NBA Draft 2010: Daniel Orton and Hassan Whiteside

I’m going to take a quick break from the forwards here to look at a couple of young big guys. These are a couple of freshmen centers whose most impressive skill is blocking shots. While Orton has been a good shot blocker, Whiteside has swatted away shots at a historic rate. I’ll look at each separately below, but first here’s a table showing the best freshmen shot blockers. I included players from major conferences who played over 500 minutes as freshmen only. The cutoff was 4.0 blocks per 40 minutes.

Player	2 pt pct	P40	R40	B40	A/TO
Shawn Bradley	.517	20.5	10.7	7.2	0.5
Alonzo Mourning	.609	18.6	10.3	7.0	0.4
Jim McIlvaine	.579	16.8	9.9	6.9	0.4
Samuel Dalembert	.503	11.1	11.1	6.7	0.2
Marcus Camby	.502	18.7	11.7	6.6	0.7
Hasheem Thabeet	.562	9.5	9.8	5.9	0.2
Alvin Jones	.500	8.9	8.8	5.6	0.5
Hakeem Olajuwon	.607	18.2	13.5	5.4	0.3
Shaquille O’Neal	.573	19.8	17.1	5.1	0.7
Jamaal Magloire	.490	12.5	11.3	5.1	0.2
Tim Duncan	.543	13.0	12.7	5.0	0.8
Joel Przybilla	.560	10.6	9.1	4.7	0.6
Chris Mihm	.527	20.0	12.9	4.7	0.2
Elden Campbell	.554	20.5	9.4	4.6	0.4
Greg Oden	.616	22.1	13.5	4.6	0.3
Patrick Ewing	.631	17.6	10.5	4.5	0.3
Jelani McCoy	.676	13.7	9.3	4.4	0.5
Benoit Benjamin	.555	18.4	11.9	4.2	0.4
Dwayne Schintzius	.440	15.9	8.8	4.1	1.2
Yinka Dare	.551	17.6	14.8	4.0	0.1
Oliver Miller	.564	15.4	7.5	4.0	0.6
Jason Lawson	.523	14.5	9.5	4.0	0.5
Hassan Whiteside	.522	19.3	13.1	7.9	0.2
Daniel Orton	.539	9.8	9.5	4.0	0.4

Wouldn’t it be great to see what a healthy Greg Oden could become? For the record Dikembe Mutombo did not play as a freshman. His first season, when he was a 22 year-old sophomore, he played 374 minutes and blocked 8.0 shots per 40 minutes.

Hassan Whiteside, Marshall: The man can block some shots. Looking at the list above, Whiteside appears in line for a long career as either a star NBA center or a ridiculously overpaid NBA center. The thing that does concern me is his low A/TO. On the list it shows as 0.2, but that’s because I round to tenths. It’s actually 0.16 which is very low for freshmen of any age. Here’s a list of freshmen college centers who also posted an A/TO below 0.2. I only included players who played over 300 minutes. I lowered the bar from the usual 500 so I could include Dikembe Mutombo and David Robinson.

NCAA Freshman	Minutes	A/40	TO/40	A/TO
Mel Turpin	380	0.11	2.42	0.05
Yinka Dare	831	0.14	2.94	0.05
Kevin Willis	518	0.15	2.01	0.08
Todd MacCulloch	419	0.38	2.48	0.15
Jerome James	685	0.47	4.67	0.10
Steven Hunter	744	0.48	3.01	0.16
Charles Claxton	644	0.50	3.17	0.16
Dikembe Mutombo	374	0.53	3.21	0.17
Samuel Dalembert	643	0.62	3.86	0.16
Greg Ostertag	311	0.64	3.86	0.17
David Robinson	372	0.65	3.33	0.19
Kevin Duckworth	669	0.72	4.19	0.17
Hassan Whiteside	889	0.45	2.88	0.16

I listed the players in order of how frequent the assists came. The idea here was to separate the players who simply didn’t pass from the players who were erratic passers. On this list are 2 players who could legitimately called busts based on their draft position: Turpin and Dare. Claxton hardly had a career, but was drafted in round 2, so not much was expected of him. The others either met or exceeded expectations. The point is Turpin and Dare were the two most notorious non-passers in the bunch, along with Willis. Willis, drafted after Turpin in the legendary ’84 draft, defied the odds and played 21 years with one all-star appearance to his credit. Turpin actually improved his passing by his soph season and that wasn’t the reason for his not living up to expectations. This is important for Whiteside, because his passing numbers are more in line with the players at the middle of this group who all forged careers that were at least journeyman level, but included a couple of one-time all-stars and a couple of legends. The point is Hassan Whiteside’s weak passing numbers don’t appear to be so weak that they’re going to keep him from an NBA career.

