With No. 1 overall draft pick Zaccharie Risacher facing No. 2 overall pick Alex Sarr on Wednesday night, we need to talk about this rookie class. Summary: It wasn’t good. If you thought this was the worst league in recent NBA history, there’s a group of experts who seem to agree with you:

NBA coaches.

The way things are going, we may be witnessing the worst class to compete in NBA history. Rookies are couch-locked in ways we haven’t seen yet. And even when the Towers do play, the team hardly trusts them for any kind of real accountability.

You know the Freshman 15, when freshmen inevitably gained 15 pounds from partying and pizza.

Let me introduce you to the other Freshman 15. No rookie has scored 15 points in a game this season. Nada.

Fifteen points is not a high bar, especially in today’s scorer-friendly environment where no one blinks an eye when a team scores 140 points. And yet no first-year pro player has reached that 15-point threshold — not Risacher, Sarr or anyone else taken in the lottery. According to Stathead.com, we’ve never gone this “deep” into the season with a rookie failing to score a paltry 15 points in an NBA game.

Last year, two rookies scored more than 15 points in their very first games, San Antonio’s Victor Wembanyama (15 points) and Dallas center Dereck Lively II (16 points). In the second game of the season, two more names were added to the list, Charlotte’s Brandon Miller (17 points) and Chet Holmgren (16 points). Third game of the season, another name: Gradey Dick, who scored 16 points for the Toronto Raptors. Through each team’s first three games last year, rookies had surpassed the 15-point plateau a total of eight times (Holmgren, Miller and Wembanyama did this multiple times).

But this season, that same number is zero.

Since 1970, we typically see about nine such performances at this point in the season, sometimes as many as seventeen. The 2014-2015 season represents the previous low point, with just one 15+ match in the opening week, and that was it. by noted non-scorer in Orlando’s Elfrid Payton. This season? We are still looking for our own Elfrid Payton.

Coaches in the NBA just don’t trust the Towers to do much.

Preseason consensus Rookie of the Year pick Reed Sheppard has been hurting for Ime Udoka’s Houston Rockets. The Kentucky player played 15 minutes on opening night but has seen his playing time decrease in every game since, dropping to just three minutes after Monday’s win over the Spurs. The marksman has shot just 4-of-12 in 38 minutes so far.

Zach Edey, another popular choice for Rookie of the Year (including yours truly), has started every game for the Memphis Grizzlies. That’s the good news. The bad news is everywhere else. The 7-foot center has scored more fouls (15) than field goals (14). He has registered one more block than his 6-foot-4 teammate Yuki Kawamura, and Kawamura has zero. Despite all the foul trouble and general ineffectiveness, Edey has averaged just 16 minutes per game, the lowest of any full-time starter in the league.

Risacher, Atlanta’s top overall pick, has shown promise, but the 19-year-old came off the bench in the team’s first two games — a rarity in the annals of No. 1 overall picks — and has an abysmal 38.3 percent registered. true-shooting percentage in his first foray into pro-American hoops.

In Charlotte, sixth overall pick Tidjane Salaun also didn’t start in his first two games; he actually didn’t even play. According to the DNP coach’s decision for the team’s first two games, the French teenager apparently has not earned the trust of first-year head coach Charles Lee. And it’s not like the Charlotte Hornets roster reminds anyone of the 1996 Chicago Bulls.

By the way, has anyone heard from Rob Dillingham? Minnesota’s eighth overall pick hasn’t even been in a game yet. In retrospect, John Calipari looks charitable after bringing Dillingham off the bench at Kentucky last season. Chris Finch didn’t call his number once, and the same goes for the team’s other first-round pick, Terrence Shannon Jr.

The tanktastic Wizards were the boldest team in the rookie division. Coach Brian Keefe started the team’s two announced lottery picks Sarr and Bub Carrington in the season opener against Boston. But even Keefe couldn’t tolerate that situation for long. After two blowout losses, Jonas Valančiūnas replaced Carrington in the starting lineup to give Sarr some muscle up front. After three games, Carrington has scored three, ten and thirteen points.

