OK, the Da Silva discussion has been bothering me for a few weeks now. I realize in the world of sports message boards, there is no room between "Future Naismith Award Winner" and "Waste of Scholarship", but I'm nowhere near as high as a lot of posters are on him. For the record, I view him as a solid player who is a glue guy that should get rotation minutes off of the bench all four years here but never starts. I hope I'm wrong. It would be fun for him to be a starter and turn into a badass. I personally just don't see it. So with that disclaimer out of the way...
I was looking over his KenPom numbers. And honestly, except for a 7 game stretch (and really, it's a four game stretch with three "meh" games at the end), he was pretty generic. Which is what you expect from a freshman who wasn't highly recruited. But I feel like people are paying more attention to that 7 (4) game stretch than the other 20+ games. And I did this exercise with Dinwiddie after his freshman year to predict he was going to be a star (I have a 100% average so clearly this is FACT and you can't argue) so I figured I'd do the same thing with Da Silva because I don't want to work right now. I basically took the five "most comparable" players to him and figured out how they did the next year compared to the year that was most comparable for Da Silva. Again, small sample size and with these five there are a few other variables that cause it to be even more sporadic with predictions, but it could at least give us a guide. For those that don't have KenPom subscriptions, I shame you, but give you the five comps:
* Niels Giffey 2011 (UConn)
* Yavuz Gultekin 2020 (Texas A&M)
* Keith Smith 2017 (Oregon)
* Chris Jones 2014 (Pitt)
* Alex Illikainen 2016 (Wisconsin)
The two weird results, that may not change the results but are worth pointing out are that Gultekin transferred to San Diego for the follow up year, so he was going against lower quality competition and Jones jumped from 7.4 mpg to 27.4 mpg. Now, with all of that said, here's how the numbers jumped on average:
* %Min - 190%
* ORtg - 96.5%
* %Poss - 102%
* eFG% - 94%
* TS% - 94%
* Offensive Rebound% - 92%
* Defensive Rebound% - 121%
* Assist Rate - 109%
* TORate - 97%
TL;DR version - minutes went up a lot, but efficiency went down (which makes sense). Most of inefficiency comes from shooting %, but they got better passing the ball and not losing it and grabbing defensive rebounds. So with that, we would get the following numbers from Da Silva:
| % Min | ORtg | Poss% | eFG% | TS% | OR% | DR% | ARate | TORate |
Da Silva ('20) | 17.3 | 98.2 | 16.7 | 56.9 | 57.3 | 4.5 | 9.2 | 6.9 | 24.5 |
Da Silva ('21*) | 32.9 | 94.8 | 17.0 | 53.7 | 53.6 | 4.1 | 11.1 | 7.6 | 23.8 |
So, in conclusion, there is nothing in the numbers to suggest that Da Silva is going to make the jump that people seem to be projecting. Doesn't mean it won't happen. Lord knows we've seen stranger things. But I feel like it's unfair to the kid to be putting these sorts of expectations on him. I think it's more likely that he ends up being a Chen - a kid who plays a few solid minutes and provides defense and maybe in his senior year ends up getting some quality minutes while never carrying the team.