HoopsHype.com NBA Blogs - Mark Heisler

If you want to know who leads this season’s Rookie of the Year race, and who’s likely to stay ahead, the short answer is Sacramento’s Tyreke Evans.

If you want to know the significance, that’s another matter entirely and may not reveal itself for years.

Of course, Blake Griffin, who’s probably still the best bet to head this class up, hasn’t even taken off his warmups.

And, of the players we’ve seen, who’s to say the most impressive this season will have the most impact in the years to come?

Who’s to say one of them won’t be Hasheem Thabeet, the No. 2  pick by Memphis and now a semi-embarrassment to the Grizzlies, who took him ahead of Evans, Jonny Flynn, Stephen Curry and Brandon Jennings?

Take a look at the last 10 All-Rookie teams. Among the players who weren’t first team are:

Danny Granger, beaten out by Charlie Villanueva.

Carlos Boozer, beaten out by Drew Gooden.

Andrew Bynum, who didn’t get a single vote while Nenad Krstic made the second team.

Joakim Noah, beaten out for second team by Jamario Moon.

Chris Kaman, beaten out for second team by Udonis Haslem.

Mike Conley, beaten out for second team by teammate Juan Carlos Navarro.

Leandro Barbosa, beaten out for second team by TJ Ford.

So it’s going to take longer than their rookie year to see who’s whom.

Significant or not, the rookie race has become a feature attraction on the big web sites that cover the NBA – which are almost the one media outlets covering the league.

In an age where great NBA writers like Sam Smith are allowed to take buyouts and wind up taking their columns to Bulls.com, we’re down to six NBA writers working for newspapers: Peter Vecsey of the New York Post, Mike Monroe of the San Antonio Express-News, Mitch Lawrence of the New York Daily News, Michael Lee of the Washington Post, Gary Washburn of the Boston Globe, and me at the Los Angeles Times.

With unlimited space, big sites like ESPN.com and Yahoo! have a different mission: capturing “eyeballs”– market share – in an era in which there’s still something called a “first-mover advantage,” even if ESPN moved first years ago, surging to the fore.

As opposed to the specialized sites like HoopsHype, RealGM, DraftExpress or 82games, the big sites are like a combination of reportage, however feverish, as on “SportsCenter,” and discussion, however contrived, on “ESPN2.”

To fill up the unlimited space, stay topical enough to lure readers, there’s ceasless chatter about things that won’t be decided for years.

Who’s better, Kobe or LeBron?

Hey, we still don’t know how Kobe Bryant measure up to Michael Jordan, and won’t until Kobe’s done and we count up the titles.

Welcome to the Internet, the unending barrom argument.

Rookies have a prime position as a peculiar and interesting class and get a major promotional boost from the league, which runs rookie stats.

Of course, it’s not unusual for rookies to look like duds, like Memphis’ Hasheem Thabeet, now averaging 2.8 points and 3.2 rebounds, and to go on from there.

Reading ESPN’s David Thorpe for the first 10 weeks of Thabeet’s career it’s amazing he still has a career:

Nov. 26 – “It’s hard to find something the Grizzlies can be happy about here. Thabeet has done so little for them on the court. But I watched him closely the other night and found something I’m sure they like: his attitude. And that’s no small thing. Getting Thabeet’s motor to run hot is an enormous challenge.”

Well, that’s something, at least, he has a motor!

Dec. 9 – “Thabeet can improve in every area because he seems coachable. However, he is missing one ingredient that has me concerned about his upside: a motor that runs hot. Few players who lack what I call a ‘heartbeat’ develop that drive to dominate later in their careers.”

Oh, no, his heart stopped! That can’t be good, but, wait!

Dec. 16 – “After looking D-League-bound to start the season, Thabeet has played his way into the surging Grizzlies’ rotation. In other words, he’s ahead of schedule. He’s fourth in blocks per 48 minutes among all NBA players, and his defensive- rebound rate ranks second to DeJuan Blair among all rookies.”

