Anthony Davis: Never Generational

Anthony Davis played one of the greatest college seasons in history at Kentucky, but did not follow with an equivalent NBA career. Why not?

Anthony Davis: Never Generational

In Volume 2 of the NileHoops MythBuster series, one of the greatest NCAA seasons in modern history was not succeeded by a commensurate NBA career. I know why, though.

It goes without saying how extraordinary Anthony Davis’ lone season at Kentucky was. I would be doing you a disservice to detail the successes of a college freshman so successful that he spent his summer vacation interning with James Harden, Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Durant, and the rest of the gold medal-winning 2012 Team USA Men’s team.

I’ve decided to take on a much grander task. I must clarify why Anthony Davis, one of the most accomplished 19-year-olds of the millennium, was never going to be included in GOAT conversations.

Davis played a transcendent season at a personal level, but the 2012 National Championship Kentucky Wildcat roster produced seven players who tallied at least 800 minutes in the Association. This campaign, like any successful basketball siege, was no individual effort.

Davis’ outfit was arguably as talented and productive as that of any other superstar freshman.

Like most elite prospects, Davis dominated weaker opponents to a higher degree than their more competitive counterparts. Nevertheless, in an attempt to decipher the most relevant data samples from his historic freshman season, removing these five games versus Marist, Radford, Portland, Chattanooga, and Samford does a more accurate job of predicting how his game would translate to the next level.

As seen above, Davis used these weak competition games as a personal dunk contest. Even for a high-flying finisher like Davis, packing nearly a quarter of a season’s dunk totals into 137 minutes seems skewed in a potentially problematic situation as the opposing bigs became more athletically inclined, both at the college and pro levels.

Davis’ 76 dunks versus top-245 competition or better would have landed him second in the nation across a full season, only behind Andre Drummond. His rim dominance on both ends seems constant and of a dominant nature, as did most every aspect of his game. There was not as much of a Q4 boost as one may have expected, outside of padding his monster dunk numbers.

To further my argument, I must praise a player/prospect/archetype I usually wouldn’t appreciate enough. Marquis Teague’s presence on the 2012 Kentucky Wildcats may have gone understated by the analytical glance for the rest of time if not for this. Under what circumstances would one praise a small guard who finished his sole college year with this statistical footprint?

Returning to the theme of team basketball, Marquis Teague played an integral role extinct from the game today: the non-scoring floor general. By taking on all ball-handling and playmaking load for the Wildcats, team turnover rates stayed low, and his teammates were never tasked with attempting to score off the dribble, which would have lowered scoring efficiency and increased the opportunity for unskilled creators to make mistakes. This was an especially popular archetype in this timespan, with players like Kendall Marshall, Tyshawn Taylor, and Lorenzo Brown running top-15 offenses at the NCAA level and parlaying their position to NBA draft selection.

Teague’s especially high turnover count and lack of developed scoring package did make him a weak prospect, but his quintessential early 2010s lead guard performance led this Kentucky iteration to a national championship and millions of dollars in NBA contracts.

The #1 overall pick’s minuscule turnover rate and neutral AST:TO ratio as a teenage prospect usually stand as a point of praise, that of a high-IQ processor waiting to be unleashed with a larger on-ball role. In reality, Davis was no different than his teammates regarding the inability to create offense for himself off the dribble, and one could argue that he was more dependent on Teague than anyone else on the roster. Davis attempted 174 rim attempts, 61 percent of which were assisted. A large majority of his 39 percent of unassisted rim makes would have had to be putbacks, according to his 119 offensive rebounds. Offensive rebounding is an immensely valuable skill, but not one that equates to future on-ball equity.

On possessions where Davis wasn’t dunking a putback or finishing via a Teague pass, another disheartening development was brewing that would keep him from becoming a superstar-impact NBA player.

A 147:146 Rim:Jumper ratio across his most relevant 35 games displayed a genuinely abysmal scoring process for a player with his physical and athletic gifts. Davis’ propensity to attempt jumpshots was his fatal stylistic trait as a prospect. This was the initial point that brought me to produce this study. If he wasn’t dunking a putback or a lob, all he could figure was to shoot an undercooked jumper. One could argue he was a casualty of his era in this regard. Take for instance: 3P att. ≤ 30; Attempts at rim ≤ 200; Far 2s attempted ≥ 140; Box +/- ≥ 4. In human terms, this indicates an otherwise positive contributor whose shot diet leaned harshly toward non-three-point jumpshots. Today, thanks to such heartwarming figures as Mike D’Antoni, best friends Daryl Morey and James Harden, Brad Stevens, and so on, we know midrange shots are evil.

Taking them at such a proportionate rate as displayed above is simply not allowed anymore, as shown by its year-by-year frequency.

Bonzie Colson, Timmy Allen, or J’Wan Roberts (the last man standing) were shooting these non-rim twos as their team’s best option to generate offense. Davis, a transcendent vertical athlete to whom no college player could compare, was bailing defenses out nightly.

