The league is littered with third string point guards at around the same level as JDD. We saw one for Toronto in Jamal Shead.
JD Davison, 2nd round pick
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Shead was their draft pick this summer who found his spot in the Raptors rotation from opening night. That isn't the same level as Davison who in 3 years hasn’t been able to stay out of Maine. Stevens had so much confidence in Davison last year that he traded for Springer to give him a shot.
IF Jamil Shead was on the Celtics roster, he'd be wearing a lobster bib more than a Celtics jersey
This is probably true. That said other than height and position, I'm not sure they have all that much in common. Shead is an absolute dog on defense, one of the top perimeter defenders in his class.
My point is that he’s be in what Springers role was projected to be with an opportunity to earn minutes…..Davison isn’t even showing enough to get the Springer shot.
Isn't part of that just roster management, tho? With Springer on a "real" contract, you can't give him a two-way, and you can keep Davison around by giving him another one. Springer seems buried-buried.
Watching Davison today, he could not keep Boo Buie in front of him. His defense on the perimeter is a liability for sure. He's incredibly athletic, but he's not quick. He went basically head to head with TJ Warren most of the game, though, and did alright for himself. 31 points on 12-18 shooting, 7 boards and 8 assists, even though he was out more than usual with a couple of early fouls. In the G League, he can get to the rack almost at will.
He had a putback dunk today, too, where I'd swear his head was at the rim.
I wonder if JDD is a guy who will spend a couple of years in Europe, figure some things out, and then come back and have a year or two as a decent backup.
The team is contending and looking for deep bench guys who can contribute when called on…..and Davison isn’t thought highly enough to even be given a look-see. It wouldn’t be roster management if Davison showed any ability to be able to contribute.
Hey players change, develop and figure things out. If he has a work ethic and sticks with it you never know but since he was drafted he’s never been close to being an NBA player. Gerald Green did it after years overseas, Kris Dunn is turning into a solid NBA player after years of injury and bouncing around, and other examples are out there. It’s a long shot though once you are off the radar and labeled.
It’s ridiculous to compare getting minutes on a bad team like Toronto, and on a championship level team stacked with point guards like the Celtics. They did take a flyer on Springer, but he does play a different position than Davison.
It’s also ridiculous to say the Davison couldn’t be a third string point guard on one of the bad teams in the league. He has played against similar competition in the G league for three seasons now and has at least held his own. Half the players, the Celtics face every game couldn’t crack the rotation in Boston.
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JD the headbanded LION just out here making plays in the G.
View: https://twitter.com/MaineCeltics/status/1865487318964203836
View: https://twitter.com/MaineCeltics/status/1865487318964203836
And again! Get this man a job as the 10th man on a bad team playing 15 minutes a night!
View: https://twitter.com/nbagleague/status/1867021417449132471
View: https://twitter.com/nbagleague/status/1867021417449132471
I watched him the other night (next day on tape) and the game has totally slowed down for him on this level. I said this last year but he needs to get away from the Celtics organization and for his sake hopefully involved as part of a deadline deal to a lottery team. He’s earned rotation minutes tryout on a lottery team in March-April.
Torching his prospects of getting another team to take a flier on him, I'm afraid. Last night once they gave JDD initiation duties, he dribbled it out of bounds under pressure at midcourt, and then maybe in the very next possession, got his pocket picked for a pick-6, basically under no pressure. "at least he hit the 3" yeah that's good but nobody's going to sign him if they're worried his head isn't screwed on straight. If your center has a shaky handle, it might be fine. There ain't no point guards in the NBA with a shaky handle, not even on an NBA bench. The out-of-bounds one was the real facepalm "oh.... oh, JD..." moment for me, just showing a lack of BB IQ. For me that's like Bill Belichick and running backs who fumble, just a fundamental lack of attention to your first and primary job out there.
He was terrible again, but it is 100% mental and I think that is clear to anyone seriously watching. Contrast what he’s doing with what Pritchard does and did when he took the court as a scrub – he got his, took shots at volume, even if they were horribly out of rhythm. JDD dribbles the ball up and passes it. Either he’s being told to “just be a PG” or doesn’t want to be that guy in those situations for some reason.
Either way these minutes aren’t a showcase for him and I’m pretty sure everyone knows that.
Yeah, he looked like he has regressed in his ballhandling/floor generalling, which seemed to be one of the few areas where he had looked capable. This is potentially armchair psychobabble, but he had the approach of someone who was thinking, "it's garbage time, the other team won't be trying *that* hard." That's a bus ticket out of town. I know his salary + penalties is basically couch-cushion money, but he has got to be on thin ice.
Apropos of nothing: Kornet and Derrick White agreed that two-way contract player JD Davison throws the team’s best alley-oop passes.
Shooting %s are still garbage though. Until he gets a workable 3 point shot (he's at .241 this season, .277 for his G league career), he's just not playable in the NBA. Shame.
*edit - basketball reference seems to be out of date on G league stats, he's up to .329 from 3 this year. Long way to go, plus the NBA game always appears to be going way too fast for him.