His heart has started beating again?

With apologies to Thorpe for cherry-picking his stuff, the problem isn’t his analysis – it’s the gig which calls on him to make an informed judgment weekly.

If Thorpe did it the way NBA people do, or at least smart NBA people, he’d qualify everything with “It’s really early,” defer judgments – and it would read like crap.

As for the professionals themselves, there’s always a certain percentage of GMs and scouts trying to cover their rear ends, whose mantra is “We want someone who’s ready to contribute now.”

Of course, the test for the 2009 draft isn’t the 2010 Rookie of the Year Award, but next decades’s All-Star teams.

If you take a close look, as Thorpe has noted in recent reports, you’ll see him 18 in the league in rebounds per 48 minute, ahead of players like Al Horford, Gerald Wallace and Marc Gasol.

You’ll also see him No. 1 in blocks per 48 minutes at 5.5, ahead of everybody.

(Not that per-minute production is all the “Moneyball” stat guys think it is. If he only averages 12 minutes, that’s the most important stat. Trust me on this, mathematicians, if he was better, he’d play more.)

What the numbers do show is that Thabeet is keeping up with the play going on around him. He’s not way behind as he was in his first two seasons at UConn, and last summer in Las Vegas.

If you haven’t heard, he’s 7-3 and athletic, too. Even if he’s never much on offense, taking 10 rebounds and blocking two shots a game would make him someone a fifth grader could design a defense around.

Not that Thabeet will be any factor in the rookie race. As it stands today, here’s how I see it:

Tyreke Evans – Looks like a bigger Dwyane Wade. His numbers this month, 22-5-5, are better than the 20-5-6 LeBron put up as a rookie.

In other words, meet your Rookie of the Year!

Jonny Flynn – He’s so good, the Kings actually thought about taking him over Evans and starting to show it with Kevin Love back and less and less triangle offense, which minimizes what he does.

Brandon Jennings – Of course, he isn’t as good as he was in that incredible 55-point game but he’s very good. Passing on him was an incredible screwup for the Knicks, who needed a point guard and weren’t that high on Jordan Hill, whom they took instead.

Stephen Curry – Slight as he was, he looked like he’d be very good, if not great, and still does.

Blake Griffin – That name sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

With his debut now pushed back to mid-January, it’s hard for people on the rookie beat to keep insisting he’s the best without any data to back them up, as in Thorpe’s Dec. 9 update:

“Based on what I saw from Griffin in college and summer league, I’m guessing he would be in the top four in terms of upside if he were healthy.”

Based on what I saw in college and preseason, if they did this draft over, Griffin would still go No. 1.

As for the rookie race, I’d expect him to average 12-17 points this season, get 8-10 rebounds, shoot 50 percent or so… and that won’t get it.

So, forget about the T Mobile Trophy, Blake. Happily in the NBA, life goes on with or without it.

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You shouldn’t let the world see who you really are, if you don’t know who you really are.

It’s not that NBA stars always yearned for a way to communicate directly with their fans without having to go through the media. Actually, for decades they yearned for the media to come around so they could tell the difference between their games and those of the local high schools.

In those days with annual salaries in four figures, most players had off-season jobs, and everyone was a lot more lucid. But enough of NBA pre-history.

These days, with eight-figure salaries, the media has turned into a monster for NBA stars–and what player isn’t a star in his own mind?—or at least a monumental pain in the ass, since it still has the capacity to submit the players’ illusions to real-world testing.

Hence, the desire to avoid the media filter, now realized in the exploding potential for social networking, as just demonstrated anew by Stephon Marbury, that pioneer in expanding the boundaries of Narcissism.

Steph just put a 24-hour-long video about… what else, Steph… on Ustream, starting at 9.a.m when he awoke. That would have been a bit much even for any blood relatives who aren’t actually on his payroll.

