Portland Trail Blazers: Noah Vonleh Earning More Run

In the NBA these days, it doesn’t take long for a young player to be labeled a draft bust. The unfortunate reality is that with 60 players drafted into the league every year and only 15 roster spots on each team, there just isn’t enough room in the association for every new rookie to prosper.

For the second round picks that aren’t signed to guaranteed contracts or stay overseas, that’s not such a big deal; productive role players that come from the second round are typically thought to be major success stories, let alone needles in the haystack like Draymond Green or Manu Ginobili.

But for a first round pick, particularly a former top-10 pick like Noah Vonleh, going through a full rookie season without earning minutes is a quick way to get yourself labeled as a “draft bust.” Luckily for the Blazers, he’s starting to slightly shed that label.

After being selected by the Charlotte Hornets with the ninth pick in the 2013 NBA Draft, it didn’t take long for Vonleh to earn that dreaded label. As a rookie, he averaged a meager 3.3 points and 3.4 rebounds in 10.4 minutes per game. He shot 38.5 percent from three-point range, but he only converted 39.5 percent of his attempts from the field and appeared in a grand total of 25 games.

For a playoff team, Vonleh’s lack of minutes wouldn’t have been worrisome, since the development of rookies often comes second to winning games for the more successful teams. But for a struggling Hornets team that missed the playoffs by five games, his lack of playing time suggested that this raw stretch-4 was nowhere near being NBA-ready.

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That was 100 percent true, but people were awfully quick to give up on the potential of a 6’9″ power forward who barely turned 20 years old in August. The Nicolas Batum trade is working out nicely for Charlotte so far, but some gawked at how quickly the Hornets gave up on Vonleh after just his rookie season.

To be fair, the Portland Trail Blazers probably wouldn’t have given up Batum without a promising young piece like Vonleh included in the deal, but the point still stands: even with Vonleh getting the opportunity to play more minutes on a rebuilding team, expectations were modest with the way he was abandoned so abruptly.

Through the first 16 games of his first season in Portland, Vonleh hasn’t exactly buried the draft bust narrative. He’s averaging 2.8 points and 3.1 rebounds in 14.2 minutes per game, shooting 17-for-49 from the field (34.7 percent) and 2-for-11 from downtown (18.2 percent).

Those are small sample sizes, but the first few weeks of Vonleh’s tenure in Rip City were a disappointment nonetheless. Most knew that a project like Vonleh would need time to develop, but even if it’s been a rough process, it’s been good to see that time coming more regularly over the last two weeks.

In the last six games, Vonleh has shown slight improvement, averaging 4.5 points and 4.5 rebounds in 17.6 minutes per game while shooting 41.7 percent from the floor and 40 percent from three-point range.

He’s played at least 12 minutes in each one of those games and though he’s hardly been noticeable on the stat sheet, he’s had a couple of decent nights, including a nine-point, six-rebound performance against his former team.

He’s recently started in five games, he’s played crunch-time minutes in a couple and even when plays don’t go his way, the potential is clearly there:

I mean, even when plays go HORRIBLY wrong, Vonleh is still showing signs of life. Viewer discretion is advised on the following hook shot, but notice the nice drop step that precedes it and how quickly Vonleh gets it off before his defender could even do anything. The end result was obviously laughable, but the move itself was confident and strong:

Plays like that perfectly exemplify where Noah Vonleh is at in his early NBA career. He’s got plenty of base skill and physique to work with; it’s just a matter of fine-tuning it and improving it so he can eventually become a more seasoned, productive role player.

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For a rebuilding team like the Blazers, Vonleh should have plenty of time to develop his game moving forward. The kid can’t even legally purchase alcohol yet, so it’s far too early to label him a draft bust. Between his height, length and ability to spread the floor, Vonleh has more than enough potential to work with.

He may not be “earning” his minutes, but the Blazers will never know what they have to work with unless they keep feeding them to him.