LSU Isn't Great, And That Makes Ben Simmons Even Better Than You Think

Here’s a puzzle: Ben Simmons, the top high school basketball recruit in 2015, is every bit as good as advertised. In fact, he is on pace to be the best one-and-done college player in the one-and-done era. At the same time, LSU—the school at which Simmons is playing—is not very good, and may not appear in the NCAA tournament.

These two statements seem inconsistent. Great basketball players make their teams better, don’t they? So how can Simmons be great, and his squad be … well, not so much?

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The answer–as is often the case–can be found in the numbers.

First, let’s look at Simmons’ amazing statistics. Through eight games, Simmons is averaging 19.0 points per game, 14.8 rebounds, 5.9 assists, 2.5 steals and 1.6 blocked shots. He’s also shooting 55 percent from the field. Translate all these box score statistics into wins, and Simmons already has produced 3.1 wins this season. He’s on pace to produce more than twelve wins before the year is over.

Per 40 minutes, Simmons is producing 0.438 wins. To put that in perspective, the average player will produce 0.100 wins per 40 minutes, since the average team produces 0.500 wins per 40 minutes. So through his first eight games, Simmons has been more productive than four average college players combined.

But wait. There’s more! If Simmons can maintain his current pace, he will produce more than former Kentucky standout and top NBA Draft pick Anthony Davis, who just happens to be the most productive college player since 2005, the year the NBA created the one-and-done phenomenon by imposing an age limit for its annual draft.

In 2011-12, Davis produced 0.405 wins per 40 minutes in his only season in Lexington. He also won a national title. And that’s where he seems to diverge from Simmons, who may not even get a chance to compete in March Madness. Ultimately, the game is played for championships, which means Simmons shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same sentence as Davis.

Or should he?

Davis had some help at Kentucky. A lot, actually. His Kentucky teammates—a number of them top high school recruits and first-round NBA Draft picks themselves—combined to produce 25 wins in 2011-12.

By contrast, Simmons’ teammates are doing quite a bit less. After eight games, Simmons has accounted for:

39.6 percent of LSU’s rebounds;
33.3 percent of of the team’s blocked shots;
33.1 percent of the team’s assists
27.8 percent of the team’s steals
22.5 percent of the team’s points.

Of LSU’s four wins, 78 percent can be traced to Simmons’ overall productivity. Meanwhile, his LSU teammates are on pace to produced about five wins this season. Total. Which makes Simmons a one-man team. Without him, LSU wouldn’t be mediocre—the Tigers would be awful.

In a way, this seems perplexing. Last year, LSU won 22 games and made the NCAA tournament. The Tigers added Simmons, an utterly dominant player. So how can they be worse?

Simple: last year’s team was led by Tim Quarterman (5.1 wins produced); Jordan Mickey (4.1 wins produced); Jarell Martin (3.6 wins produced); and Keith Hornsby (3.1 wins produced). That quartet produced nearly 16 of the team’s wins. This year, Mickey and Martin are in the NBA. Hornsby didn’t play in LSU’s first seven games. So Simmons is propping up a much less capable squad.

As it turns out, this pattern is quite common. If you look at all 351 Division I-A basketball teams last year, you see that on average the four most productive players on each team produced 80.6 percent of their team’s wins. Basketball fans like to think that teams win and lose games together, but most wins tend to be produced by a minority of the team’s players.

If Simmons really wanted to win this season, he probably should have followed the lead of past top high school recruits. The last five top prep players—Jahlil Okafor, Andrew Wiggins, Nerlens Noel, Davis, and Harrison Barnes—attended traditional powerhouses in Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, and North Carolina, respectively. Unsurprisingly, they won an average of 29.6 games during their freshman seasons. And it wasn’t always because of them: Wiggins wasn’t a very productive college basketball player, but solid teammates helped the Jayhawks win 25 games.

Instead, Simmons joined a LSU team that isn’t what was last year. And he very possibly will be watching the NCAA tournament like the rest of us, at home and on television. Don’t feel too badly for him, though. If he chooses to declare for the NBA Draft, Simmons will almost certainly be the No. 1 pick. Academic research indicates that team success plays a role in where a player is selected, but Simmons is so productive it probably won’t matter that his team is so-so.

Ironically, the NBA team that lands Simmons probably will be very much like this year’s Tigers. Simmons will don its uniform, put up impressive numbers, and find that his teammates aren’t helping much. Just as Davis has discovered with the New Orleans Pelicans, being immensely productive will not lead to many wins if your teammates can’t help.

Such is the answer to the Simmons puzzle: one player can’t make a team great, no matter how great they are individually. Not Simmons. Not Davis. No one. So forget LSU’s performance. We should spend more time appreciating elite players like Simmons for what they can do, and less time questioning them for what their willing-but-unable teammates can’t.