Twice in 7 games, the Suns have turned to depth and defense

Twice in 7 games, the Suns have turned to depth and defense by Kevin Zimmerman

Phoenix Suns point guard Tyler Ennis stood out as one of the better speakers in his rookie class, according to research by Henry Johnson of the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective.

Johnson took a limited look at NBA rookies and their speech sophistication using the admittedly imperfect Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula — based on sentence length and word length — that’s commonly used in academia to evaluate the grade level of written word.

The research determined that Ennis, who speaks at a 6.3 grade level, had the most sophisticated speech among the English-speaking players in his draft class. Croatian Dario Saric actually was evaluated as the best overall speaker with an F-K Grade Level score of 6.8.

Suns rookie T.J. Warren, who made his NBA debut Sunday night against the Golden State Warriors, recorded the third-lowest F-K Grade Level score (2.4) among rookie evaluated in the study. This isn’t surprising since Warren is as quiet as they come.

There are, however, a few curious results in the study. Take Houston Rockets rookie Clint Capela, who received a 3.7 F-K Grade Level score despite struggling to speak and to understand English when he visited U.S. Airways Center for a Suns tryout this summer. A reminder from Johnson:

F-K score is far from ideal—“The general manager is an imbecile” reads as a smarter statement than “I love this team”—but it isn’t without merit. Recent research found that CEOs with higher speech sophistication lead their companies to greater valuations, and a 2008 study reported that voters favor presidential candidates with higher F-K scores.

The study was solely based on draft night press conferences and the interviews as transcribed by a service that likely wasn’t around for more than a few minutes with each player.

While it’s hardly a measure of intelligence, it does say that Ennis is especially well-spoken for a rookie who spent just a year at Syracuse. And hey, there’s another reason to believe Ennis is pretty darn smart. Jeff Hornacek has praised him for knowing the playbook and thinking the game rather than just playing it.