European Prospects

Jan Vesely is one of the most looked at prospects this season in terms of the NBA Draft 2010. Even if he has not declared officially so far, it is highly probable that the Czech forward will enter his name for this year’s edition. Together with our German friend and Stat man Simon (in-the-game.org), I took a closer look at some advanced statistics of the 2m11 tall player from Partizan Belgrade.

The statistics used for this article are those of the 16 Partizan Euroleague games of the current season. The normal numbers for Vesely are the following: 23.6mpg, 7.6ppg and 4.6rpg. During the Top16, Vesely stepped up big time and improved both his game and his statistics to 9.5ppg and 6.8rpg.

Simon digs a lot deeper in his numbers and analyses the teams and players on a per-possession basis in a 70 possession game. Out of this, you can see that during the minutes Vesely is on the court, Partizan has a +2.42 +/- rating in terms of points for 70 possessions. Additionally, with Vesely on the bench, Partizan has a –7.99 +/- rating which is the second best individual differential of the team behind Lawrence Roberts. Both figures combined give Vesely an interesting +10,41 +/- rating in terms of points differential per 70 possessions.

In terms of team shooting percentage, when Jan Vesely is on the court, Partizan Belgrade has a 45.1% shooting percentage, however when the Czech forward is not on the floor, the percentage of the team drops to 42.1%. On the defensive end, the presence of Vesely is also important as the opposing team can only connect 43.3% of their shots when he is on the court while they make 44.4% of their attempts with Vesely on the bench. His tremendously aggressive defense and long arms are probably one of the reasons for this difference.

Another interesting figure developed by in-the-game is the effective shooting percentage ((FGM + 1.5*3FGM)/FGA). Jan Vesely shoots here an interesting 60.5% eFG% (which would put him among the top performers in this category in the NCAA) with real shooting percentages of 56.4% from 2 and 47.6% from 3. You can see that his shot selection is good and that he is connecting with good percentages. His three point attempts represent 27.6% of all his shot attempts and he gets 0.632 free throws per field goal attempt. Right now, he nets 60.4% of his Free-throws in the Euroleague only, a domain where he can improve still to become even more effective.

Another interesting number may be that 58.8% of his field goals come after an assist of one of his team mates. This shows that he is not going for a lot of one-on-one on the set-plays as Vesely scores a large number of baskets on the fast break. Currently, he scores from behind the arc nearly exclusively on catch-and-shoot situations as 80% of his three point baskets come after an assist.

Finally, a number that is interesting, especially for young players getting a lot of minutes, is the turnover ratio. And here, Vesely averages only 1.3 turnover per Euroleague game in 23.6 minutes of action. This gives him an excellent 0.19 turnover per individual possession in every Euroleague game.

You can find these stats for Jan Vesely and for a multitude of other Euroleague players on Simon’s website: The Jan Vesely player page can be found here.

Update: Simon also created a video recap on Vesely’s game against Barcelona. See it below to get a full picture of the forward’s game.