And here’s the crazy thing: Carrington is your new scoring leader! The Pittsburgh product has averaged 8.7 points per game so far this season, making him the leading scorer in the rookie class. Yes, some figures. To answer the question posed by NBA voice of the gods Beau Estes, my research shows that there has never been a rookie class without at least one player averaging double-digit scoring.

It’s not just about points per game. Sarr and Carrington represent the No. 1 and No. 2 in highest minutes per game among rookies, and they haven’t even played 30 minutes in a game this season. In case you were wondering, there is also a pseudo NBA record in that category. Through teams’ first three games, we’ve never seen a season where a rookie didn’t log more than 30 minutes in at least one game, according to Stathead.com tracking. By comparison, there were nineteen such cases in 2021-2022: the Cade Cunningham class.

On Tuesday night, Utah rookie Cody Williams recorded 29 minutes, 58 seconds in the team’s fourth match, becoming the first rook to reach the 30-minute plateau. While a handful of teams haven’t played their fourth game yet, having one lone 30-minute appearance from the rookie class at this point would also be unprecedented. According to Stathead.com, we’ve had no fewer than five such rookie class games since 1964-65.

So What’s Driving the Great Rookie Recession of 2024? Many NBA draftniks urged patience with this draft group that lacked home run talent like Wemby, Zion or LeBron. They are also young. There were more 18-year-olds who entered the lottery (three – Salaun, Carrington and Nikola Topić) than those who could legally buy a Bud Light in the United States (two – Edey and Devin Carter).

Speaking of Carter and Topić, it certainly doesn’t help that these two lottery picks have been sidelined due to injury. Three other first-rounders, Toronto’s Ja’Kobe Walter (No. 19), Denver’s DaRon Holmes (No. 22) and Utah’s Isaiah Collier (No. 29) are also working back from physical ailments. But injuries happen every season, and novice classes are not immune to those types of setbacks.

The most obvious explanation is that this group just isn’t that good. It happens. Perhaps the closest is the 2000-2001 class, after Kenyon Martin was selected No. 1 overall by the New Jersey Nets. The Cincinnati phenom led his rookie class in scoring at a paltry 12.0 points per game, but that could be partly explained by him recovering from a broken leg suffered in his final season as a Bearcat. (Marc Jackson – not Mark – actually posted a 13.2 scoring average in 48 games for the Golden State Warriors if you want to count that, but there’s an important caveat to his rookie status: he was 26 years old.)

My research into draft history data suggests that the 2000 draft class ranks as one of the worst draft classes in NBA history, with only three eventual All-Stars in the group and none making more than one All-Star appearance. Five of the top seven picks were gone from the league by the end of the decade. There were also slow starts in that class and it turned out to be more than just an anomaly.

There is a glimmer of hope for this 2024 team. Remember Elfrid Payton and the 2014-2015 rookie class struggling out of the gate? Little did we know that two 2014 draftees didn’t play the entire movie season – forget the first few games – would go on to become MVPs. Those players? Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokić. Embiid spent two seasons with injury problems and Jokić spent a season abroad before Denver’s second-round pick made his debut in the United States in October 2015. In that regard, you can count Julius Randle in that group of redshirt stars from the 2014 class. The seventh overall pick suffered a broken leg in his very first game in the NBA, ending his rookie season prematurely, and as we now know, he would later etch his name on three All-Star teams.

Perhaps the class of 2024 will be like the class of 2014. Digging deeper into the data, it appears that the first week of rookie production has little to no correlation with career performance. Sometimes it indicates incompetence, sometimes not. After all, 18-year-old Giannis Antetokounmpo also received several DNP CDs at the beginning of his Hall of Fame career. Teenagers almost never come out of the gate as good NBA players, a fact that amplifies the sickening moments of Risacher and Sarr, both of whom don’t turn 20 until April.

Maybe Risacher, Sarr, Sheppard and the rest of the rookie class will get going soon, and this bumpy start will feel like a distant memory. But to get a double-digit average score, the coaches have to at least get the kids to eat. So far that doesn’t happen much. Let’s at least hope that some rookie will step up and put on a Freshman 15 for all of us in the coming days. Maybe Risacher and Sarr will do it on Wednesday.