Charlotte Hornets: Comparing LaMelo Ball’s rookie campaign to Ja Morant’s through 20 games
Average Rebounds and Turnovers Per Game
As much as LaMelo Ball likes to dish the ball to his teammates, what he may like even more is rebounding the basketball. At the beginning of the season he was quietly racking up rebounds, but by the tenth game of the year, he had amassed over 60 rebounds and became the youngest player in NBA history to earn a triple-double.
The rebounding portion of a point guard’s game often gets overlooked, mainly because they are not asked to do a lot of rebounding. Somehow this message was not relayed to Ball. In 8 of his first 18 games, Ball has had more rebounds than assists, and in 3 games he had more rebounds than he did points. That’s pretty impressive for a point guard.
As for Ja Morant, he has only had 2 games where he had more rebounds than assists, and in zero of his first 20 games did he have more rebounds than points. This is not to say that he is a poor rebounder, but it does speak volumes to how good LaMelo is at playing big.
In the first quarter, of his first season, Morant averaged 3.2 rebounds per game. For Ball, he averages 5.9 rebounds per game, which puts him at nearly three more rebounds per game than Morant!
Another aspect of a player’s game that people like to compare, is the number of turnovers that the player commits. Everyone knows that a lot of points and assists are good things, but if the player turns the ball over a lot, how good is he really?
Morant averaged 3.25 turnovers per game, whereas Ball is only averaging 2.4 turnovers a game. Ball is doing a better job at protecting the ball in the first quarter of the season than the winner of last year’s Rookie of the Year. I’ll take that every day of the week.
Ball is making a great case that he deserves to be atop of the Rookie of the Year leaderboard. While he doesn’t average as many points as Morant, or have as high of a field goal percentage, he continues to prove that he can hold his own in the NBA. He is only shooting 6% lower than Morant did and his average number of assists per game is only half of an assist lower than Morant’s.
On the other hand, Ball is a much better rebounder than Morant, averaging nearly 3 more rebounds per game, and the cherry on top is that Ball averages fewer turnovers than Morant. Ball is making a great case for himself to win Rookie of the Year. If he continues on this trajectory, Ball would be the first Hornets player to win the award since Emeka Okafor won it in 2005, and would be only the third player in franchise history to hold that honor.