Originally Posted by
Pelicanidae
NAW and Hayes. Primarily for Hayes.
Hunter better be more developed than Hayes right now; he's 3 years older than Hayes is.
He's not actually been very good this year though. His issue is that while he was a good defender in college, he was primarily a good 1v1 defender, with the team scheme producing a lot of the 'team D' as it were. In the NBA, where 1v1 defense is much less important in general and team D becomes emphasised, Hunter's defense has not been nearly as good as a lot of his biggest fans hoped. He's averaging less than 1%BLK and barely 1%STL, and his rebounding has been poor too; 7%REB for a guy of his size is awful. Part of this is that he's playing on a bad defensive team overall, but it's not like he can't take any blame for it. His play recognition has been sub-par, and his footspeed has been bad. I've seen someone describe him as moving like a rusty version of the Kawhi-bot, and that's not far off truth :hihi:
The other primary aspect of his game was the 3pt shooting, and while there's still time for that to translate, it hasn't so far. He's shooting 34.9% from 3, which is okay but not worth writing home about; it's slightly below league average. Can't make his own shot either: 94.5% of his 3s have been assisted, and he's only shooting 59% at the rim, which is pretty bad for a forward.
All of this shows in his advanced metrics.
BPM: -4.5
VORP: -1.1
WS/48: 0.003
PER: 8.8
TS%: 52.1%
RPM: -0.71 (50th among small forwards)
PIPM: -1.88 (including -0.93 DPIPM)
EPM: -2.5 (341st in the league)
He's not been good, really, on defense or offense. Part of that is that he's on the Hawks, yes, but part of it is also his own failure to really create impact. That's not what you want at all from an older rookie; the entire point of drafting an older rookie is in the hopes that they are more likely to create impact more quickly rather than taking a few years to grow into it.