimate. So we would perhaps not be wrong to speculate that the numbers could be a fair amount better had he been allowed to run the PG from his first season.
4) However, there are some interesting comparisons to be made here from an athleticism perspective from Bobby Sura to Evan Turner to Luke Walton even perhaps to Tyreke Evans and Kyle Anderson, as I’d guess from Kyle Collinsworth’s 28″ standing vert, which is comparable to that of both Turner and Evans, that his max vert is between 34″ and 36.5″, which is to say Collinsworth’s has playable NBA athleticism, but is far from an elite athlete.
1) Here we see again, Kyle Collinsworth is far from the most spectacular member of this club, but it’s a pretty spectacular club of 6’5″ or 6’6″ or 6’7″ guys (or better) who possess average or better athleticism, can pass, rebound, and have better than 1:1 Assist to Turnover Ratios. And good, or at least decent steals+blocks.
2) This is most of the guys who qualify for this group, and almost everyone in this club is or was a legit NBA player.
3) The exceptions listed here are Brian Voelkel, who isn’t actually of average NBA athleticism, but should have gotten a chance due to how great his line was. A classic AAAA player.
4) The other exceptions are DeAndre Kane, who is easily the worst player of this group through Age 22, and Julyan Stone, who literally couldn’t score from anywhere but within 3 feet of the basket. You can see evidence of this in Stone’s poor three-point percentage, his low field goal attempts per 40 and his incredibly low points per 40.
With a jumper, Stone almost certainly is still in the NBA right now, as he has the athleticism, the defensive potential, the vision and the passing acumen.
Passing Comparison: Assists to Turnover Ratio
1) Here we see Kyle Collinsworth with exceptional numbers for a freshman. Especially for a Freshman with low overall Assists. And one who often played off-ball. A 1.3 Assist to Turnover Ratio for such a player is very good.
2) It’s good enough that Collinsworth rates in the middle of the pack here, even though he’s up against guys like Andre Iguodola, Paul Pierce, and Joe Johnson.
3) Of course, being good or great at Assist to Turnover rate is no guarantee of anything if you lack athleticism (Voelkel) or you totally lack any viable way to score. (Stone, Brewer.) Still, this is still ideally where you’d hope prospects would be, even as older players.
4) We also see Collinsworth as a 22-year-old, bumping right up against the numbers of Luke Walton, and significantly better than Ron Harper, who remained an excellent passer even when his athleticism was leaving him.
5) Luke Walton is a comparison I’ve long thought to be interesting in connection with Collinsworth. Collinsworth is the more athletic player, but it is no accident that Walton was able to contribute to multiple championship teams. And there’s even a season or two in the middle of his career in which he did shoot well from three.
Per 40 Defense and Rebounding
1) Collinsworth is a really good rebounder for his height. There’s not that much more to be said about it. He’s got great instincts, is able to rebound from the perimeter and is capable of turning a rebound into a transition opportunity.
2) He’s also in some pretty good company here.
1) That good company continues here. The second table is particularly apt because of how Collinsworth falls between DeMarre Carroll and Luke Walton, which is where his athleticism lies. Which is one of the two prevailing questions about Collinsworth. The first, just how athletic is he? Will he be able to get to his spots off the dribble? Will he be able to set up screens effectively against NBA quality defenders?
The second will be framed by most as this, will he shoot three pointers? Though a better way to ask the question is this: Are there areas of the court from which Collinsworth will be able to threaten the defense? I think we’ll see that it’s possible that 12-18 feet may be a bread and butter area for him as it is for Livingston, even if he doesn’t extend his jumper. Of course, that won’t make him a star. But it could make him a valuable rotation player. To become a star, Collinsworth will probably need some somewhat late and therefore unlikely improvement on his jumper from distance.
Per 40 Steals
1) Again we see a solid, but far from elite number. He’s not Wade or Kidd or Iguodola. Almost no one is. Collinsworth still clears all the basic athletic and intuition thresholds.
1) This fact is just as true at 22 as it was at 19. And it’ll remain true when we look at blocks below.
Per 40 Blocks
1) Again, there’s just nothing here to suggest he’s not an NBA player, at least not yet. I know that doesn’t sound hugely positive, but very often when looking at a statistical profile, we’re looking for flags that would have us question if that player will have a place in the league. There are flags with Collinsworth, in terms of his scoring profile, but everything else is solid to significantly plus. And that was true looking at Collinsworth as an Age 19 or Age 22 player as well, just as it is now. Learning to see the court the way he does is not a normal part of any prospects growth curve.
A Quick Look At DRtg
Collinsworth played on two above average defenses, one his Freshman year, which finished 34th in DRtg, surrendering 94.6 points per 100 possessions, and one his senior year, which finished 60th, surrendering 98 points per 100 possessions.
He also played on two wholly mediocre defenses in between, both which surrendered over 102 points per 100 possessions. As we’ll see below, Collinsworth’s Individual DRtg, in part because he rebounds so well, is always well above that of his team:
Though that is not the main point. The main point is that he has proven himself capable of functioning on successful defenses. And from this standpoint, his Age 19 season may be more impressive than his Age 24 season.
