But that’s fine, and if you look at my rebuttal, I am not even disagreeing with your inference. I think the tighter data I used set leads to a more defendable, though hardly less dire, inference. Guaranteeing the likes of Al Harrington what RJ is going to get payed for the next 5 years is a scary prospect. Could he be worse than the 28,000 minutes of inefficient usage eater that was Al Harrington? Sure. I think he will be better than that, but how much is hardly clear to me.

I didn’t know you interpret the word as tantamount to “opinion.” So yeah, I am using the data on that list along with a lot of other data points to arrive at the opinion that RJ Barrett is unlikely to be good in the future.

That’s not a conclusion?

Who is drawing conclusions? I posted a list that demonstrates players who are as bad as RJ over their first 7,000 minutes very rarely turn into good NBA players. If you think there are circumstances surrounding RJ that make him likely to buck that trend, you’re entitled to that opinion.

I personally don’t. He began his career earlier than many people on that list, but he also is simply lacking in essential skills that players tend to demonstrate very early in their careers.

I’ll use a random but telling example: as a 19 year-old rookie, De’Aaron Fox sucked overall. However he finished at a 60% clip around the rim, good for the 66th percentile among point guards. It was clear the guy had serious skill even if he couldn’t be productive as a rookie. Fast forward a few years and Fox is very good, with his finishing at the rim being the skill he builds the rest of his game around.

There’s no equivalent for RJ. There’s absolutely nothing that stands out when you look at his career. He’s been bad-to-average at basically everything outside of low-volume 3PT shooting during the empty gyms season.

On the bright side Mitch is apparently available today!

There’s just nothing

But this in and of itself suggests that the sample size is to small to reach any meaningful conclusions beyond the odds being small that RJ will blossom into a top-level star.

I dont see the value of comparing RJ to guys like Eddy Curry (ate himself out of the league) or Enes Kanter (a pure C who was unplayable defensively) or Tristan Thonpson (a low usage PF) or Sebastian Telfair (a 6’0″ PG) or Spencer Hawes (a journeyman backup pure C). Collin Sexton, a tiny scoring PG, is a stretch as well. RJ is a scoring wing, and should be compared to other scoring wings.

So if you compare RJ to the comparable players, I’d rank them from worst to best as follows:
Stanley Johnson
Ben McLemore
Al Harrington
Andrew Wiggins
Zach LaVine
DeMar DeRozan

And that’s where I’m at. I think it is extremely unlikely that RJ will ever be as good as DeMar DeRozan or a *healthy* Zach Lavine, or as bad as Stanley Johnson or Ben McLemore. So somewhere in the range between better than Al Harrington but not as good as Zach LaVine, with a Andrew Wiggins-ish median outcome seems about right to me.