Season preview: Jarrett Allen

 Jarrett Allen:  We know what Jarrett Allen is, good defender, good pnr partner for Garland, solid team contributor.  All-Star alternate level player, 6th year pros don’t tend to improve. Except maybe not.  Allen belongs to a smaller group of NBA players- ones who made their debut as 19 year old rookies.  Typical 6th year pros don’t make large improvements and tend to be settled into a role and productivity with individual season variation having to do with injuries and teammate shifts more than their own internal differences.  This does not hold up for 19 year old rookies though, typical 6th year pros are 26 to 28 years old, even most who had one season of college before being drafted are 25, whild Allen is still 24.  This isn’t idle speculation either, one study of players that split them by age as a rookie showed that 19 year old rookies (dropping the tiny sample of 18 year olds who no longer exist due to drat rules) have not only the longest improvement curve but the steepest as well.  This study uses PER as its metric, which is far from perfect but the difference is very, very large.  


Quick summary of the findings:  For 19 year olds the average rookie PER was ~13.5 which rises every season until age 25, with the total increase at ~6.5 points, and years 24 and 25 representing a total of 2 points of increase.  It is also year 6 that 18 year old rookies outproduce age 20 year old rookies for the same level of NBA experience for the first time.  


Let’s put Allen in this context.  At age 19 he had a PER of 17.5 and at age 23 it was 23.0, so he both started higher than a typical 19 year old rookie and has increased his PER by more total points than you would expect in this span.  If his total improvement were to match that of this group he would top out at ~23.5 PER sometime in the next two seasons.  If his total improvement over the next two years matches that of his peer group it will hit ~25 PER.  


One interesting comparison is his draft class mate Bam Adebayo, who was drafted 8 spots ahead of Allen and is considered to be one of the best centers in the Eastern Conference.  Bam had a nice rookie season and has seen his PER jump 7 points to his peak (age 23) season, which well outpaces the average 20 year old draftee who sees only a roughly 3.5 point jump.  Year 6, this coming season for both Bam and Allen, is on average the first year in which a 19 year old rookie will first outperform a 20 year old rookie in PER.  This past season Allen’s 23 PER was higher than Bam’s best season (22.7, 2 seasons ago) and Allen also nudged out Bam in PER in year 3 (20.7 to 20.3).


PER is not nearly strong enough to declare Allen better than Bam, but it is very encouraging to put Jarrett’s numbers up against a very good, young C who is considered the 2nd or 3rd best C (depending on how you classify Giannis) in the conference, and a top 8 C in the league.  That a naive projection would have Allen stepping over Bam in the hierarchy over the next two seasons, and perhaps substantially passing him is both exciting and also something that isn’t expected or really even discussed. 


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