Looking for research that has been done into answering the question whether a player's age or minutes played (i..e experience in the league) is more predictive of future development.
Specific use case: Harrison "He's still just 23 year old" Barnes.
I have an ongoing discussion with someone who is arguing that at that age he still has a lot of upside, even though he has already been in the league 4 seasons. My thought is if he hasn't shown much improvement by now, I don't really care how old he is. Is there any evidence to make a case one way or the other?
Age vs. Minutes?
Re: Age vs. Minutes?
I don't have an age vs. minutes comment (yet); but Barnes has shown some improvement on ws/48, bpm and rpm over broad span of time. Very low TO%. That may be a lot about team circumstance but perhaps he deserves some credit for it too. If that is partly about him and transferable, then some other team might value him more than GSW. If you crack .100 on ws/48 (and Barnes has the next 2 seasons), then they are worth considering for fit and thinking about for remaining potential.
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Kevin Pelton
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Re: Age vs. Minutes?
I don't think I've ever really written it up, but the research I've done in the past generally suggested that when you accounted for age, experience didn't matter for season-to-season development. The one notable exception seemed to be international players improving from year one to year two in the NBA.
Re: Age vs. Minutes?
Barnes has about 10,000 regular season and playoff minutes. That should be plenty to develop and show improvement. 3-5,000 is enough to start to guess.
Batum might be considered an appropriate comparison. Lots of people thought he still had untapped potential after 3-5 years and even now. He did add assist making to his role in recent years but he stayed at same average to good level.
It wouldn't be too hard to look at SFs who got to some threshold of "very good" (say over .150 on winshares per 48 and see what the average level was after 3-4 years or 5,000 minutes and what the frequency was of getting to that very good level or better.
Batum might be considered an appropriate comparison. Lots of people thought he still had untapped potential after 3-5 years and even now. He did add assist making to his role in recent years but he stayed at same average to good level.
It wouldn't be too hard to look at SFs who got to some threshold of "very good" (say over .150 on winshares per 48 and see what the average level was after 3-4 years or 5,000 minutes and what the frequency was of getting to that very good level or better.