🏀 Wemby, CP3 and a modern theory of NBA talent distribution
My Week in Sport(s): aging in basketball, risk in tennis and Barça (again)
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
🏀 Youth and experience on this year’s Spurs
🎾 Improving service in men’s tennis, at little cost
⚽️ Cubarsí and Yamal, combining beautifully
🏀 Wemby, CP3 and a modern theory of NBA talent distribution
The relationship between age and on-field production has been a regular topic at Plot the Ball this year.
Back in January, we talked about one of the ageless wonders of the NBA: LeBron James, who has sustained elite production much longer than anyone could have reasonably expected when he entered the league in 2003.
But he’s not the only veteran who’s still getting regular minutes at the top level of men’s basketball.
Over the summer, the San Antonio Spurs1 brought legendary point guard Chris Paul on board — at age 39 — to aid the development of their young star, Victor Wembanyama.
And the beginning of their on-court relationship is an interesting point at which to consider one modern theory of how talent is distributed across the NBA.
Do peak-age players in the league now represent a ‘squeezed middle’?
On one side, players like Wemby are already so skilled when they enter the league; on the other, older players seem to be hanging around — and contributing significantly — so much longer than they did in the past.
At least, that’s how the theory goes.
Ben Taylor of the excellent Thinking Basketball podcast feels particularly strongly about the latter point, which applies to veterans like CP3. As he said in a season-preview episode earlier in the month:
And it’s hard not to look at Wembanyama’s immediate excellence — particularly on the defensive end — and wonder about the former.
We can try and address this hypothesis from two different angles.
First of all: has the share of NBA minutes allocated to particularly young and particularly old players increased over time?
The answer to that question is a clear yes.
In 2005-06 — Paul’s first season in the league — NBA players between the ages of 21 and 33 played just over 90% of regular-season minutes, with the remaining 10% split roughly equally between the cohorts on either side. Players 20 or younger played 4.7%, and players 34 or older played 4.9%.
By last season, however, the share of minutes played by 21- to 33-year-olds had fallen by almost 4 percentage points to below 87%.
The age group on each side gained some of those minutes, but older players took on slightly more playing time than younger ones.
Players 34 or older played 7.2% of all minutes in 2023-24 — a gain of 2.3 percentage points from 2005-06. Players 20 or younger, meanwhile, played 6.1% of all minutes in 2023-24 — a gain of 1.4 percentage points.
A second, related, question: are the players at those age extremes more likely to contribute at a high level than they were in the past?
We can use Basketball Reference’s ‘Box Plus/Minus’ (BPM) metric to get an overall sense of whether or not this is true.
Let’s look at regulars only here, and impose a cut-off of 25 minutes played per game and 1,000 total minutes per season. This gives us 130 player-seasons since 2005-06 at age-19 and -20, and 159 at age-34 and above.
We can immediately dispense with the idea that there are considerably more youngsters contributing at a high level than in the recent past: BPM tells us that elite seasons from 19- and 20-year-olds are still exceedingly rare.
Basketball Reference’s rule of thumb for a season deserving of ‘all-star consideration’ is a BPM of +4 points above average per 100 possessions — and there have only been seven such seasons by players in this age bracket since Paul entered the league in 2005-06.
The point guard did it himself in his rookie season — and, funnily enough, Wembanyama did it last year for the Spurs2.
If anything — as the chart below shows — there are many more young players getting regular playing time despite their production, rather than because of it.
A BPM rating of -2 points per 100 possessions is Basketball Reference’s cut-off for an ‘end-of-bench player’.
In the 10 seasons between 2005-06 and 2014-15, there were 11 such seasons recorded by 19- and 20-year-olds who played at least 25 minutes a night for their teams; in the nine seasons since 2015-16, there have been a further 40.
At the other end of the league’s age range, though, we have clearly seen more star-level contributions over time.
Of the 28 seasons at a BPM of +4 points recorded by players 34 or older over this period, 16 have come in the six years since 2018-19; there were only 12 in total across the 13 preceding seasons.
A spoiler, though: this newsletter might actually be about LeBron after all.
Six of those 16 seasons are his age-34 to age-39 campaigns. Another four can be accounted for by Steph Curry and Kevin Durant over the last two years.
It’s not clear to me, then, whether this is a broad-based trend that will be sustained when this particular cohort of exceptional players ages out of the league.
Sadly for the Spurs, it might already be too late for Chris Paul.
