The 2013 NBA Draft was a strange and peculiar one, and to this day it remains unparalleled in its unconventionality. A potential all-time great taken at No. 15, borderline all-stars at Nos. 2, 3, 10, and 12, even a perennial Defensive Player of the Year candidate taken at No. 27. Yet, despite all of these idiosyncratic, yet significant, storylines, this draft will be forever known for one thing: producing Anthony Bennett.

Taken No. 1 overall and out of the league just four seasons later, Bennett is touted as the worst draft pick ever. Even on our own site, he was ranked as the biggest bust of all time – a sentiment shared by many. But why am I writing this? Am I not just reverberating the resolution the majority of fans and media personnel have come to? Read the title; I’m making the counter-argument. And before you start commenting about how I’m the real idiot (fair conclusion), I am not justifying the pick. I’m not vouching for the Grizzlies to offer him a max. I’m not even saying he wasn’t one of the biggest busts in NBA history; I’m just saying we gave up on him too early.

Touted as a 6-foot-8, 240-pound athletic forward/small-ball five, most predicted Bennett to fall anywhere from 3-10, citing his athleticism and freakish rebounding ability. As a team looking to build a core around the then 21-year old Kyrie Irving, the Cavaliers were looking for a frontcourt player who could complement Irving’s surgical style. They looked for a player with athleticism and stretchability, and they deemed the 20-year old from UNLV to be the best candidate.

In his first NBA season, Bennett put up 4.2 ppg on 36% shooting from the field, and seeing this as enough evidence of bust potential, the Cavaliers shipped him and Andrew Wiggins to Minnesota in the Kevin Love deal. Only minimally improving his scoring total in Minnesota, he was cut at the season’s end. Now, two years later, after signing with the Raptors, Nets, Suns, and making a brief stint in Europe, Bennett found a home with the Maine Red Claws of the NBA’s Developmental League, settling into the role of the team’s starting Power Forward. His fall from grace was swift, banal, and seemingly unanimous, as five NBA teams and one in Turkey have no interest in signing him. He has been deemed by numerous leagues, hundreds of teams, and an innumerable number of fans to be unfit to play basketball past a $20,000 a year level, and yet, I am making the case that he should be given minutes in the most competitive basketball league time has ever known. Let’s dig into it.

Let’s first determine if Bennett’s game has a place in the NBA, as to either prove or disprove the validity of the numbers I will later present. To think I would write everything I have so far just to explain why the former number one overall pick has no place in the modern NBA, you’d have to be nuts. Anthony Bennett definitively has a place in the NBA. If I wanted to stretch it, I could compare his game to that of Draymond Green or Paul Millsap, but I’m not. I’m a realist. So I’m going to compare him to the most likely NBA scenario for him. A player tantamount to Taj Gibson. Maybe a more athletic, worse defender Taj Gibson. Let’s examine the clip below:

After you ignore the first 2 minutes of the video, which I’m convinced is just a loop of him doing the same exact dunk, you can begin to examine and unearth his true game. Bennett is an athletic, capably passing big man who is undersized but makes up for it through his excellent spin-move and his fantastic off-ball movement. Both him and Gibson are very good rebounders, but not dominant. Both have career usages hovering around 20, indicating they both are not primary offensive options, but can act as functionaries in an effective offense. Similar to Gibson, when the play breaks down, he’s a viable option to go get an easy bucket at the end of the shot clock. He’s a clean-up guy, and that should be his role in the NBA.

Now, regarding positionality, Bennett is a strange case. Ten years ago, Anthony Bennett would have been your prototypical four. At 6-8 and 240 pounds, his frame resembles that of a Carlos Boozer or a David West. However, the prototypical four is a thing of the past in the NBA. Thus, Bennett is forced to adapt. In the NBA, Bennett could fit in effectively in one of two roles: as a small-ball five or as a stretch-four. Bennett could be viable as a small-ball five through his athleticism and strong frame. Although lacking on defense, he has the versatility to compensate for that as a small-ball five. He could easily adapt to the role of a rim-runner, and through his aforementioned freakish-athleticism and body-builder frame he could protect the rim at a high degree, perfectly molding his game to fit in the modern NBA. I would predict his game to be similar to that of John Henson, with added ahleticism, but somewhat significantly worse defense.

Concerning his potential at stretch-four, Bennett’s agility and athletic tools make him a viable option to fit into this role. With his capable mid and long-range shooting, Bennett could fill a role similar to that of the Hornets’ Marvin Williams.

Finally, regarding team role, Bennett’s ceiling is not an all-star. It’s not even a good starter. At this point, Bennett’s absolute ceiling at this point is as an average starter. Yes, it is largely disappointing for a once highly touted, former number one overall pick to settle in the role of an average starter, but let me recall another former number one overall pick: Andrew Bogut.

Interposing at spot 21 on the Good Hoops’ Top 25 NBA Draft Busts, Bogut is somewhat considered a bust, but his NBA career of mediocrity is largely deemed acceptable. Though he never quite fulfilled the lofty expectations set for him as a 7-foot international center, Bogut had a respectable 13-year career, accumulating one ring and a fortune that puts him in the top 20 percent of the top 1 percent. Who is to say Bennett can’t achieve similar success?

