Elfrid Payton: Darkhorse Rookie Of The Year Candidate?
Elfrid Payton entered the draft season as a virtual unknown. He left as the 10th overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft, a member of the Orlando Magic via a draft-day trade with the Philadelphia 76ers for the rights to Croatian forward Dario Saric.
Payton enters his rookie season as the point guard of the future for the Magic, and just watching highlight tape you can see why the organization is so high on the rookie out of Lousiana-Lafayette. At 6′ 4”, he rebounds extremely well for his position, and has the potential to be a pain for opposing teams defensively.
He uses his athleticism to penetrate into the paint, and has the ability to make some sensational plays when he does. On the outside looking in, Payton should be a point guard that is an every night triple-double threat if his game continues to develop in that direction.
The problem with the rookie is that he really can’t shoot. For every time he penetrates to perfection, there’s a missed opportunity to finish or a wonky jumper that still needs some refining. He is not a threat from three-point range in the slightest, shown by his zero attempts from distance in his rookie debut.
Scoring just isn’t Payton’s game right now, but thankfully he’s a point guard, and he handles the mechanics of the position otherwise quite well.
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The question, with the opportunities handed to him, is if Elfrid Payton can make a serious run at Rookie of the Year. There is a case to be made for both sides, but any run would need to see some development in Payton’s scoring output as the year progresses.
What would benefit Payton the most would be to focus on his poor free-throw shooting, and then to use his penetrating ability to his advantage to gather easy points at the line. The problem is that Payton shot a career average of 61.1 percent from the free-throw line in his college career on over six attempts per contest; for a comparison, Dwight Howard is a career 57.4 percent shooter from the stripe in the NBA.
Where Payton could turn some heads is on defense, granted that those heads are paying attention to defense to begin with. With a 2.0 average of steals per game in college, if Payton can be a force in that area of the game, he could certainly make a difference in that department for the Orlando Magic.
He would need to put up some eye-popping stats in the defensive categories to garner enough support to become the Rookie of the Year, but it’s not entirely out of the question.
When considering Payton’s competition for the award begins with Jabari Parker, it’s unlikely that he will be able to put up the numbers necessary to snag the honors. The voters care not about wins; Michael Carter-Williams took home the trophy last year for a Philadelphia 76ers team that would have traded the 19 wins they did get for anybody with an expiring contract.
Parker will be on a team where is the offensive focal point, and is more prepared to put up nice offensive numbers including a high points per game total.
That’s before you even get to other eligible candidates like Andrew Wiggins, Dante Exum, Marcus Smart, and Nerlens Noel (another defensive contributor).
Simply put, while he is a nice player, Elfrid Payton doesn’t yet have the game to put up huge offensive numbers in his first season, and it will cost him. That’s not to say he won’t get there, and have some sensational games this season in the process, it’s just that right now he’s outmatched by the extremely stacked draft class he came in with.