The point guard played at an impressive level in his 34-, 35- and 36-year-old seasons, recording BPMs comfortably above the +4 threshold. But he’s declined notably in two consecutive years, falling to a mark of +3.2 at 37 and +1.0 at 38.
He’s not expected to fall off precipitously; per
‘ aggregation of player rankings for his newsletter, The F5, he’s still a consensus top-100 player in the league.And his role as a starter for San Antonio will likely suit him better than his peripheral status on the Golden State Warriors last season3.
He’s still so proficient at executing the core responsibilities of his position4 that his presence next to Wembanyama should really aid the Frenchman’s development in his sophomore season.
Paul’s own career trajectory is evidence that we shouldn’t necessarily expect a leap in year two, though; his age-21 season with the New Orleans Hornets was one of consolidation.
He burst onto the scene with a BPM around the +5-point mark at 20 years old — almost identical to Wembanyama’s performance level as a rookie — but it wasn’t until 2007-08 that he truly leapt forward to become one of the best players in the league.
Still, we shouldn’t underestimate how unusual it is to get rookie seasons that good from players that young.
And that’s why expectations are high in San Antonio this October5.
The Hornets ultimately didn’t make the most of CP3’s early prime — but the Spurs will be hoping that, by bringing him in at the tail end of his NBA career, they can better leverage Wemby’s.
🎾 Run the Numbers
After highlighting how batters in women’s T20 cricket have been able to increase their scoring rates without losing any more wickets a few weeks ago, I read one of Jeff Sackmann’s recent posts at Heavy Topspin — the blog attached to his website, Tennis Abstract — with some interest.
In response to a comment about higher-value, higher-variance strategies across sports, he made the point that — in recent years, at least — it’s not clear that tennis players are taking more risks on their own serve:
Sackmann goes on to show out that a similar trend holds for second serves:
As he notes, though, it’s only really possible to make these claims about the men’s game; the availability of WTA data is much poorer than on the ATP circuit6.
Tennis Abstract is doing its bit. Its Match Charting Project — a crowdsourced database which we previously used to analyse some of Carlos Alcaraz’s tendencies — currently contains data for 6,563 women’s matches, as well as 7,897 men’s matches.
Even as the collection of on-field data improves in the present, though, analysis of women’s sports is going to continue to lag behind men’s because of gaps in the historical record like this.
⚽️ Watch the Games
Since I wrote about their workload two weeks ago, 17-year-old Barcelona starlets Pau Cubarsí and Lamine Yamal have played another 437 minutes between them7 for club and country.
And things are unlikely to ease up this weekend: later today, they face Real Madrid at the Bernabéu in their biggest game of the year.
The two have combined a bit in dangerous areas of the field so far this season. Cubarsí has recorded 19 shot-creating actions in La Liga and Champions League play; three of those actions have resulted in shots for Yamal8.
Last weekend, though, it was closer to their own goal that they produced a moment of magic.
As Sevilla looked to enter the Barcelona penalty area towards the end of the first half, Cubarsí was able to sweep up a slightly overhit pass from his position at right centre back.
Not content with extinguishing the opposition’s opportunity, he chips the ball into the space between their attacker and the goal line and hares after the ball to prevent it going out for a corner.
Cubarsí regains control with a neat second touch, and reorients his body so that he’s facing upfield. The defender uses his third to curl a lofted pass towards Yamal, who has turned towards his own goal to provide an outlet for his team.
Taking the ball on the first bounce, the right winger knocks it just past his marker with a raised left foot. Raphinha — as he tends to do — has made an off-ball run into the space beyond Yamal.
The Brazilian collects the ball at a full sprint — and, just like that, Barcelona’s two teenagers have engineered a breakout.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday November 2nd.
It would be remiss of me not to mention here the excellent coverage of the Spurs you can read elsewhere on Substack — both at ’s and ’s .
The others: Andrew Bynum in 2007-08, Kyrie Irving in 2011-12, Anthony Davis in 2013-14, Luka Dončić in 2019-20 and Zion Williamson in 2020-21; Dončić’s exceptional mark of +8.4 is partially hidden by another data point in the second chart.
He averaged 26.4 minutes a night last year — the lowest of his career by five whole minutes per game; he played almost 29 minutes in the first game of 2024-25 on Thursday night.
After winning just 22 games in 2023-24, Bet365 set their over-under line for 2024-25 at 36.5 wins.
One vs. Getafe, One vs. Osasuna and one — resulting in a goal — vs. Monaco.
Appreciate the shoutout! Great stuff on Wemby, CP3, and the Spurs!