lipoli390 wrote:Nothing in Payne's numbers from 4 years of college or his D-League stint suggest he was worth giving up a future 1st. And that's before you factor in Payne's lung condition and age.
I agree with the D-league part but not about his college stats. He played quite low amount of minutes even in his senior year (28.1) and that really affected his stats.
If we check his per 40-minutes stats, they look really impressive:
12-13: 16.4 pts, 11.8 rbs, 2.0 blks and .63 TS%
13-14: 23.4 pts, 10.3 rbs, 1.9 asts, 1.3 blks, .607 TS% .423 3P% with 4.8 attempts per 40 minutes
I would say that his senior year scoring numbers are near elite level. Those numbers are better than some of the best scoring last year lottery picks had. For example Jabari Parker had 25.0 pts per 40 minutes with .558 TS% and Julius Randle had 19.4 pts per 40 minutes with .567 TS%.
We can also compare those numbers to college numbers of some current NBA top scoring bigs and Payne's senior year numbers look even more impressive. Nikola Vucevic had 19.4 pts per 40 minutes with .578 TS% in his junior year, Al Horford had 19.0 pts per 40 minutes with .624 TS% in his junior year, Greg Monroe had 18.9 pts per 40 minutes with .589 TS% in his sophmore year and LaMarcus Aldridge had 17.8 pts per 40 minutes with .589 TS% in his sophmore year
Other elite skill that Payne had in college was his 3-point shooting. I think that last big that had as good 3-point shooting year than Payne's senior year was Ryan Anderson. (in terms of accuracy and volume) Ryan Anderson shot in his sophmore year 3-pointers .41 accuracy and 5.8 3-point attempts per 40 minutes.
I somehow understand your concern related to Payne's rebounding and block numbers but they were still not that bad if we compare them to for example Jahlil Okafor's numbers. Payne had career DRB% 21.3 and BLK% 5.8 while Okafor has currently DRB% 19.0 and BLK% 4.6.
Payne's DRB% in last two years (23.9 and 22.9) is also quite comparable to numbers for some other bigs that stayed longer in college as well. Dieng's had DRB% 22.1 in his last year, Mason Plumlee had 24.5 and 23.3 in his last two years and Vucevic had 23.2 and 25.6 in his last two years. All those players have been successful in rebounding also in NBA.
I understand that since Payne is older than most of other rookie bigs, his ceiling is most probably lower. But one thing that gives me hope that he can still improve is that in college, he improved every year. He got only minimal minutes in his 1st year and was quite horrible in scoring (TS% .480 with low usage and FT% .486).
In his second season, he improved significantly his shooting (TS% .602 with little higher usage and FT% .697).
Third year he further improved his scoring efficiency and FT% (.63 TS% and FT% .848) added 3-point shot (3PT% .381 with quite low amount of attempts) and improved rebounding (from 9.5 per 40 minutes to 11.8 while his minutes increased.
In his last year he nearly tripled the amount of 3PT attempts while improving his 3PT%, he also maintained high scoring efficiency while his usage increased from 20.7 to 28.9. He also improved his passing so that he had 1.9 assists per 40 minutes compared to 0.7 that he had in his first two years. Of course higher offensive load affected some part of his game like shot blocking and offensive rebounding that were career low level in his senior year.
