Per Sactown Royalty…

Tyreke Evans will be named the NBA’s 2009-10 Rookie of the Year later this week, Sactown Royalty has learned.

The announcement is expected Thursday or Friday. The Kings nor the NBA have announced Evans’s victory, and the team has not yet alerted the media of a press conference later this week.

In my prediction post, I said the following:

I think this is a two-man race between Evans and Jennings. Evans’ numbers are better than Curry’s and his team is a little better, so if we’re going to go with a good player on a bad team, it should be Evans.

As for Jennings, his case depends how much importance we place on a team’s record and how responsible the player is for that record. It’s funny — a good record is crucial in winning the league MVP, but for ROY, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. Why is that?

In the end, I think Evans will win Rookie of the Year. Given the history of the award, if a player clearly has the superior numbers, winning just doesn’t matter. That’s the case here.

Evans averaged 20.1 points, 5.3 rebounds and 5.8 assists to become the first rookie since LeBron James to average 20-5-5 in his rookie season. (Oscar Robertson and Michael Jordan are the only other players to accomplish this feat.)

Both Evans and Curry posted eye-popping numbers, but did any rookie have a bigger impact on the 2009-10 NBA season than Brandon Jennings? Even though his FG% fell off a cliff, he still posted pretty good numbers, and guided the upstart Bucks to the #6 playoff spot in the East.

Based on the criteria that picked previous award winners, Evans is very deserving. But when we look back on this season’s rookie class, I think we’ll remember Jennings’ leadership, Evans’ 20-5-5, Curry’s stretch run and Blake Griffin’s knee injury, in that order.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

It’s that time of year again. Let’s try to figure out who will win this year’s Rookie of the Year…

Brandon Jennings jumped out in the ROY race with a 22-4-6 average in October and November, while shooting 43% from the field and 50% from three-point land. This included an epic 55-point outing against the Golden State Warriors in which Jennings hit 21 of 34 shots, including 7-for-8 from behind the arc. Since then, he is averaging 14-3-6 and is shooting just 35% from the field and 36% from 3PT. He has struggled with scoring from inside the arc, but he leads all rookies in assists and has a pretty nice assist-to-turnover ratio — 2.41, but he has posted a 2.72 ratio since the start of December. Maybe most importantly, the Bucks are 41-32 and are in the #5 spot in the East.

Tyreke Evans overtook Jennings with a 22-5-5 December and hasn’t looked back. On the season, he is averaging 20-5-6, and is shooting 46% from the field. He’s on the verge of joining LeBron James, Michael Jordan and Oscar Robertson as the only players to average 20-5-5 in their rookie seasons. However, the Kings have the 6th-worst record in the league and have been out of the playoff hunt for some time. This is both good and bad for Evans’ stats. On one hand, the Kings are so bad that he has to be the clear focal point of the offense — unlike Jennings, he doesn’t have to get the ball to Andrew Bogut or John Salmons — but the fact that the Kings are so bad means that defenses can focus on stopping him.

And then there’s Stephen Curry, whom NBA.com’s Drew Packham lists first in his rookie rankings. Since the start of December, he has averaged 18-5-6, while shooting 47% from the field and 44% from long range. And he keeps getting better. In February and March, he averaged 21-5-7. But at 21-52, the Warriors are even worse than the Kings. In fact, Golden State is tied for second third in fewest wins this season.

One thing that pure averages don’t account for is a team’s pace (i.e. the average # of possessions a team has during the course of a game). Is it fair to compare Jennings’ numbers to Curry’s when the Bucks are #18 in overall pace and the Warriors are #1? Using the league average of 95.15 possessions, here is a look at the pace-adjusted numbers for each player, along with John Hollinger’s PER:

All due respect to Mr. Packham, I think this is a two-man race between Evans and Jennings. Evans’ numbers are better than Curry’s and his team is a little better, so if we’re going to go with a good player on a bad team, it should be Evans.

