Thinking Basketball podcast, my name is Ben. Welcome back to another episode.

Today we are doing the most improved players of the

2020 season. That's right. My list of the players who have improved the most will

tell you about the criteria in a little bit, but basically material changes that impact teams in terms of how guys have improved this season from not just last season but sort of where they were

as players so if they were injured or they had a down year I take that into account and

that's what we're going to do today. If you haven't heard it before the season began, Danny Larrue and I did a podcast on the Thinking Basketball

podcast, it was about forecasting who we thought are most likely breakout candidates would be for this season.

And we had different approaches, which is exactly what I wanted, but if you haven't heard that episode,

the idea for me was to look at get deeper into these statistical indicators.

Now we have a wider body of numbers and tracking information than 10 or 15 years ago when I played more in the college

analysis space and things like that.

This is something that I wanted to come back and revisit.

And so in doing that you end up with a list of guys who are likely candidates and I

sort of polled my top breakout candidates from that list with those ideas in mind

but I thought this before we kicked off it would be a great opportunity with those hits and misses and things like that and one of the names that jumped out at me when I looked at my list was Marvin Bagley.

Now the quick answer is like, okay, Marvin Bagley hasn't improved this year in any meaningful way at least on the court he's only

played a few hundred minutes because of injury.

But I think that at least for me that misses an opportunity at a piece of learning which is the interaction

between the coach and the player and the type of player and so in this case

Bageley's going into his second scene. of and Luke Walton is a more defensively inclined coach. A lot of people don't really talk about that with him because he was in Los Angeles

and there was a, you know, all sorts of wild traumatic noise going on there and things like that but I think

Luke as a young coach has had a lot of struggle on offense or developing

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