Adding team context to player development projections

Paopao makes for perhaps the easiest case study in player development context ever. She came into Eugene as a clearly capable shooter and, while playing for a coach in Kelly Graves who has employed countless great shooters, ended her Ducks career an astounding 43-for-73 over her final nine games; though she has become more consistent from deep under Dawn Staley, she demonstrated elite production under Graves.

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Defense is a different story. Paopao had good weakside help instincts at Oregon, but would frequently stray too far off her assignment and was a liability at the point of attack. Despite excellent pick-and-roll playmaking, the defensive issues meant she profiled as a soft 45 on the future value scale. But her defense tangibly improved within her first few months at South Carolina. She is now a capable point-of-attack defender and a plus off-ball defensive guard, developments which shouldn’t come as big surprises since this is just what Staley tends to do with guards.

“I think I can play both ends of the court [now], especially on defense.” Paopao told The Next’s Hunter Cruse this week. “I don’t feel like I’m a liability anymore.”

“She came a long, long way,” teammate Raven Johnson told Cruse. “Now, Paopao’s just defending. It’s big, she can play both sides of the ball.”

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Those developments are not what tends to happen under Graves. Maite Cazorla and Jillian Alleyne are perhaps the only examples of players who made big, lasting gains during his time at Oregon, and those came on the offensive end of the court. What Graves has consistently produced in his time in Eugene is off-ball shooters and rim-runners. This is not only clear in the gains made by players like Lexi Petersen and Endyia Rogers in the backcourt or Nyara Sabally or Sedona Prince in the frontcourt, but also the ways in which Sabrina Ionescu and the Sabally sisters have improved in the WNBA and transfers like Paopao and Jaz Shelley (or really anyone in the right column from this article): off-ball skills for guards and basic ability in the paint improved while playing for Graves, but on-ball skills, live-ball processing and most aspects of defensive execution improved after.

Graves is not the only coach who has a lengthy track record of very particular strengths and weaknesses in player development. Staley’s South Carolina has produced the most consistently dramatic lasting improvements to her players’ games among major programs, but has never added a 3-pointer to a frontcourt player’s game and tends to not develop pro-level playmaking primacy in its lead guards. Geno Auriemma excels with frontcourt players but Paige Bueckers is the first 45 FV backcourt player UConn has produced since Moriah Jefferson.

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We as a basketball community already appreciate these facts; when Paopao transferred to South Carolina, there was plenty of excitement over her getting to learn defensively under Staley. And we here as a scouting team already appreciate what it means to see players under different coaching and schematic contexts; Hunter, Lincoln and I have podcasts from this past spring and fall about how important that would be for evaluating Janiah Barker (from Texas A&M to UCLA) and Laila Phelia (from Michigan to Texas). But we don’t take this directly into account when projecting future development, and I think we should.

To demonstrate what this would look like in practice, take our post-draft prospect rankings from last spring. We listed Madison Booker as a 60 FV, alongside Hannah Hidalgo and a grade ahead of fellow midrange shot-creators Flau’jae Johnson and Mikaylah Williams. Booker’s offensive role versatility, projectable 3-point shot and defensive tools meant we believed that she would not have trouble both rounding out her offensive efficiency in different roles and becoming a valuable wing defender. But these are all traits that Vic Schaefer teams have never developed in a backcourt player. By contrast, Kim Mulkey’s systems have historically been designed to control as much of the game as possible and reduce individual players’ responsibilities, which leaves many of her players with less experience in live-ball processing than comparable prospects, but Johnson and Williams’ biggest areas for improvement weren’t in processing but in possession-to-possession consistency, which Mulkey players tend to develop more easily.

By those principles, since all three of Booker, Johnson and Williams were players at fairly similar levels in 2023-24, I think our belief in Booker’s development over the LSU players’ was misplaced.

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The other notable adjustments we would have made if we had taken team development context directly into account would have been pumping Lauren Betts’ grade, because of Cori Close’s track record developing bigs’ processing, and backing out Cotie McMahon, since dramatic player developments under Kevin McGuff are mostly restricted to guards on offense.

The current freshman class presents several examples where weighing team development context would material affect how we project players. The top two prospects, Sarah Strong and Joyce Edwards, are both at programs which consistently excel at improving their frontcourt players in just about every way. Syla Swords and Olivia Olson both play for a coach in Kim Barnes Arico whose wings and bigs have shown great improvement up and down the roster for years. Toby Fournier is playing in a Duke system where multiple frontcourt players have made massive defensive gains but Kara Lawson has yet to develop any significant offensive gains among them. Lanie Grant would be the first true WNBA prospect under Courtney Banghart at North Carolina.

But we as a scouting team will not be implementing this into our work, since Hunter and Lincoln disagree with me. To them, we lack an effective control sample to be confident enough in evaluating programs’ player development abilities to this level of detail, and there are too many programs where a coach either hasn’t been there long enough or has had inconsistent development. But they don’t have weekly columns, so I get to enlist you, dear reader, in trying to bully them into acquiescing.

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The Next’s Hunter Cruse contributed reporting for this story from Greenville, S.C.

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