As for Jennings, his case depends how much importance we place on a team’s record and how responsible the player is for that record. It’s funny — a good record is crucial in winning the league MVP, but for ROY, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. Why is that?

In the end, I think Evans will win Rookie of the Year. Given the history of the award, if a player clearly has the superior numbers, winning just doesn’t matter. That’s the case here.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

From his most recent mailbag…

I have caught chunks of five Jennings games so far, including a decent piece of his 55-point game, but haven’t seen him in person yet. First time I watched him on TV? Blown away. Sometimes you can just tell with these things. I thought Chris Paul played well beyond his years as a rookie; Jennings is a lefty Chris Paul, only if Paul could shoot 20-footers and 3s with a hand in his face. More importantly, his teammates love him. And he has a wonderful sense of The Moment already. I can’t say enough about him. He’s a superstar in training. He’s the first Buck in 25 years who could actually sell tickets and jerseys there. Amazing. He will save basketball in Milwaukee, as long as this early start doesn’t go to his head. And it might.

Regardless, he’s the least likely franchise rookie I can remember. I always make fun of bumbling GMs in this space, so let’s pay tribute for once to someone who absolutely crushed a decision: Bucks GM John Hammond. It’s one of the best draft picks ever. A franchise-alterer. I don’t get floored by much with sports anymore, but this Brandon Jennings thing floored me. Never saw it coming. It more than made up for Rubio fleeing back to Spain for three more years.

While I agree that Hammond crushed this decision (and that Jennings could save basketball in Milwaukee), I don’t think that he’s a lefty Chris Paul. Paul averaged 7.8 assists and 12.1 shots in his rookie season while Jennings is averaging 5.7 assists and 18.7 shots per game. Jennings is more of a lefty Iverson (7.5 assists and 19.8 shots per game). He’s a shoot-first point guard who has the ability to set up others if he wants. Iverson didn’t have much to work with in Philly, and the Bucks’ roster is pretty sparse outside of Andrew Bogut (a good center with a few star qualities), Ersan Ilyasova (a good sixth man with upside), Charlie Bell, Luke Ridnour and Luc Mbah a Moute (rotation players). So it’s no surprise that Jennings is going to shoot a lot. He has to.

After a blistering hot start, he has come down to earth in the last few games. He is 25 of 84 (30%) in his last five games, and the Bucks went 1-4 over that span. The good news is that he is 10 of 19 (53%) from 3PT over that same span. Teams are going to game plan for him now and it’s his job to adjust.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

While the last few years haven’t been very kind, Milwaukee is a proud franchise with a long tradition of winning. Led by Lew Alcindor, they won a championship in 1971, and in the ’80s, the team advanced at least as far as the Conference Semifinals in nine of 10 seasons. The team has a nice 1-2 punch now with Jennings and Andrew Bogut, and if Michael Redd can get healthy, this team is a good bet to make the playoffs in the East.

Not since the 2001 Playoffs have I been this excited about the Milwaukee Bucks. That was the year George Karl led the so-called “Big Three” — Ray Allen, Glenn Robinson and Sam Cassell — to the Eastern Conference Finals, where they faced Allen Iverson and the Philadelphia 76ers. They were just a missed Robinson jumper away from making the NBA Finals.

For a small market team to develop into a serious contender, they have to get lucky. Big name free agents generally don’t want to play in Milwaukee or any other small market, so they have to acquire their superstar through the draft. The Spurs landed Tim Duncan. The Magic landed Dwight Howard. The Cavs landed LeBron James.

That Bucks team won the first pick in the 1994 lottery (Robinson), swung a draft day trade in 1996 (Allen) and traded for an underrated point guard (Cassell) during the 1998-99 season. Robinson wasn’t a franchise player like Duncan, Howard or LeBron, but with Allen and Cassell (along with an up-and-coming reserve named Michael Redd), the Bucks were able to make a run in a watered down Eastern Conference.