Davis’ jumper rate ranks second among the top 50 prospects in dunk rate (where he ranks twentieth out of over 1,000 NBA-designated players in the Bart database) in my Secret Shot Diet Sheet. Most players who shoot jumpshots with any notable frequency don’t dunk the ball because the dunk is the most efficient shot on the basketball court, and the ability to dunk at a high rate ensures efficiency. If they could, they would. Many try and fail to meet this lofty standard of basketball. Davis was no different.

Of the top 5% of players in Dunk Rate, below are the players with the highest ‘Jumper Rate’, their effective field goal percentages, and the number of attempts captured in their NCAA sample.

The high dunk, high jumper rate (with shooting proficiency) archetype is as rare as it seems, with only Toppin and Huff shooting jumpshots at a rate efficient enough to carry this role into their professional careers. Davis’ fascination with shooting inaccurate jumpshots instead of being the supreme playfinishing force of the 21st century was disastrous, but the underlying reason for this style of play was always evident, and is the reason that he lost the plot and is not an all-time legend.

Anthony Davis is The Smallest Giant.

In short, Anthony Davis was not big enough to be the legendary ‘big man’ prospect he was proclaimed to be.

We almost made it through the entire piece without mention, but the growth spurt that made Davis into a blue-chip prospect did not come with linear weight gain.

This was the most prominent weakness referenced in his scouting reports, such as this one, this one, this one, this one, and many others that have been lost to time. The expectation for the 19-year-old big to simply ‘get bigger’ was understated due to a lack of importance in anthro data in draft analysis. Davis measured 6’9.25 without shoes, 222 pounds, with a 9’0 standing reach and 76.5 hand area measurements at the 2012 Draft Combine (via @MarkC_NBA’s Combine Measurement App). Of the 55 players drafted from 2010 to 2022 standing between 6’8.75 and 6’9.5, Davis ranked 44th in weight, t-35th in standing reach, and 52nd in hand area.

Age-relative, Davis’ frame still stands out as sub-optimal, especially as a supposedly premier prospect.

Even in comparison to top-five picks whose combinations of skill and size put them into the upper echelon of big prospects, Davis’ measurements left so much to be desired.

Relationships between NBA success and height/weight/standing reach are intuitive but I was not able to secure information directly proving his small hands would lead to a lack of pro success, outside of this 2019 research article that ‘only’ states “there were significant differences between drafted and undrafted players of all positions in all variables except hand length, hand width, and bench press.”

Davis’s debut basketball-reference profile listed his weight at 220 pounds until his age-22 season, when it jumped to 253 pounds. This has apparently been his steady, unchanging weight every season for the next ten seasons. NBA season-by-season weight tracking is an untapped resource in prospect analysis, as knowing how many seasons it took a player to reach their peak weight and how any other fluctuations may have affected their impact would be immensely useful. I digress. Davis’ weight and the fact that he played 61% of his minutes designated as the Hornets/Pelicans power forward during his 19–22 age seasons exist in tandem. Highlights include attempting 63% of his shot attempts from beyond 3 feet with poor returns to show. This may have worked in his favor if these early seasons worked as a sandbox development period and he developed into an elite jump shooter at his peak, devastating defenses with a unique inside-out threat from the center position.

As seen above, he did not. There has rarely been a complete regular season where an Anthony Davis jumpshot has been a good possession for his team. As predicted by his college role, Davis has been one of the best clean-up/roller/play-finishers in the league from Day One.

It becomes much sadder to acknowledge the latter point when he would inevitably resort to the former jump-shooting wastefulness from his NCAA career.

When analyzing prospects, it is simply not enough to focus on production. Physical profile, the stickiness of shot diet, and the context provided between a prospect and other players that the coach has deployed are just as instructive as thoroughly targeted per-game or per-possession stats.

For example, the role that John Calipari-coached teams have rolled out for their centers during his career is significantly streamlined, and Davis was simply the best at it. There have been 148 bigs with a 90+ RecruiTRank since 2010 to dunk at least 12 times and shoot 70 percent at the rim with no notable playmaking or floor-stretching duties; Kentucky fielded twenty. That’s more than one every season.

Davis was undoubtedly the best prospect at playing the Calipari big role and has been an immensely successful professional.

It takes a lot to go right for the best amateur prospect to become the best professional, and the rarity of this instance proves that. Kareem, Magic, Jordan, Shaq, Kevin Garnett, Lebron, and maybe Kevin Durant have definitive claims as the best players in their age cluster as high school, college, and pro players, as well as being elite in comparison to the league’s all-time ranks. Not reaching this pinnacle of career success after completing the first two is more frequent and does not inherently indicate a failed career.

Does being in the second tier of his age range, clearly behind Embiid, Kawhi, Giannis, and Gobert, and falling in an impact group closer to Kyrie Irving, Steven Adams, and Alex Caruso indicate such? I leave that up to interpretation.

Nile!