Going to the shot blockers table at the top, there are six centers in that group who had careers that stood above the others: Mourning, Camby, Hakeem, Shaq, Duncan and Ewing. These players typically had a higher FG pct. with scoring and rebounding numbers that were at least decent. Whiteside meets 2 of these criteria. He scored a solid 19.1 P40 and posted a R40 higher than all but 4 players on the list. The FG pct. is low, something made worse by the fact he declined throughout the season with monthly splits of .590, .516, .479 and .460. With a player who is raw and in his first college season, it is obviously better to see improvement or at least a flatter decline. A decline in numbers is common for any player, but this is pretty sharp and coming in Whiteside’s freshman it suggests that teams were figuring him out as the season progressed. This tells me that coming in Whiteside’s offense will require a lot of work.

Hassan Whiteside has a long way to go as a player. He needs to bulk up and work on his offensive game. He was outplayed by Jerome Jordan in their 3 matchups this year and every center in the NBA is a better player than Jerome Jordan. He’s also about a year and-a-half older than most freshmen, and that flattens his career curve some. Statistically he’s behind the all-time greats, but ahead of where the likes of Dalambert, MacIlvaine and Bradley were at the same point. For that reason I see him at least having a long NBA career. As to how successful it will be, the potential is pretty high. He’s already a solid rebounder and is potentially a dominant defender. That combination in itself will get any center plenty of PT. Should he add an effective offensive game to his arsenal, he’ll be a force. While I see it more likely that he’ll spend most of his career as a semi-regular with great per minute numbers, the fact that he has the potential to become a dominating center separates him from the rest of the draftees once the impact players are off the board. For this reason I can’t see how any team can let Whiteside slide too far out of the top 5. I understand that he’ll require more time and effort than someone like Wesley Johnson and there could be little in the way of payoff for that effort. But a dominating center is the single most valuable player any team can have and Whiteside has such potential. The opportunity to develop such a player doesn’t come along that often and is not something to be passed on for a mediocre perimeter talent.

Daniel Orton, Kentucky: Orton comes into the draft as something of a mystery. He came off Kentucky’s bench as a freshman, which is rare for a prospect, but not unprecedented. He doesn’t bring the numbers that fellow freshmen Whiteside and Cousins do, but was fairly impressive in his own right. As the above chart shows he’s in some pretty fast company with freshmen who blocked over 4 shots per 40 minutes. His other numbers aren’t as impressive, but were put up while playing on a talented roster, so they could be a little suppressed. He was also recovering from ACL surgery that caused him to miss most of his HS senior season and that has been known to suppress a player’s numbers for a year or so after recovery. Here are his splits:

Daniel Orton	2 pt pct	P40	R40	B40	A/TO	PF40
Nov-Dec	.500	10.4	9.1	3.7	0.9	7.0
January	.333	9.5	14.0	7.3	0.1	12.4
February	.635	8.3	10.3	2.7	0.0	5.3
March	.722	10.2	6.9	3.9	0.2	6.6

There is some good news here for Orton, mainly the fact that he hit 68% of his shots in the final 2 months of the season. I should note that this is for an average of 2 FG attempts per game, but it is impressive nonetheless. A common trait of the best centers ever is a high FG pct. from the start. For Orton putting up a .676 against the toughest part of the schedule is impressive. On the negative side it ignores his slow start and his much less impressive .539 overall number. Even if the .676 on a low number of attempts is a real indication of his ability to score inside, it merely places Orton on the same class as Jelani McCoy, considering his other numbers.

For that reason it is hard to rank Orton too high. We can say that right now he looks like nothing more than a NBA journeyman. But there are enough unknowns about him to add some intrigue to his prospect status. An athletic big man who has shown flashes is never a bad gamble as the draft gets past the lottery stage. Orton’s potential isn’t anywhere near as impressive as Whiteside’s. To me he looks like a player who could spend a long time in the league, but will be nothing more than a low minute, backup center for his entire career.