Scoring Numbers
1) Kyle Collinsworth is not a highly efficient scorer. However, he’s reasonably far from the sub 50% True Shooting Danger Zone as well. And he does it without three-point shooting.
2) I know that does not seem a strength, and in many ways it’s not. But it does suggest how successful he can be from other areas of the floor.
3) It also suggests that there’s some legitimate upside here if he ever does learn how to shoot, even at a passable level. Though one place that a player like Denzel Valentine (mentioned as a another player whose passing will likely regress upon reaching the NBA level) has a big advantage is that he’ll be able to shoot off of motion.
That’s probably not the case for Collinsworth, unless perhaps the look comes in that Rip Hamilton area of the court. An area that he’s pretty unlikely to catch the ball on the move anyway, since that’s not the way most NBA offenses are structured.
Two-Point Field Goal Percentage
1) There are no guarantees here. You find successes and failures on both sides of the 50% mark.
2) One thing you’ll notice about Collinsworth’s profile is that his Two-Point Field Goal Percentage drops every year. That’s not because he’s getting worse. It’s because he’s becoming a more proficient mid-range shooter and taking more of them. And while, these aren’t necessarily the highest value shots in the game, taking and making unassisted mid-range shots can bode well for a player’s future.
This is Collinsworth’s Senior Year Scoring Profile, by way of Hoop-Math.com:
3) Here we see a player with a sneaky impressive profile. Mediocre True Shooting Percentage, but 76 unassisted makes at the rim while shooting 67.5% from that area, and 80 unassisted makes from mid-range while shooting 36.4% overall from that area.
4) There’s a similar story told in his age 22 sophomore year, when he shot 66% at the rim, made 63 unassisted shots there, while also shooting 40% from mid-range and hitting 59 unassisted shots from that range. Which is to say, that while his shooting numbers aren’t that impressive, and he is relatively old for a prospect, there might be some sneaky potential for improvement.
There’s enough evidence elsewhere to guess that he does have a good enough work ethic to do so. That’s a lot of what separates a good player from an average one. Which one continues to put in the work, year in and year out.
Three-Point Field Goal Percentage
1) These numbers are not pretty. They aren’t even close to pretty.
2) They are also very small sample sizes as Collinsworth never shot more than 37 such shots in a season, and barely scraped 100 in his career.
If Collinsworth fails, this will be the reason. It’s hard to succeed if you can’t find areas of the floor where one can threaten the defense, and for many reasons, it’s always going to be questionable if a player’s mid-range game is going to translate.
For one, it’s much more difficult to get to one’s spots vs. better athletes. For two, it’s much more difficult to hit from one’s spots if the defender knows he can play off of you and wait for you to come to him. This was one of DeMar DeRozan‘s issues vs. Indiana. Paul George would just wait at around 15 feet to intercept him, and thus DeRozan had a lot of trouble finding advantages and openings in this range where many of his shots are normally generated.
Free-Throw Percentage
1) Again, not a pretty picture. As good as the mid-range numbers are. That’s how bad the three-point numbers and free-throw numbers are. A guy who can shoot 40% on 15 foot jump shots during the course of a game and off his on dribble shouldn’t struggle to shoot 60% from the Free-Throw line. Those two numbers should be impossible.
Though that was also true of Bruce Bowen‘s entire career from the 3-Pt and Free-Throw Lines. Sometimes data points don’t make sense. Though it is hard to place a strong bet on a player with a line like this learning how to shoot.
2) However, it does seem just interesting enough to be worth a gamble.
A Version of Free-Throw Rate
1) Finally some good news. This is my version of Free Throw Rate, in which we divide Free Throws by 2-Pt Field Goal Attempts rather than all field goal attempts. The logic being that most players are much more likely to be fouled on 2-Pt field goal attempts than threes, and thus a player who shoots a lot of threes will be unfairly credited by a standard FTr.
2) Not that it would much affect Collinsworth, but a player like Damian Lillard is an example of this phenomenon. He had a .5 FTr despite shooting nearly half of his Field Goal Attempts from three. So the relatively average FTr belied how successful he was at getting fouled.
3) Regardless, Collinsworth is reasonably good at getting to the line. We can see the numbers compare quite favorably to many NBA success stories.
4) Which is to say, even though Collinsworth is old, don’t count him out. When we are talking about basketball IQ, we are talking about Ben Simmons, we are talking about Gary Payton II, we are talking about Denzel Valentine and DeAndre Bembry, we are talking about Kay Felder and Tyler Ulis and Fred Van Vleet, and we are talking about Thomas Walkup and Kyle Collinsworth.
Not all of these players will be successful. Some of them just don’t have the athleticism or frame to be so, especially not without a jump shot. But they are indeed the kinds of players that sometimes surprise. And indeed, we’ve seen such surprises in the last several years, from Matthew Dellavedova and TJ McConnell and perhaps some others. Passing the basketball and understanding what’s going on in real-time, being able to make adjustments, these kinds of things are really important when it comes to winning basketball.
