Fantasy Blogs  |  The Court Jester  |  

My diabolical opponent, team Whipping Post, beat me out in the Brook Lopez bidding war in October. And the Nets center has rewarded WP’s perfidy by ranking 14^th in the league this year by averages.

But I have retaliated, matching WP Lopez for Lopez. I grabbed Brook’s brother Robin a couple of weeks ago. (He’s available in about 90 percent of ESPN/NBA leagues.)

However, I have one small problem: while the Lopezes are twins (perhaps identical ones, though even they are not sure), their stats are as different as twins of the Schwarzenegger/DeVito variety.

 Here are the Lopez family’s season averages (SCR is their overall leaguewide rank in my system, which is calculated much like ESPN/NBA’s except that a score of 0 represents the average player in a typical league).

	FG%	FT%	PTS	3M	REB	AST	STL	BLK	TOV	SCR
Brook Lopez 09-10	.502	.825	18.9	0.0	9.1	2.2	0.8	2.0	2.5	2.81
Robin Lopez 09-10	.610	.692	7.0	0.0	3.8	0.1	0.1	1.0	0.8	-4.27

Okay, Robin has been playing more like Jennifer Lopez than Brook. And note that these dismal numbers actually make Robin appear better than he truly has been, as he has logged many DNPs which don’t show up on the averages.

But I’m banking on the fact that Robin will turn out to be a player of Brook’s caliber. And why not? These two share very similar, and quite probably identical, genes. What’s more, their nurture as well as their nature was extremely comparable. Same parents, same high school, and they even played at the same college, Stanford.

Brook was born a minute earlier; maybe mama Lopez always loved him better for this, giving him fat steaks while Robin was forced to eat the leftover gristle. Maybe Robin’s Sideshow Bob hairdo creates aerodynamic drag that slows down his game. But in all, one might think that twin players should make for twin stat sheets. Do they?

Let’s examine the pairs of twins who have played in the NBA. In addition to the Lopezes, they are: Dick and Tom Van Arsdale; Horace and Harvey Grant; Joey and Stephen Graham; Jarron and Jason Collins, and Carl and Charles Thomas. The Thomases weren’t in the league for long, so let’s consider the other pairs.

The lessons they demonstrate? Great difference between twins’ careers are perfectly possible. Horace Grant played 17 years and has 4 championship rings to show for it; Harvey managed only 11. Horace averaged 33 mpg vs. 26 for Harvey. This would indicate that Robin may continue as a pale imitation of Brook, perhaps for his entire career.

But career numbers are the product of many things, including minutes, touches, team chemistry, and of course longevity. Of perhaps greater interest, because it is a better gauge of a player’s true quality, is per 36 minute average production. Comparing apples to apples over the course of their careers:

	FG%	FT%	PTS	3M	REB	AST	STL	BLK	TOV	SCR
D. Van Arsdale	.464	.790	17.1		4.3	3.5	1.1	0.2
T. Van Arsdale	.433	.703	17.9		4.9	2.6	0.9	0.1
Horace Grant	.509	.692	12.1	0.0	8.8	2.4	1.1	1.1	1.2	0.88
Harvey Grant	.469	.709	13.7	0.1	6.0	2.1	1.1	0.8	1.3	-1.07
Jason Collins	.410	.647	6.4	0.1	6.6	1.6	0.9	0.9	1.4	-4.35
Jarron Collins	.459	.701	9.0	0.0	6.7	1.8	0.6	0.4	1.4	-4.89
Joey Graham	.478	.822	13.2	0.3	6.3	1.2	0.8	0.2	1.8	-2.25
Stephen Graham	.445	.806	13.9	0.8	5.9	1.3	0.9	0.5	2.3	-2.63

In all, I’d call those numbers eerily similar. Clearly these pairs are vastly closer than two NBA players picked at random would be, and I’d bet the house they are much more similar than even two randomly picked players of the same height would be.

And Brook and Robin? Here are their numbers, per 36 minutes, for last season:

	FG%	FT%	PTS	3M	REB	AST	STL	BLK	TOV	SCR
Brook Lopez 08-09	.531	.793	15.4	0.0	9.6	1.2	0.6	2.2	1.6	2.55
Robin Lopez 08-09	.518	.691	11.1	0.0	6.9	0.5	0.6	2.4	1.7	-0.82

And this season:

	FG%	FT%	PTS	3M	REB	AST	STL	BLK	TOV	SCR
Brook Lopez 09-10	.499	.826	18.7	0.0	9.2	2.2	0.8	2.0	2.4	2.70
Robin Lopez 09-10	.610	.690	14.6	0.0	8.4	0.2	0.3	2.3	1.7	0.44

No, the players are not on the same plane. But given equal minutes they are a lot closer than they seem from the season stats, and the gap seems to be closing.

The main difference is Robin’s very poor free throw shooting. Why Robin and Brook should differ so starkly on this is a mystery to me; one would think that if twins would be the same in any stat it would be free throws, which eliminate any factors which are not intrinsic to the player.

What does all of this mean?

First, Robin is already a strong player. By my calculations, Robin would be about 50^th in the league this year if he was getting 36 minutes. That’s worth a spot on your squad for sure – provided, of course, that Robin gets the minutes.

And more minutes he has been getting. After getting less than 10 mpg in November and December, which doesn’t even count all his DNPs, Robin has been starting and getting almost 26 minutes in the last 10 games. During this time he is a very respectable 65^th in the league by averages.

You’ll also note Robin’s dramatic improvement, even on a per minute basis, from last year to this one. He’s young and definitely on the upswing. Brook has benefitted from the fact that he plays on a woeful team and has had a much greater opportunity to develop his game. But Robin is now getting some on-the-court experience too.

Robin will probably improve at free throws; he’s trending in the right direction, shooting .612 in college and .690 in the pros.

Also, I love watching Robin’s game – like David Lee he never stops hustling and has the athleticism to get up and down the floor in the Suns up-tempo offense.

In case you’re like my opponent Burgh Scourge, for whom any player is only as good as his last game, Robin had 11 points and 7 boards in 18 minutes Wednesday night. The only reason he didn’t do more is that I made the mistake of watching him play for five minutes, which jinxed him into picking up 2 immediate fouls, sending him to the bench.

And finally, as the numbers above show, if history is any guide twins end up posting remarkably similar per minute stats.

In sum, give Robin a hard look. Over the remainder of the season, and into the future, the omens say he’s going to look more and more like his dominating brother.

At least for the sake of my squad I hope he will.