BY HENRY ABBOTT

After the gray frigid winter, nature’s shiny hood ornaments are re-emerging. I’m no tree expert, but I think that one on the left is a flowering cherry—one of the earliest and showiest bloomers. The one on the right is a little more subtle. We’ll get to that. ANETTEANDERSEN, BAILEYSTOCK/GETTY IMAGES

Packed with flowers and super flashy, an ornamental cherry is impossible to ignore. When it’s blooming like that, nobody wonders why you have it in your yard.

Then there’s that simple guy on the right, who doesn’t start conversation.

Here’s the thing: the cherry tree grows about a foot a year until it reaches 25-feet tall at best, and then it’ll die after about 25 years. But that little green fellow is a giant redwood—not just one of nature’s fastest growers, but also one that will ascend aggressively for a century, and then more slowly for perhaps a millennia after that. It can grow 15 times taller than the cherry tree.

Which tree makes the bigger impact depends mainly on when you look. There’s a small window of time when the cherry is more impressive, and then forever after that it’s the sequoia—because touching the sky isn’t about how tall you are at the start, it’s about how much you grow.

Remember when the Knicks were coached by Jeff Hornacek and run by Steve Mills? That 2017-2018 team won 29 games, which cost Hornacek his job. Pressure surrounded the team’s ninth overall draft pick. The Knicks worked out plenty of players. Two of the candidates had been Kentucky freshmen together: Kevin Knox II from Florida, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander from Ontario. “He’s a really young, athletic, long player,” Mills told reporters after picking Knox II, “who makes us really excited.”

Knox II was the cherry tree. I don’t know why the Knicks picked him over Shai, but I do know that Mills mentioned his length—and that at the 2018 pre-draft combine, Knox measured 3.25 inches taller than Shai.

Knox II doesn’t seem bigger anymore. In June 2019, David Thorpe wrote a story about how Knox had become the least-productive player in the NBA. The Knicks had to include a first-round pick to get Cam Reddish back when they gave up on Knox II. After 17 games, the Hawks let him go; then he signed with the Pistons, then the Blazers, then the Pistons again. After they traded him to the Jazz, he was waived, again, and now the former lottery pick is playing for the Rip City Remix.

Gilgeous-Alexander, though, is on an opposite path—from obscurity to the sky. SGA wasn’t a top-30 high-school player. He wasn’t the high-scorer on his college team. He was drafted 11th and traded twice. Yet, he has grown better almost every year. In Box Plus-Minus as calculated by Basketball-Reference (a handy one-number reference that includes defense, and approximates contribution to winning) rookie SGA was the league’s 120th-best player, a level at which the team was slightly better when he was off the floor. He was 59th a year later, and then, with a very respectable score of 4.1, he was a top-30 player by this measure in his third year. He lingered around there the following season before exploding last year, in his fifth season to 7.3, which snuck him into the top ten. This season, he’s near the tippy top of the league, nipping at Luka’s heels for second, just around 10. Maybe SGA will be the MVP this year, if not soon. He’s a sequoia.

There is a lot of research about how to become an MVP-level basketball player. You need to be able to score, to play at least halfway-decent defense, and to make highlights. It helps to be tall, long, athletic, and on a team that wins a ton of games. There are algorithms and prediction models that fractal out into the many variables and vicissitudes of the game and the MVP voters.

But maybe there’s a simpler formula:

Make it to the NBA;
Earn a lot of minutes;
Improve for five years—either all in a row, or close.

In other words: be the best at getting better.

“Different skills progress at different rates,” says Dan Rosenbaum, a pioneer of advanced statistics who has worked in the White House and for the IRS, the Office for Management and Budget, as well as the Cavaliers, Hawks, and Pistons. “Players tend to be who they are out of the gate in terms of possession usage, but the shooting and avoidance of turnovers takes time to develop, with passing skills in the middle of that development curve. I have not dug into SGA that much, but my guess is that he has seen above-average improvement in shooting and avoiding turnovers, all while increasing his possession usage more than young superstars typically do.”

There are many excellent players in the NBA. Some make it to the All-Star level of, say, Luka Dončić, Kyrie Irving, Tyrese Haliburton, or Damian Lillard. But none of those players can be counted on to play meaningful defense and sometimes play the worst defense. All but the very best players have shortcomings. Devin Booker clawed his way from the league’s 174th most productive player in BPM to All-Star level … but still has never been higher than 20th in the league. The last rung of the ladder is harder to reach.

Luka achieved an incredible level of production in his second year in the NBA, and then had three years being that same guy. This year, his offense has somehow gotten even better. But he’s six years into being a flatlining, unremarkable defender. If he’s going to have more years of big growth, that seems like the easy place to focus.

It takes a special player to be as good as Shai and then spend a whole offseason working hard on weaknesses. But that’s evidently what Gilgeous-Alexander did. He’s a top-five offensive player. All the other players who are up around him on that list are either unremarkable defenders or have won recent NBA MVP awards.

