Brooklyn Nets: Appreciating The Underrated Thaddeus Young

It’s been a depressing 2015-16 season for the Brooklyn Nets. They’re tied with the New Orleans Pelicans for the third worst record in the league, they don’t own their first round draft pick from now until the release date of Star Wars: Episode 39 (approximately), and they don’t have much hope of attracting free agents in the meantime.

They are a rudderless boat adrift at sea, only this sea is raging out of control and there’s no savior ready to walk on water through the draft and calm the storm.

Over the past summer, the Nets made a conscientious effort to re-sign their two best players, Brook Lopez and Thaddeus Young. We’ve known what to expect from Lopez at this point: around 20 points a night, an underwhelming amount of rebounds for his seven-foot frame, a couple of blocks here and there, and a twin brother on a holy crusade to rid the world of NBA mascots.

But what of Young, a player who’s rarely gotten his chance to flourish in this league despite being such a solid role player for more than eight years now?

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In 2007, the Philadelphia 76ers took Young out of Georgia Tech with the 12th pick in the NBA Draft. Other than his rookie season, he’s averaged anywhere from 12-17 points and about 5-6 rebounds per game every single year. And yet, other than his last two seasons in Philly — the first of which marked the last time anyone respected the Sixers — no one hardly knew he existed.

Simply put, Thaddeus Young is a good but not great player. He’s a steady source of production for the end of the bench in your fantasy league, but he’ll never be the guy you talk about around the water cooler the next day.

Still, in a lost season where there aren’t many bright spots (especially now that Rondae Hollis-Jefferson is out with an ankle injury), Young has re-established himself as an underrated player that actually deserves to be more…well, “rated.”

Thaddeus Young is having a strong season. Good numbers, but also defending better than he did at the end of last season.
— John Schuhmann (@johnschuhmann) December 9, 2015

After signing a four-year, $50 million contract extension that some balked at, Young has been more than earning his paycheck this year. Through the first 25 games of the season, the Nets’ starting small forward is averaging 15.7 points, 8.9 rebounds and 1.4 steals per game while shooting an efficient 51.9 percent from the floor.

As a career 31.9 percent shooter from three-point territory, it’s probably for the best that Young has only attempted 12 on the season (making just one). His status as a 6’8″ power forward makes him something of a tweener, and that lack of a three-point shot does him no favors in that regard, but Young has found a way to compensate for those shortcomings in his game.

For one thing, he’s a fairly efficient midrange shooter, especially when facing the basket straight on:

Thaddeus Young’s shot chart 25 games into the 2015-16 season, per NBA.com/stats /

There’s a lot of red on that shot chart, but don’t be fooled: most of those areas of the floor are shots that Young rarely takes. An overwhelming 70.9 percent of his shots come from right around the basket, where he’s converting at an above-league-average rate of 56.5 percent.

Then there’s his uptick in rebounding. For most of his time in Philly, Young vacillated between the forward positions depending on who was on the floor, and he never averaged more than 7.5 rebounds per game. In a more stable and consistent role in Brooklyn, he’s pulling down a career high 8.9 boards per game.

He’s got 12 double-doubles on the season, including five in the team’s eight December games. He’s second on the team in scoring, first in rebounding, first in steals, first in field goal percentage among regular rotation players, and first in murdered Ersan Ilyasovas:

His 16.0 points per game are also the highest in his career since his last year in Philly, which was the first year of Sam Hinkie’s complete roster strip-down that, when all was said and done, had robbed Young of similarly underrated teammates like Jrue Holiday, Spencer Hawes and Evan Turner.

Less than two years after that Sixers core had upset the Derrick Rose-less Chicago Bulls in the first round of the playoffs, he had become the only remaining relic from the last winning basketball team in Philly, toiling away for a tanking team that only had rookie Michael Carter-Williams to look forward to for the future (and even THAT didn’t last).

Hinkie finally, mercifully, traded away Young after the 2013-14 season…where he quickly joined another tanking team in the Minnesota Timberwolves. They had rookie Andrew Wiggins, sure, but no one could blame Young if he was getting sick of his best teammate being the Rookie of the Year winner. And yet, he’s never seemed to let it affect him:

Thaddeus Young, NO quit.
— The Brooklyn Game (@TheBKGame) November 23, 2015

Then, last February, Young was traded to the Brooklyn Nets…ANOTHER lackluster team that managed to make the playoffs despite their losing record of 38-44. Over his eight-year career, Young has played on one team with a winning record: the 2011-12 Sixers squad that took down the injury-depleted Bulls after going 35-31 in the lockout-shortened season.

More than likely, this year will mark eight losing teams in nine NBA seasons.

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Young has been to the playoffs five times, but the most wins his teams have ever accrued in a single season was 41 (2010-11). He’s made it to the second round of the postseason once, and he’s had to endure the 19-63 Sixers in 2013-14, the 16-66 Minnesota Timberwolves in 2014-15 AND the 38-win Nets that lost in the first round last season.

Thaddeus Young is not a transcendent talent by any means, so no one should correlate his value with how many bad teams he’s played for. Rather, he’s the quality role player you watch excel on all those losing teams and can’t help but wonder what his career might have looked like had he just gotten lucky enough to play with more quality teammates.

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No one should feel sorry for Thaddeus Young, or anyone else who’s set to make $50 million over the next four years for that matter. But as he toils away for yet another NBA bottom-feeder, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of pity — and curiosity — about what his solid skill set might look like being put to its proper use in a winning environment.

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