Fortunate enough to play a highly-coveted position, Bennett doesn’t need to be the archetype of his position to make the leap back into the NBA. If Bennett could just refine his game, develop his shooting and defense just a bit more, three or four years down the line we could easily be looking up to him averaging 13 points with eight rebounds on 26 minutes played on a mid-tier NBA team.

Now, to address the statistical aspect of my case to give Bennett another chance in the league, take a look at the graph below:



Charted above is Anthony Bennett’s career arch in terms of SACUMUR and MACUMUR. What is evident through both the numeric and visual aspect of this graph is the undeniable progression Anthony Bennett has undergone over the course of his four-year career. The overwhelming majority of NBA players see some regression, however minute, in the first four years of their careers. In fact, only five players drafted since 2012 have seen no regression in SACUMUR over the first four years of their career. A list headlined by Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bradley Beal, Anthony Bennett joins elite company in this regard. While I am in no way saying that Anthony Bennett will ever reach the stardom Antetokounmpo and Beal currently enjoy, I am saying that it is quite significant that he is one of the five players to join that list, and it bodes quite favorably to the future of his NBA career.

To delve into the purely numeric aspect of the chart, Bennett does not rank favorably. A replacement level player scores about a 6.5 and begins their career at about 2.5. Bennett was considerably below the 2.5 mark at the beginning of his career, and with most players reaching their prime in seasons 5-7, Bennett was 2.3 points below replacement level in year four. This indicates an uphill battle for Bennett just to reach the ranks of mediocrity, yet, all hope is not lost. Last season, to mention a few, the likes of Harrison Barnes, Devin Booker, Kent Bazemore, and Jamal Crawford all ranked worse in SACUMUR. Yet, Harrison Barnes is on a max contractmax contract, Devin Booker is unanimously considered to be a rising star, Kent Bazemore is generally considered a quality 3-and-D wing, and Jamal Crawford has had one of the most successful NBA careers a combo guard could hope to have. It goes to show that these players, although deemed to be below replacement level, still are quality players who can make impactful contributions to any NBA team.

What if a team actually took a chance on Anthony Bennett, giving him rotation level minutes? How would he play? To what level would he produce? Take a look at the graph below.



Shown above is Anthony Bennett’s SACUMUR single year projections with the probability of each actually occurring. With the most accurate prediction predicting him to continue his marginal progression and reach a score of 5.35 in the fifth year of his NBA career, this would place Bennett as an average role player, likely coming off the bench and playing 12-13 minutes a game. His predicted per-36-minute usage-adjusted statistics roughly translate to 15 points and nine rebounds on a 14.7 PER, pushing him towards the league average level. Projected by FiveThirtyEight’s CARMELO model to have a market value of about $2 million in the coming year, he would be an extremely valuable asset to a team as a near replacement level a 25-year old small-ball five/stretch four, approximately the equal value of a late first-round pick.

Bottom line, although a bust, the numbers and the potential say Anthony Bennett undeniably deserves a spot on an NBA roster. Out of the nine tanking teams, one can’t take a gamble on a 24-year old former No. 1 pick? That is the very problem. We as fans and the NBA community at large has written Bennett off as a bust, when in reality he isn’t the superstar we expect out of the number one pick but he is still a quality player. This bias and promptness to write progressing players and projects off as busts is a sequestered poison in the league to which it is unbeknown how many talents we have lost. How about Dragan Bender? How about Marquese Chriss? How about Georgios Papagiannis? Should we write them off as busts as well?

Just last season, Timberwolves fans and the NBA community as a whole came to the conclusion that Kris Dunn would never reach the perceived potential he had coming out of the draft, and after just one season he was promptly traded out of the conference. Now, one season later, Dunn is playing at a phenomenal level, minutely below the benchmark of a starting-caliber guard. Why didn’t the Bucks trade Giannis after he had a SACUMUR score of 1.39 his first season? Last season, his rookie season, Georgios had a score of 2.61. Could he be the next Giannis? It’s already in the name! Truthfully, Georgios will very likely never come near the level Giannis is currently playing at, but there is a great likelihood that past his FIRST SEASON he could become a suitable starting center, decent value out of a pick in the teens.

In the NBA community, we need to be patient. We need to give players a chance to prove themselves and fulfill their potential before exile them to the CBA. As we saw through DeMar DeRozan and Kevin Love’s resounding statements, professional basketball players are humans too. They have anxiety, they stress, they work relentlessly every day on their game, yet there is an unspoken sentiment within them that they aren’t good enough. They can’t make it. DeMar can’t return to the impoverished inner city of Compton; Giannis can’t go back to selling watches on the streets of Athens. Fortune has struck them with the innate talent to make it in a billion-dollar industry, but success doesn’t come without work. Every day, they work harder than the last, driven by the constant paranoia of what life would be like if they weren’t so fortunate. They fear the unknown, they are terrified to leave expectations unfulfilled. They are human. And we need to begin treating them as such.

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