Think about how much work it would take for Tyrese Haliburton or Damian Lillard to become a top-20 defensive player, and then realize that Shai did that work. Today, in Defensive Box Plus-Minus, Shai’s the 17th-best defensive player in the league, just behind Rudy Gobert and well ahead of Kawhi Leonard, Draymond Green, and Derrick White.

Can you name anyone who works on anything that takes five years to complete? A sand castle takes a half-hour and seems like a big loss when the wave comes. It’s not easy to think so long-term—nor, in such projects, is it easy to recognize the progress.

TrueHoop’s David Thorpe spends his days getting texts and phone calls from NBA players attempting to navigate these years of improvement. Much of what comes out of his mouth is the exact opposite of what you hear from anyone who’s dead set on looking good today: Coach is playing you out of position? Great news! You get to face a whole bunch of new opponents, with lessons that will serve for years. You are trying to add a new skill? Try it in a game, because in the NBA, “games are practice” (because there is no time to practice). You totally screwed something up? Incredible!

A favorite David quote: “Mistakes are the textbook.”

Wrong position, trying new things, and screwing up … none of this makes sense in the 24-hour view. Get a cherry tree if you want something pretty right away. But if you’re trying to build a basis for massive growth, if you expect a half-decade of serious improvement, the whole thing has to be about learning. Sequoias put early energy into root balls nobody notices.

Around the time one young NBA player got drafted and signed a life-changing contract, David told the lifelong point guard that it would take three years of hard work for his handle to reach an All-Star level. That’s a very different mental approach than trying to break ankles tonight.

“It’s not ‘The Matrix,’” Thorpe says, “where suddenly you know karate.” Karate takes a long time to master.

The NBA is full of these high-stakes player-development questions: Can Bronny James shoot 3s? Can James Wiseman dominate the paint? The wrong time to answer those is when they’ve just begun. People are speculating after watching Bronny for small amount of college ball, or Wiseman’s very young years in the NBA. “We’ll know if Bronny can shoot 3s when he’s 24 or 25,” says David, who notes that Wiseman is now shooting 80 percent at the rim—at the age Kevin Durant was when he first started helping teams win.

When they’re just planted, sequoias and Christmas trees look about the same.

Sam Hinkie had a very unusual upbringing. In high school, he was a defensive back, a point guard, and valedictorian. At the University of Oklahoma, USA Today somehow named him one of the top college students in the nation; he was president of all kinds of stuff, including the Student Business Association. After working for the swanky consultancy Bain, he went to Stanford Business School with the titans of Silicon Valley. While there, Hinkie began part-time work for the Houston Rockets, which led to his becoming one of the youngest executives in league history, just before Daryl Morey arrived.

The point is, as a former business consultant and Stanford MBA holder, Hinkie thought deeply about business strategy. By the time he got to run the 76ers, he was lucid that he would run the Sixers with “the longest view in the room.”

When Hinkie resigned in 2016, he wrote a letter to the Sixers’ dozen investors. That letter then leaked, offering incredible insight into his thinking:

The same 82 games are up for grabs every year for every team. Just like in 1985 (or before). To get more wins, you’re going to have to take them from someone else. Wins are a zero-growth industry (how many of you regularly choose to invest in those?), and the only way up is to steal share from your competitors. You will have to do something different. You will have to be contrarian.

If every team thought long-term, thinking long-term wouldn’t stand out. But this is the NBA, where GMs are fired every few years and it’s better to draft a rookie of the year while you’re still employed instead of losing your job, like Hinkie, while Joel Embiid is rehabbing in Qatar seven years before winning the MVP.

The Kings drafted Tyreke Evans in 2009. He never made a huge impact. In BPM, his best season was barely better than Embiid’s worst. But he was as showy as a cherry tree when he first arrived in the NBA and—here’s the key to how most NBA teams think—the GM who drafted Tyreke got a three-year contract extension that year. Meanwhile, Hinkie drafted Embiid and lost his job before Embiid even played in a 76ers uniform.

That’s why most NBA teams struggle to think long-term. Hinkie quoted Jeff Bezos saying: “You have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

Hinkie explained why he scouted players in person: “What kind of teammate is he? How does he play under pressure? How broken is his shot? Can he fight over a screen? Does he respond to coaching? How hard will he work to improve? And maybe the key one: will he sacrifice—his minutes, his touches, his shots, his energy, his body—for the ultimate team game that rewards sacrifice?” He talked about borrowing wisdom from other fields, especially behavioral economics.

Hinkie planted big trees; some of them withered, but others matured after he left (or, in his words, was “repotted”). He wrapped his letter up by saying: “This story underscores what our players, particularly our best players, are in greatest need of—time.”

Time to improve.

As we look ahead to the 2024 NBA draft, word on the street is that there aren’t a lot of stars this time around. That might be true. But that same kind of prognostication determined there were a dozen players better than Kobe in 1996; eight better than Dirk in 1998; six better than Steph in 2009; 14 better than Giannis in 2013; and 40 better than Jokić in 2014.

You’d say: That’s unfair. When they were drafted, no one knew how much better those players would become.

And I’d say, “Exactly.”

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