Let me get this out of the way. I would like to see better performances from Jalen right now, but I still have faith that he will become an All Star caliber 2-guard.

And just as a side note, having faith in a player literally means that you believe they will get there even though said player is not there yet. I don’t need to put faith in Sengun being an All Star quality player because it’s abundantly obvious that he’s already there in terms of his play. So for those that have given up on Jalen, I think it would be appropriate to figure out if you want to have faith in Jalen or have the instant gratification of seeing him play like an All Star each game right here right now.

Now that my shtick about the over-reactionary crap on the sub is over, let’s take a look at why it’s still appropriate to keep the faith in Jalen Green.

Like I have said, his archetype requires patience. 2-guards who focus primarily on high volume scoring take awhile to develop. Jalen’s two closest counterparts in this league, Zach Lavine and Bradley Beal were not consistent in their third year nor were they stars in year three.

Let’s look at their stats, starting with Beal in 2014-2015:

15/4/3 on 42.7/40.9/78.3 with 2 TO and 1.5 stocks (steals plus blocks) in 33.4 min

His first 12 games as can be seen in the link to his game log included major stinkers such as:

13 points on 4-14 fg and 1-3 from 3 plus 5 TO

10 points on 4-10 and 0-2

10 points on 4-18 and 2-6 plus 4 TO

and two games with less than 10 points, granted one of those was in limited minutes.

I could go further but considering Beal was averaging only 15 for the year, I think you get my point. Amidst all these awful stinkers, Beal had a couple of good outings as the Wizards 21 year old third overall pick. Sounds an awful lot like Jalen Green who was also drafted very high as well in year 3.

Now on to Lavine in 2016-2017

19/3/3 on 45.9/38.7/83.6 with 1.8 TO in 37.2 minutes

Now I understand that Lavine has similar counting stats on a better fg% and that is still better than what Jalen is doing right now. However it has still only been 12 games for Green, and even with Lavine’s higher fg%, I still think that overall Zach in ‘16-‘17 was very much not a star and still in the tier of “Not there yet but still has potential”, the same tier I’d put Jalen in right now.

Now onto some of Lavine’s stinkers during his first 12 games.

14 points on 4-13 and 2-6

4 points on 1-6 and 1-3

17 points on 5-16 and 1-5

15 points on 7-15 and 1-5 in 40 minutes

11 points on 5-14 and 1-7 in 39 minutes

So overall like Jalen, both Beal and Lavine were very inconsistent in year three and did not look like stars at all. Jalen in his limited sample has looked better than Beal but not quite as good as Lavine in their respective third years. But there is still plenty of season left, so that can change for the better. Another thing you should keep in mind is that Beal and Lavine both continued to have some bad stinkers throughout the rest of their third years, so although I would expect Jalen to progress as the season goes on, he probably will still look more like he is right now at the end of the season, then like an actual All Star caliber player.

But the good news is that he is in good company with two guys that have each gotten 2-3 All Stars over their careers, which I would be happy with for Jalen. Not every top pick is going to be a top 10 player in the league and that’s fine. Players like Lavine and Beal can be very valuable in the right context as secondary options rather than as face of franchise type of players, and luckily for Houston, the Rockets have their franchise player in Alperen Sengun and has a playstyle that works well with a Jalen’s archetype.

https://www.landofbasketball.com/nba_players_game_logs/2015/bradley_beal_full.htm#google_vignette

https://www.landofbasketball.com/nba_players_game_logs/2017/zach_lavine_full.htm