I see him shooting 3s at 32.9% this year. But your basic point stands, that is not good enough for an NBA point guard.
https://stats.gleague.nba.com/player/1631120/
https://stats.gleague.nba.com/player/1631120/
Yeah, I think of it this way (not just about Davison but in general). We all have a kind of intuitive understanding of the following, but it might help just to put some numbers on it:
At guard height (6'1-6'5 roughly), we're talking about people 1-2 standard deviations above the norm (men are avg 5'10" with StDev 3"), or roughly 2% (6'4)-15% (6'1) of the male population, 1 guy out of every 6 down to 1-every-50. At wing height (let's say 6'6-6'9), we're at like 3-4 standard deviations above the norm, down to 0.4% (6'6) - 0.01% (6'9) of the population, or 1 guy out of every 250 up to 1-out-of-10,000 (!). At center height, call it 6'10+, it's 4-5 standard deviations, 0.003% at Z= -4.0 (6'10") and falling fast, one out of every 40,000 men or so. 7-footers far rarer than even that.
And in those 3 rough groupings, there are about equal numbers of NBA jobs available. Maybe slightly fewer bigs, but guards and wings are in roughly equal proportion. Out of the 450 active roster positions, it might be like 170 guards / 170 wings / 110 centers, give or take, and acknowledging the imprecise boundaries of the groups. But even so: very different than the population distribution.
This is why we see the stat that if you're 7 feet tall, there's about a 1 in 6 chance that you'll play in the NBA. You don't have to beat out very many other people your height - in fact, given how many people at that height are in ill health in general, not up to any sort of athletic activity, not interested in the career, etc, probably at worst you're talking that 1 out of 3 people that height who seriously pursue and train basketball, end up on a roster.
If you're of NBA wing height, you have to beat out a goodly number of other people of similar stature. There aren't a ton of guys at that height, but many will play basketball, enough will be healthy and athletic. You might have to beat out the next 100 players of your height in order to make it onto an NBA roster. Think of how many college teams there are with guys at that height who have pro-hoop ambitions every year. The competition is way more fierce than it is for bigs. But the journey is certainly made a lot easier for you by having been born 6'8 or whatever.
If you're of NBA guard height, well, goooood luck. There are an absolute assload of men of that height out there, with their mere size not usually causing big health problems the way freakishly tall people are. You might have to be the best 1 out of the next 10,000 players or even 100,000 players to make it to the NBA. It's way, way easier to get into Harvard or any other insanely-competitive admissions process one could name, than to make it to the league as a guard. To even get anywhere near competing for one of those spots, you need to be an absolute freak in many ways other than height - determination and work ethic, certainly (think Payton Pritchard's workout videos), natural creativity and agility, but also every other skill around the game, most of all shooting. There is basically no room for error, no room for having some part of your game that you need to work on - because if you're weak at it, the team can find somebody who isn't. The level of competition is absurd, and thus the floor for performance by those given a shot to earn a roster spot is very high.
All of that to say, JDD can look out there like someone with NBA-level skills at passing, ability to defend G-leaguers, and even able to score in the paint against G-leaguers. But in today's NBA if he lacks outside shooting, he's dead. Or he's Ben Simmons, a 6'10" guard who can defend 1-5 at an all-star level, pass at an all-star level, read the game in transition incredibly well, and (used to be) score around the rim a little. He's the exception who proves the rule, because you have to basically look like Ben Simmons in every other area except shooting in order to get away with shooting like Ben Simmons.
JD shoots better than Ben Simmons, but at 6'1" he needs to be Payton Pritchard to stick. And I have a hard time seeing him get anywhere close to there. If he was 6'8, he'd probably be on a roster already.
Everyone always gotta be hacking the system.
View: https://twitter.com/FootyHumour/status/1395005419114926084
I watched that and said, well, he's not that bad. Ok. He is that bad. Ok. He's about as good as I am. Not as good as I was at my best, as good as I am right now. At 58. Having not played organized outdoor soccer in 40 years.
A couple of those "highlights" had me thinking 'I am only out here because Dad wan.....is telling me to be"
Interesting quote about JD from Maine's coach Tyler Lashbrook:
If that is true, one would think that JD should have a pretty decent NBA career, particularly if he's closer to the 40.5% 3P shooting he accomplished last year, than the 32.9% he's putting up this year.
Cite (P.S. BS stuff in his thread).
“The thing that might surprise other people is just how smart he is — because he’s such a quiet person off the court,” he said. “He’s one of, if he’s not the, smartest player I have ever been around in terms of managing situations and understanding coverages and understanding reads and understanding situations. He is a really high-level IQ basketball player.”
If that is true, one would think that JD should have a pretty decent NBA career, particularly if he's closer to the 40.5% 3P shooting he accomplished last year, than the 32.9% he's putting up this year.
Cite (P.S. BS stuff in his thread).
Reminds me of what Casey Stengel said about Jay Hook, the first winning pitcher in Mets' history, who also attended Northwestern in the offseason:.
Jay Hook – Society for American Baseball Research
He was awesome last night, hitting a huge three to send the game into overtime and then setting up a drive and layup for himself to close out the Elam ending. If he can ever prove that he can regularly get downhill against NBA perimeter defenders, unlocking his floater game and dishes to the corners, I think his three-point shooting would hold up. We just haven't seen that yet. I don't think he's ever going to be a spot-up shooter. He needs the ball in his hands.