Does He Contribute To Winning?
A survey of trusted basketball minds bears out whether there is such a thing as a "winning player" as opposed to a winning environment
“Empty calories”
”Empty stats”
”Does he impact winning?”
We all hear these terms thrown around a lot in the draft space, but what do they really mean? Do they go just to describe a certain type of player, or is there merit and accuracy in claiming that a player can produce raw numbers but not actively help his team win games while doing so?
It’s an idea that has been on my mind since I was a young coach, really my first year in coaching. I was an assistant on a very mediocre club that barely went over .500. On that team, we had a 5’11” point guard who led the state in assists — he was incredibly shifty, could score it for himself, and was supremely smart in ball screens. At 5’11” and without a polished jumper, it isn’t like he was without flaws. But he didn’t end up with a Division I or even a Division II offer, even after several schools evaluated him.
I wasn’t too involved in his recruitment process at the time, but I remember standing next to our head coach and listening to him speak with a Division I head coach at the time. “He’s a good player,” the D1 coach remarked, “but he puts up a lot of empty numbers and doesn’t help his team win.”
There was a part of me that was fuming. How can a 5’11” pass-first point guard lead the state in assists on a team without another high-caliber college player and not be a winner? I was thinking through all the areas in which his game would pop if surrounded by more talent — the missed shots that could’ve turned into assists, the attention he got because he was our only option and how that would disappear at the next level. How much more was the kid supposed to do?
Again, it’s not that I don’t understand the questions asked of his game. The kid was not efficient from the field (he had to take a ton of shots as our best player), had high-volume numbers, and his turnover rate was pretty high (again, context is important here). Since I was close to the situation, I could see the flaws in the logic that was so quick to dismiss our player. Without that context, perhaps I would have done the same in that college coach’s shoes.
I was reminded of this conversation I was a fly on the wall for the other day, and wanted to explore it further. I had forgotten about it for years, and a horrifying thought entered my mind: what if I’m now that coach? What if, in my sometimes surface-level dive into a prospect, I’m similarly writing guys off as guys who don’t help move the needle at the next level when their current environment could be what’s preventing us from seeing their true potential?
Now that I have the ears of some really smart and influential basketball minds in the NBA and scouting spaces, this was finally my chance to capitalize and get an answer to the question I’ve been wondering for years. So I decided to ask them and see what answers I could find!
While I was a pretty shitty science student back in my day, I do remember the importance of having a ‘control’ when running a study. So what we did was ask the same question, via text/ email/ DM, to ten different basketball minds we know and trust — five media/ basketball personalities online and five scouts or actual NBA personnel. Below is the question we asked them:
What do you make of the phrase “does he impact winning” when talking about a player? Are there any specific traits or areas that immediately pop into your head?
Part of my decision to phrase the question this way was to leave it open-ended enough for the respondent to take it in one of two directions. They could provide us examples of what they would label a “winning” player — a trait so many prospects get labeled. They also had the freedom to look at the glass half-empty, describing some traits that many may frown upon and think are more “me” over “we”.
Some of the responses we got were intriguing…
One scout described it with the following:
“To me, it’s guys that play beyond empty stats. It’s not searching for your shot every time you touch the ball. It’s not conserving energy on the defensive end to keep yourself fresh on offense. Ultimately, it’s players that fit within the team construct, then can rise above when the time and score allows for it.”
Here’s what another had to say:
“I think less about defining strengths and singular outstanding traits and more about identifying whether any big flaws exist that can undermine the rest of what they do… In essence, a player who can consistently impact winning is the opposite of a player who can be exploited, at least without being able to mitigate for their exploitable weakness.”
Two different takes. One focuses more on exact traits they exude within a team construct, while the other focuses on individual weaknesses or inefficiencies that winning players simply don’t have.
A few respondents we heard from talked a lot about embracing a role, shifting the narrative from a skill-based response to a more character-driven one:
“I think there’s a part of this that is about finding the right role for the individual and their willingness to accept it. If a player is placed in a situation that asks too much of him, then the lack of winning is likely due to the team constraints. If that same team gets better pieces and the player is unwilling to change his style to mesh with those teammates, then the lack of success is due to his individual constraints. So individual evaluation of each team circumstance is crucial.”
A pretty thoughtful response that boils ‘winning traits’ down to identifying how much sacrifice goes into the player giving back to their team. It’s easy to identify once you see the prospect surrounded by more talent, but mighty difficult to weed that out while the player is on a poor team.
Another respondent discussed winning in terms of willingness to do what helps the team.
“So many guys are scalable and adaptive, functionally, in concept. But is this player actually willing to shape-shift his role relative to the personnel around him? Even with stars, it’s nice to know they don’t need to lead these heliocentric existences and can play off others or do some more of the dirty, nuanced, unglamorous work away from the ball.”
That same respondent seemed to hint that character is often what comes to mind when thinking about “winning” — while it goes hand-in-hand with willingness to accept different roles, they discussed it more broadly:
“Do they elevate the mood or vibe of a team in the locker room and on the court? Is their leadership genuine rather than for show? …We’ve seen time and again how abrasive, rigid and high-maintenance personality can submarine entire windows or eras.”
