Minnesota Timberwolves: Is the Patrick Beverley effect real?
By Ethan Becker
Minnesota Timberwolves guard Patrick Beverley’s track record: 2012-2017 – Houston Rockets
Beverley was drafted in the 2009 NBA draft, but he didn’t play a game in the NBA for his first two seasons due to overseas commitments in Greece and Russia. Because of this, his rookie season wasn’t until the 2012-13 season. Even then, his first game wasn’t until January 2013. Coming in as an unheralded rookie, expectations weren’t high for Beverley, but he immediately impressed people in the league, especially on his new team, the Houston Rockets.
In the previous season, 2011-12, Houston struggled defensively. Defensive rating is a measurement of how many points an opposing player or team scored in 100 possessions against a team or player, and in 2011-12 Houston recorded a 104.0 defensive rating, putting them 17th in the league. They also averaged 7.5 steals and 4.8 blocks per game, good enough for the 18th and 20th spot in the league, respectively. In 2012-13, even without Beverley playing much (he averaged 17.4 minutes per game over 41 games), those stats improved. Houston’s defensive rating did fall slightly to 105.3 (17th in the league), but their steals number rose to 8.3, enough to put them 9th in the league in steals per game.
The following two seasons would be where Beverley’s impact on the team seemed to shine through the most. In 2013-14 and 2014-15, Houston averaged, respectively, a 105.2 defensive rating, 7.6 steals, and 5.6 blocks per game and then a 102.6 defensive rating, 9.5 steals, and 5.0 blocks per game. In these three stats, over those two seasons, the only one where Houston wasn’t top 10 in the league was 2013-14’s steals per game, where they were 17th. These improved stats defensively coincided with an increased role from Beverley, who secured a starting role in 2013-14, and a defensive rating improvement on Beverley’s part from 2013-14 to 2014-15.
Over the course of Beverley’s career with the Rockets, which ended after the 2016-17 season when he was traded in the offseason by the Rockets in a package to the LA Clippers for Chris Paul, Houston’s defensive stats rarely dipped below the level they were at in the season before Beverley arrived.
Of course, Houston’s increased productivity could be due to a number of other factors, not least of which being James Harden joining the team around the same time as Beverley. Still, it is worth noting that the season after Beverley’s departure, 2017-18, the Rockets averaged a 105.7 defensive rating, 8.5 steals, and 4.8 blocks per game; meaning that only their steals numbers beat their pre-Beverley stats, something that hadn’t happened during Beverley’s entire tenure with the Rockets. The following year, Houston’s defensive rating fell to 110.1.