This summer, the Bucks got lucky again. While it would have been nice to win the lottery and the right to draft Blake Griffin, the next best thing happened — they struck gold with the #10 pick. As the draft grew closer, it appeared that the Bucks had zeroed in on Jennings, but as Chris Sheridan writes, they didn’t think he’d be there.

“The thing that stood out for me with him was just his quickness — and his quickness in playing in a slower-tempo game,” McKinney said. “And when you watch the Euro game, they play a slower tempo there, and you would think that would be an advantage for the bigger players defending him, yet he was able to handle the pressure and pretty much do what he wanted to do.

“The only question I had at that time was it looked like he had some technical flaws in his shot, minor flaws, and he didn’t play a ton of minutes. So I came away from that game with a lot of questions, which is what you do in the scouting process — instead of making a final evaluation you come away with questions — and that’s how you evaluate him in workouts, and those questions were answered.”

They were answered in a workout the Bucks held in mid-June for point guards Ty Lawson, Jonny Flynn, Jeff Teague and Jennings.

“From that workout, in addition to what we saw on the DVDs, he really opened our eyes as to how good he was and how much we weren’t able to see in some of the games we saw overseas,” McKinney said.

It was also in that workout, general manager John Hammond said, that the Bucks saw a player whose ability to get to the basket and finish was similar to that of Tony Parker.

“We thought he’d go at No. 5, 6 or 7,” Hammond said.

Before heading to Italy, Jennings’s resume was already impressive. He was the 2008 Naismith Prep Player of the Year, which is a pretty good indicator of success in the NBA. The previous 12 winners were Kevin Love, Greg Oden, Louis Williams, Dwight Howard, LeBron James, Ray Felton, DaJuan Wagner, Gerald Wallace, Donnell Harvey, Al Harrington, Shane Battier and Kobe Bryant. There are three superstars on that list (Kobe, LeBron, Howard) and other than Harvey and Wagner, they’re all significant contributors in the NBA.

I remember watching Jennings’s draft stock over at NBADraft.net as the 2008-09 college season wore on. He started the year in the top 3-5 of the site’s mock drafts, and as reports out of Italy had him struggling to fit in, he slowly dropped into the back half of the top 10. During the pre-draft workout phase, he was in the 10-15 range. It didn’t help that the 2009 Draft was heavy on point guards, including Ricky Rubio, Tyreke Evans, Stephen Curry, Jonny Flynn, Jeff Teague and Ty Lawson.

Scouts questioned his jumper and his attitude. Thus far, he is getting rave reviews on both counts. He is averaging 24.8 points per game, and is shooting 48% from the field and 56% from long range. Is he going to be a 50%+ 3PT shooter? No, but he’s looking like he might settle somewhere in the low- to mid- 40′s, and for a guy with his quickness, that would make him very difficult to defend. He’s also getting along very well with Bucks head coach Scott Skiles, who has a reputation for being a hard ass.

He’s drawing comparisons to other lefties Kenny Anderson, Nick Van Exel and Tiny Archibald. To me, his game is most reminiscent of Allen Iverson’s, though right now, Jennings looks like he’s going to be a better distance shooter — Iverson has hit just 31% from 3PT in his career — and he doesn’t seem to dominate the ball as much as AI does.

Not only is Jennings a scorer, but he’s a capable playmaker (5.8 apg) and rebounder (4.7 rpg). His assists will likely grow as the Bucks start to get a few more pieces around him. Right now, along with center Andrew Bogut, the team is starting Carlos Delfino, Hakim Warrick and Luc Mbah a Moute. Those aren’t exactly marquee names, and the Bucks are still 6-3. Granted, six of the team’s nine games have been at home, but that’s a good start nonetheless.

Of course, it is early. He’s only played nine games, and it’s going to be tough for him to keep up this pace. But all signs point to the Bucks striking gold at #10. Hell, the Clippers can keep Blake Griffin. We’ll take “Young Money.”

Photo from fOTOGLIF

Here is his 29-point third quarter in its entirety. It’s worth watching.