Okay, at the end of the last article, I wrote that I\u2019d run the Statistical Doppelganger Machine on Bilal Coulibaly, completely forgetting I\u2019d already done it. Senior moment, I guess.<\/p>\n
At this point, there are maybe three more players I\u2019m interested in running through The Machine. Today, let\u2019s talk Justin Champagnie.<\/p>\n
For reasons that were never quite clear to me, Champagnie was not drafted. He\u2019d been a reasonably productive player at Pitt, and I had him rated as a late first or early second rounder in YODA. Not getting drafted put him into an early career fight for opportunities, and he may have found a home with the Wizards.<\/p>\n
He started last season on a two-way contract, made the most of chances to play, got a nice payday when the team signed him to a multi-year deal, and then continued to play well in an expanded role when they traded Kyle Kuzma. This may sound like a hot take, but Champagnie was better than Kuzma last season.<\/p>\n
At the risk of converting that \u201chot take\u201d into a scorcher, Champagnie\u2019s 2024-24 was better than any season of Kuzma\u2019s career.<\/p>\n
That said, while Champagnie was pretty good last season (PPA: 114), the sample was still small enough (1,340 minutes) to still keep him in \u201cwait and see\u201d mode.<\/p>\n
For those new to the series, the Statistical Doppelganger Machine takes a reference season (in this case, Champagnie last year) and compares it to every other player season since 1977-78. The Machine uses 14 box score and data categories, including age, but does not include position or height.<\/p>\n
Here are Champagnie\u2019s comps:<\/p>\n
Next through the Statistical Doppelganger Machine: CJ McCollum or Kris Middleton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Okay, at the end of the last article, I wrote that I\u2019d run the Statistical Doppelganger Machine on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85,93248],"class_list":{"0":"post-135077","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-washington-wizards-statistical-analysis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}