According to NBA Musings, a blog for Celtic fans (I stood as much as I could, a shot of Steph primping in the mirror in his bathroom), he “stretched for at least an hour with R&B music blaring in the background” and then tweeted, “I’m about to shi! Shave and bath so we can get started with the day.”

It doesn’t get any better, especially if you’ve followed Steph’s car wreck of a career and have heard and seen all the dumb things he has said and done.

I guess the big deal is, you look on your hand-held and there’s an alert, informing you Stephon Marbury is personally inviting you, JoeFan@twitter, to sit in on his live telethon, in which you and he can chat in real time!

Personally, I would advise holding out until someone who has actually scored a point or two in the NBA lately holds his telethon, unless you’re really, really bored. I know, I have days like that all the time, but I’d prefer suicide to 24 Hours of Steph.

For those interested in Steph’s career, as opposed to his obsession with himself, he has played 47 games in two seasons, not because he was hurt but because he was suspended.

Two seasons ago, then-Knick Coach Isiah Thomas suspended him for jumping the team after his teammates voted that he should be benched.

Marbury then sat out the first 59 games last season, rejecting a $17 million buyout of the $21 million left on his deal until the club bumped it to $19 million.

Signing with the Celtics, who had great hopes for him in a limited role, backing up Rajon Rondo, Steph then fell on his face, averaging 3.8 points and shooting 34 percent.

Offered a $1.3 million deal for this season, presumably on the basis that nobody could be as bad as he looked, Steph then turned it down, and is still seeking a better offer.

Not that a segment of the mainstream press can’t be interested in anything any celebrity does, however clueless. The New York Post had its Knick beat writer spend all last season ghost-writing Steph’s account of events, giving readers a choice of alternate realities, everyone else’s or Marbury’s.

Actually, the problem with access to the public is the fact that it bypasses the media, which actually protects players when it can, and shows the player as he really is.

On draft day, Brandon Jennings, who’s new and just starting up his entourage, compounded his error in not showing up by telling all to a “friend”—rapper Joe Budden—who posted the conversation on Youtube.

It was quickly taken down, but too late. I just googled “Budden” and “Jennings” and got 72,800 results.

“This is what happened, right?” Jennings told Budden and, subsequently, the world.

“My agent is like ‘Well, we ain’t hear nothing. We ain’t have no guarantee.’ So we makin’ phone calls and (expletive) and (expletive) is saying like, ‘The workouts is great and everything and he’s the best point guard but we don’t know yet, we just don’t know….’

“I came out there and made my appearance (expletive) and I had the best appearance out of all them (expletives). And I was the best dressed, they said, by the way. I was the best dressed.”

Jennings also trashed the Knicks who “skipped out on me,” for taking Jordan Hill at No. 9, leaving Milwaukee to take him at No. 10, sending him to the tundra instead of Gotham.

Not that I’d attach too much importance to this, since Jennings isn’t much dizzier than anyone else his age in the draft. But that’s still pretty dizzy.

Then, there was Charlie Villanueva, who should own a piece of  Twitter by now for publicizing the web site by tweeting at halftime of a game last spring. (To show how fast things move, four months ago you had to explain what tweeting was. Now anyone who doesn’t know doesn’t care.)

If you didn’t know much about Villanueva before, he was the player at the 2003 Nike camp who complained that LeBron James was getting all the publicity. After two merely OK years at UConn, Toronto took him with an ill-advised No. 7 pick, and traded him a year later to Milwaukee. Three years later, the Bucks let him leave without an offer, even after he averaged 17 points after the All-Star break last season.

Charlie has been tweeting all summer about the glorious future awating the Pistons, who just gave him a five-year $35 million deal.

We’ll see how that turns out. Personally, if I was a GM these days, I’d have a Twitter Exclusion. Anyone who tweets during games is excluded.

In the real world, the day Steph awoke at 9 a.m. to begin his Ustream show, Kobe Bryant probably awoke at the same time, even if it was 6 a.m. in California, and lifted weights.

One was telegenic. One actually meant something.

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