Romeo has been atrocious on offense, there is no other way to slice it. I'm sorry to disappoint those the Romeo backers, it's been as ugly as it gets.
Year 3 (really year 2) will be a big year for him and I am hopeful he turns it around. He has the pedigree, legit physical skills, and flashed above average on D. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he makes a leap next season.
His offensive performance (even accounting for age/injury/inexperience) has still been below any reasonable expectations. It doesn't get much worse than what we have seen from Romeo so far.
Yeah, I guess the difference in perspective here is that I'm wayyyy more interested in eye test stuff with young players than I am in metrics or counting stats (which are bad in Romeo's case).
Young players are almost all bad wrt contributing to winning, and the ones who aren't are usually either old or superstars. I don't need metrics to tell me Luka was going to be good after his first couple months. I am still pretty meh on PP because of age, eye test, and physical profile, regardless of his counting stats.
So the focus on metrics early on leads to this kind of weird anti-epistemlogical approach, where, for players who end up good but aren't studs out of the gate, the trajectory looks like:
- He's bad
- He's still bad (Romeo's offense)
- He looks ok out there but the metrics say he's not great. Do you reject the Sacred Numerals? (Romeo's defense year 1)
- Man he's pretty decent, who could have seen it coming??? For lo, the Numbers foretold it not. (Romeo's defense now)
- He's really good and everyone always knew he would be! (check what people thought of Jayson Tatum late year 2 and early year 3. Everyone pretends now that Jayson Tatum, Star was always seen as inevitable, and that's a total retcon.)
In fairness to you, I think that your probability bands for a player's career are a fine/good way to approach this, and I put Romeo's floor way higher than you likely would in that exercise.