The Nets are building for the future, with a roster including five (!) rookies, all first-round draft picks. Lucas Kaplan has been providing NetsDaily readers with periodic updates on their progress; but fans who don’t spend much time watching other teams may have trouble putting that progress in perspective. Most young players improve with experience. How do the young Nets look when compared to other young players around the NBA? With much of the league on its Cup break, it’s an opportune moment
to look around.
The Nets are building for the future, with a roster including five (!) rookies, all first-round draft picks. Lucas Kaplan has been providing NetsDaily readers with periodic updates on their progress; but fans who don’t spend much time watching other teams may have trouble putting that progress in perspective. Most young players improve with experience. How do the young Nets look when compared to other young players around the NBA? With much of the league on its Cup break, it’s an opportune moment to look around.
Here, I focus on 48 players age 21 or under (as of January 15). I exclude older players, even if they were drafted in 2025 (no Cedric Coward; no Walter Clayton). I also exclude players who have played less than 90 NBA minutes, including Khaman Maluach, Noa Essengue, and the Nets’ Nolan Traore, among others. On the other hand, I include young players from previous draft classes, some of whom have considerable NBA experience. One of those is Noah Clowney, who is 70 days younger than Danny Wolf but had already played 1412 minutes coming into this season.
My primary focus is on overall performance so far this season, as measured by Estimated Plus-Minus ratings. These ratings adjust each player’s raw net ratings (how many points his team scores and how many it gives up when he is on the court) to take account of the estimated quality of teammates and opponents on each possession. Since it takes a lot of possessions with different combinations of players to reliably sort out individuals’ distinct contributions to the team’s performance, these ratings are decidedly Estimated at this point in the season.
To improve their reliability a bit, I supplement the EPM ratings with another measure, Win Shares per 48 minutes, which captures (mostly offensive) box score contributions. I also adjust the results to take account of differences in age, boosting the scores of 19-year-olds by almost a full point and those of 20-year-olds by about one-tenth of a point to reflect the average difference in their performance relative to 21-year-olds. (Perhaps surprisingly, previous NBA experience is statistically unrelated to current performance for this set of players.)
Some of the resulting ratings are unsurprising, while others will raise eyebrows. The top two players, even after adjusting for age, are third-year players—the Celtics’ Jordan Walsh and the Blazers’ Donovan Clingan. Clingan is widely viewed as an emerging star. Walsh, on the other hand, played sparingly in his previous two seasons, and it will not be surprising if his impressive +3.1 EPM rating regresses as this season progresses.
Three of the top-rated rookies so far—Atlanta’s Asa Newell and Orlando’s Noah Penda and Jase Richardson—have also played sparingly, so their ratings are especially uncertain. The same might be said for the Nets’ top-rated rookie, Danny Wolf, with just 141 NBA minutes under his belt. Wolf was a late-first-round pick (27th) and began the season in the G league. So far in his brief NBA career, however, he has seemed to be not bad offensively and a better-than-average defender, placing him 19th in my adjusted ranking.
The Nets’ lottery pick, Egor Demin, ranks 20th. His offensive and defensive EPM ratings and win shares are all less impressive than Wolf’s, but my age adjustment erases most of that difference. Among the nine 19-year-olds who have played at least 90 minutes, Demin ranks 4th behind Dylan Harper, Hugo Gonzalez, and Cooper Flagg.
The other young Nets rank in the bottom half of this 48-player field. Noah Clowney has looked good offensively so far this season, but rates as one of the worst defenders in the NBA. Conversely, 22nd pick Drake Powell has looked like a decent defender but a drag on the offensive end. Nonetheless, his overall rating at this point is hardly distinguishable from those of such highly touted lottery picks as Tre Johnson, Jeremiah Fears, and Derik Queen. (And Powell is arguably less experienced on the offensive end than most 20-year-olds, having played a low-usage role in college.)
Point guard Ben Saraf, the Nets’ 26th pick, has had troubles on both sides of the ball, and his unadjusted and adjusted EPM ratings are a full point below Powell’s. If fellow point-guard Nolan Traore, the 19th pick, graduates from the G league in the coming weeks, he may well supplant Saraf in the rotation.
Obviously, all these young players have a long way to go in their NBA careers. For now, the Nets’ youth movement seems to have produced no stars, but some keepers. For fans—and for the players themselves—that should be an encouraging start. After all, some teams have no young players showing similar signs of success. And with the Nets having little to focus on this season besides development, their young players should have ample opportunities to continue to improve.
