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CHARLOTTE — There are times when Utah Jazz coach Will Hardy can't help but feel frustrated.
It's times when his 21-year-old rookie Walker Kessler looks like a 21-year-old rookie. He stands in the wrong spot or makes a silly foul, or misreads a set, or any number of mistakes that first-year NBA players commonly make.
Then Hardy starts his review of the game.
"I come back to the locker room and end up looking at the stat sheet and watching the film and going like, 'Oh my (expletive), I'm a crazy person. He's unreal. Why am I complaining all the time?'" Hardy said.
Here's a little secret: NBA rookies aren't actually expected to help teams win. Take, for example, Orlando's Paolo Banchero, the heavy favorite to win the rookie of the year award. Banchero has averaged 20.0 points and 6.6 rebounds for an improving Magic squad, and he'll be a worthy winner of the award.
But, according to FiveThirtyEight's RAPTOR rating, Banchero's affect on winning is minimal — and that's being kind. The stat gurus have the Magic wing as a -0.7 in wins above replacement. That means, according to their data, that Orlando could have substituted Banchero with a replacement-level player and have actually been better as a team.
Now, that's not a knock on Banchero by any means. It doesn't take a basketball genius to see that he will be very good in the league; it just shows the steep learning curve that NBA rookies have to deal with — especially if they are thrust into a starring role immediately. What's made Kessler so "unreal" is he's actually helped the the Jazz win.
Those same ratings have Kessler ranked as the 60th best player in the NBA this season, and someone who's added 3.7 wins to the Jazz — not your typical rookie. His offensive rebounding rate has been among the best in the league (he had eight offensive rebounds during Utah's win over Charlotte on Saturday); the only players who have better rim protecting numbers are Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jaren Jackson Jr. and Draymond Green.
Hardy said to not mention that last fact to Kessler. And the jovial center may have revealed why when answering a question about the rookie of the year race.
"Whenever I got sidetracked with like the rankings and stuff, I always played worse," he said, remembering his days in high school. "So for me, it's always just about trying to impact the game as much as I can, trying to win the game at the end of the day, and the rest of it kind of takes care of itself."
It certainly has thus far. And the exciting part for the Jazz is they feel he's nowhere close to a finished product.
"Our goal is for Walker to be somebody you can build a defense around," Hardy said. "His stats have been good to date, but I don't think he's there yet."
It's been a steady progression for the Auburn product since being traded to the Jazz last summer. Utah first wanted him to develop a "fastball," so to speak, and get ultra comfortable in drop big coverage. He's fifth in the league in blocks per game; that has gone well.
Now, it's about expanding the game. The Jazz are slowly starting to use more switching defenses with Kessler on the court to push him to be a more versatile defensive anchor.
"Now we need to try to expand that some and put him on some different matchups and do some different coverages with him to try to help him grow," Hardy said.
It's been the same steady progress on the other end, too. Kessler struggled to set a screen in the first couple months of the season, and would do a little hop skip into the screen, and for some reason, lift one of his arms. Those tendencies led to plenty of offensive fouls and were bad enough that high school coaches would have been left scratching their heads.
Months later, he's now catching pocket passes and being asked to make decisions with the ball on the roll — quite the jump.
Hardy has even drawn up two plays for Kessler to fire away from deep. He made the first and, as Hardy put it, he "bricked" the second. In today's NBA, 3-point shooting is en vogue, no matter what position. But, for Hardy, it's not the be-all and end-all.
"I really feel like the 3-point line has ruined more players, and it's made you just like strip them of everything else and just say bomb away. And I don't want that for Walker," Hardy said.
That doesn't mean he doesn't want that to be a part of his game as he continues to expand; it's just a step-by-step process. Yes, he can envision Kessler in the corner regularly shooting catch-and-shoot 3-pointers, and he can see him being a pick-and-pop threat big down the road, but there's more important things for him to get better at right now.
"I don't want us to get caught up in like the final product with Walker right now because it can get distracting," Hardy said. "If you're trying to add four things to a guy's game in the middle of his rookie season, it can get lost in the shuffle of what am I actually supposed to be focusing on. And so we're really just trying to keep Walker's focus on those few main things."
It's worked out this far.
