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Jalen Green I Fantasy Basketball I Razzball

Jalen Green I Fantasy Basketball I Razzball

On this week’s Razzball Fantasy Basketball Podcast, Son and I discussed some of the flashing warning lights coming off of Houston Rockets second-year guard Jalen Green. Son invoked a Malik Monk comp and I nodded. Then I heard a CJ McCollum one and nodded at that too. What could Jalen Green be? Sitting longer added confusion rather than clarity. Sloppy Ja Morant? Zach LaVine with better knees? Really, what is Jalen Green now? Houston is low on my League Pass preferences and I’d never rostered him before this season. With a head full of jumbled hoopers, I fired up the invaluable DunksandThrees.com and started digging. 

This Side of the Fence

In general, the lack of development from Green’s rookie year to this year – both in real basketball and fantasy – has been discouraging. By EPM, Green is no longer a negative offensive player like he was last year (-1.0 Offensive EPM last year, +0.2 this time around), but he’s suffering from the nasty inverse relationship of increased usage and lower efficiency. Up nearly five points from last year, Green’s 27.3% usage rate is in the 93rd percentile, a figure usually reserved for bonafide stars like De’Aaron Fox (28.6), DeMar DeRozan (27.5), and Bradley Beal (28.8). This makes sense, of course, because Jalen Green is a star, yes? As a tooled-up number-two pick, it won’t be long now until he emerges as the backcourt scorer of the future, right?

Well, no. Or maybe yes, but this season didn’t offer up much certainty one way or another.

I rostered Green for the first time this year. Following a big man build in a shallow league, Green’s made three-pointers and scoring paired well with a Giannis/LeBron/Turner/Capela front line, and his ho-hum free throw value and loose handle were gleefully swallowed up by the punt FT and TO build. He routinely hovered around 200 overall on player raters as the season wore on, but I held fast because of the complimentary skillset. There were hot stretches of efficiency or a run of steals that would push him inside of the top 100 or better (he’s on one of those right now; Monster has him as player 27 over the last week at the time of writing), and since the rest of a loaded group was chugging along, I was happy enough to ride the wave. The threes were solid and needed and, as evidenced by his late-season run last year, the dude can certainly hunt a bucket when he’s right. Patience with young players is a virtue and on this particular team I could play out the…

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