Herein lies the difficulty of scouting — especially for us amateur scouts from our living room couches. How can we accurately grasp and evaluate such an important character piece without access to the person? Even for teams, this is difficult. Prospects are coached up, by their agents and inner circles, to show best throughout the process. College coaches are often quick to downplay concerns with their own guys, as they stand to benefit from a player on their roster getting drafted earlier.
Without being prompted, several respondents brought up player examples to illustrate their point. Only three players were mentioned multiple times: Draymond Green, Mikal Bridges and Tyrese Haliburton. Of these, I find the Haliburton one most intriguing. His sophomore year, the Iowa State Cyclones went 12-20, and he’s yet to play on a team to finish above .500 during an NBA season. Yet his impact on winning seems to already be lauded, which could say a lot about his style of play and character, or about a certain archetype that most frequently gets mentioned with ‘winning’ players.
I also found it interesting that zero 20 PPG scorers were mentioned by respondents. Every piece mentioned was more of a glue guy or high-IQ role player, not an All-Star leading cog in an offense. That isn’t to say that all respondents think scoring isn’t important to winning. It’s just a critique on how to fill out the roster around those scorers. We still don’t have a ton of clarity for how these respondents might differentiate between ‘empty stats scoring’ and the value of scoring on a winning team.
That’s still the biggest area for us to grapple with. Countless players have been labeled as empty stats guys earlier in their careers, only for them to go on and play on successful teams as key cogs later. It’s hard to know if they are the exception to the rule, if the efficiency is something that can be developed, or this is simply a perception problem that the basketball community has with scorers: a belief that what they do is highly replaceable and, therefore, guys who do that and fewer of the little things are less likely to help a team win:
What did I take away from these answers (and the others that we didn’t include here)? A reasonable definition of a winning player is a high-character kid who can understand how and accept when they have to make sacrifices for the benefit of the team while impacting the game in ways other than scoring. The inverse then, a non-winning player, could be one whose individual production appears more important than the team success and who isn’t willing to adjust their style of play when surrounded by an increasing level of talent.
I then looked to a second group of respondents — five college basketball coaches and five more trusted writers, who shall remain anonymous — and asked them a similar question. The idea was in framing this one a little differently and seeing what the outcome showed. This one had to do with winning, but more on a team level than with individual accomplishment.
When evaluating a prospect to join your team, how much stock do you put into the success of the team(s) they have been part of? Does it matter to you that they have been a part of a really successful or really unsuccessful team? If so, how much?
The impetus for this question was driven by a conversation I had with a college coach recruiting one of the players on the team I coach. Our team went 1-20 in my first season at the helm — there are several reasons we could dive into, but quite plainly, we weren’t good enough. But one college head coach asked me a question about one of our players: how do we know he’s really a winner?
Look, I get it. The goal is to win, and experience does or should matter for something. However, there’s a notion that I’m not sure I fully buy into, which is the idea that just because someone hasn’t won already doesn’t mean they can’t. We’ve seen guys like Ben Simmons and Anthony Edwards miss the NCAA Tournament as best players on their college teams, then go on to be the top overall pick and play like All-Stars. For Simmons, perhaps there was a mental part of the equation — which is why it’s not an unfair question to ask. It’s just hard to find the nuance in the situation.
One respondent who came at the question from a draft perspective:
“It’s not something I value very highly especially in young players… If anything, I think the whole ‘get a winner’ bias leads to guys getting over-drafted.”
One respondent who is a current college coach came at it from a very different perspective:
“I think it matters a lot… I do believe winning is a skill and when you have a group of guys in your locker room who acieved success in high school, it translates to college… For example, out of our rotation last year, every single guy outside of one player won a championship in high school. Our one player that didn’t had the most difficult time figuring out how to fit in and contribute to winning.”
It’s an interesting perspective and, according to that college coach during our follow-up conversation, felt tangible in terms of its impact. He mentioned that their team trailed by 10 points or more multiple times and came back to win, something he attributes to the collective belief of his team and their refusal to accept the result of losing.
One current college head coach gave us a really interesting tidbit on evaluating the driving force for the success of the prior program.
“Some prospects who have played for really successful programs (and really great coaches with high demands) struggle to adjust to a new program. It can be really tough to comprehend how much that coach is dictating the winning ways.”
The responses gave us a lot to think about. Whether it’s in how empty calories are seen, on character and how that can be seen through on-court play, or how a winning mentality can potentially carry over from one stop to the next.
From an NBA Draft scout perspective, it’s all about nailing the intel and the eval. Just because a prospect comes from a successful program doesn’t mean they’ll inherently bring something valuable to the table — just as it isn’t automatic that an unsuccessful program is incapable of producing a winner at the next level. Perhaps the biggest takeaway here is the necessity of having background research done on the person and understanding the paths they’ve walked to get to where they are. Every person is, in some form, a confluence of all the people who have rubbed off on them. Getting to know who those people could be and what their values are is an important part of the player evaluation process.
From your description it seems like "winning player" is just sort of a stereotype people apply to a certain type of player who is seen as "virtuous" and unselfish rather than anything analytically grounded. I mean, how can you say Devin Booker and Luka Doncic aren't winning players, because they score a lot of points? Volume scoring is a valuable role on a team and some people are good at doing it in a team-enhancing way.
Your gentle point that Tyrese Haliburton has literally never played on a winning team was hilarious. I like him too, he's such an attractive idea of a player, but maybe wait till he's proven he can actually be the best or second best player on a winning team?
Great article as always