The Rowan Outlier: Can RJ Barrett turn the flashes into reality in 2023-24?
Officially free of his rookie contract, RJ Barrett’s first four years were an intense up-and-down ride. Can he harness the ups more next season for the Knicks?
Since I have nothing else better to do during this bizarre NBA offseason, I’ve been thinking about RJ Barrett, teetering between meditation and madness. As I try to wrangle my thoughts on a young player who has this lightning rod-esque quality amongst Knicks fans, I keep coming back to one question: Has anything similar happened before?
See, the situation at hand is that the Knicks have a 23-year-old wing who puts up inefficient counting stats on high volume, but has pretty poor adjusted plus-minus and other impact statistics. Have there been players like this in NBA history? If so, how and why? If not, is there anything we can learn? To Stathead I go.
The goal is to find players with similar roles and physical profiles to Barrett, i.e. a high-usage slashing wing. In his four-year career, Barrett has played in 270 regular-season games, taking 1,328 free throws and 4,157 field goals. I decided to create a bit of a range with “rounded” numbers, so the query I put into Stathead was players in the 3-point era who are between 6-foot-5 and 6-foot-8 (Barrett is listed at 6-foot-6 and was previously listed at 6-foot-8), played at least 250 games their first four years, took at least 1,000 free throw attempts and shot at least 3,500 field goals. Here is the link to the query if you have access to Stathead and want to view all the numbers yourself.
Since the 1979–80 season, a total of 60 “wing players” fit this criteria, a who’s who of the NBA: Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Luka Dončić, Brandon Roy, Clyde Drexler, Carmelo Anthony, Devin Booker, Paul George and Latrell Sprewell, to name a few. There are randos like these guys named Jay Vincent and Todd Day, but most of the players on this list are at worst multiple-time All Stars, and Rudy Gay. These are effectively above-average to high-usage offensive players; the average usage rate of that 60-player sample is 24.67%. There is also a box plus-minus (BPM) column to have some sense of what their on-court impact is. Here’s some context about the values of this stat directly from Basketball Reference:
League average is defined as 0.0, meaning zero points above or below average. A value of +5.0 means the team is five points per 100 possessions better with the player on the floor than with average production from another player.
To give a sense of the scale:
+10.0 is an all-time season (Peak Jordan or LeBron)
+8.0 is an MVP season (Peak Dirk or peak Shaq)
+6.0 is an All-NBA season
+4.0 is in All-star consideration
+2.0 is a good starter
+0.0 is a decent starter or sixth man
-2.0 is a bench player (this is also defined as "replacement-level")
Below -2.0 are many end-of-bench players
These are effectively high-usage, high-minutes offensive players where 70% of the list has a positive BPM. They are quite good. Want to guess where Barrett ranks? Sixtieth. Dead. Last.
Over the first four years of his career, Barrett has a -2.4 BPM. There are only two other players in NBA history at -2 or worse while putting up high-volume shot attempts: Andrew Wiggins (-2.0) and DeMar DeRozan (-2.2). Let's compare some of their per 100 possessions stats. They are quite similar:
It’s easy to be disappointed, annoyed, angered, or any negative emotion by this revelation. If you want to bounce right now and not read the rest of this article, I totally get it. Critics of Barrett who value the impact stats (RAPM, EPM, DARKO, BPM, etc.) and shooting percentages feel validated in their assessments of him as a player when they read a tidbit like this. But we need to answer the question that started this entire thing in the first place: Have there been players like RJ in NBA history?
I think we can safely say “no,” there haven’t been.
Remember that 60-player sample? Well, there are only 16 players on it with a negative BPM. Sixteen. That’s it. And Barrett has the worst one. Who exactly are these 16 players? Not by name, but what they represent as data points? These are players who were given NBA All-Star usage and minutes while having borderline-replacement to replacement-level player impact on the court. Not only is this occurrence rare, Barrett’s BPM value is unprecedented. Why is this so rare? Because teams generally don’t commit big minutes to replacement-level players, because... they’re replacement-level.
We are currently seeing the question “How long do you give a prospect like RJ?” being answered in real time. When a player has that negative an impact, they do not see the court. The closest comparisons to Barrett are DeRozan, one of the more flawed stars/first options of the past decade, and Wiggins, a disappointing top-overall pick who was traded to the best possible team and offensive role for him in Golden State. We aren’t far removed from Wiggins being the second-best player on an NBA champion. I really wrote that sentence.
This current state of dissonance — high minutes and usage with awful shooting percentages and impact stats — makes watching Barrett maddening and projecting his future extremely difficult. The simplest and easiest conclusion to take from all of this is “RJ Barrett stinks, is a bust, and needs to be traded ASAP.” I feel as if that’s too clean and reductive in trying to understand what is happening. Despite the awful starts, DeRozan ended up being a career “plus” player with a career 0.8 BPM; Wiggins is trending upwards. Here’s every stat nerd’s favorite stat, DARKO, to illustrate this:
How long do you give a top-3 pick to figure it out? We’ve all seen the flashes because Barrett already has those moments you want from young players.
He trucked PJ Tucker into the camera crew for a game-winning layup as a rookie.
He hit a game-winning three in dramatic fashion in his third season against the Celtics, with Jayson Tatum all over him as the clock expired at the Garden.
He dunked on Scottie Barnes after Barnes missed a free throw to force OT — at the Garden.
He dropped 26 and 7 on 63 true shooting against the Miami Heat in a must-win playoff game to force a Game 6... at the Garden again! The “good” RJ Barrett is somewhere in there. “Will that ever show up consistently?” appears to be “no,” given the much larger sample and where he stands historically amongst similar statistical profiles; however, it’s not a 100% guarantee. If the chance of consistent occurrence appears minimal, how long do you wait before you pull the plug on the experiment when you’re a team that almost made the Conference Finals with their All-NBA player not playing like an All-NBA player?
If I were to guess, I think there are a few things occurring with New York allowing Barrett to take effectively as long as he needs. The most obvious is that the Knicks’ “star trade” is still to be determined. It’s safe to say that if the team could trade him for Paul George or the asking price for Zach LaVine wasn’t an overpay, then Barrett is moving to Los Angeles or Chicago. The Knicks’ front office does not deal in overpays, so Barrett remains a New Yorker.
Then there is the volume side to all this. See, Barrett puts up the volume necessary for positive impact, has been relatively durable throughout his career — meaning he’s been given every opportunity, and available to take them — and has the shot profile you want from one of your main offensive players. Since entering the league, Barrett ranks 10th in total shots at the rim and 24th in total free throw attempts, per PBP Stats. For some perspective on these totals, over those four seasons Barrett has taken more shots at the rim than Julius Randle, Jayson Tatum and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. In that same span, RJ’s taken more free throws than LeBron James and Donovan Mitchell. Hell, since entering the league, Barrett has only 12 fewer career defensive rebounds than Mitchell Robinson’s had since he did, and Robinson had a year head start. And we know from last season that volume is very important at the team level for a successful offense.
No matter what side you’re on in the ever-so-heated RJ debate amongst Knicks fans, I think we can all agree that these first four years were not good, overall, but there were flashes. Put whatever merit you want in those flashes. Fine by me. Let’s put that aside, keep it in the past, or whatever, and enter this upcoming season with more intrigue than frustration. We get to witness if Barrett can actually put things together. And if he doesn’t? Well, it’s nice to have a star in Jalen Brunson, a somehow two-time All-NBA player in Julius Randle and other promising young players in Immanuel Quickley and Quentin Grimes to fall back on. It’s ultimately going to be on RJ Barrett to make this work. Let’s see if he does.
