It’s been about a month now since the NBA season started and the 2021 draft class hasn’t failed to impress us yet. To get a feeling of what the public thought of these rookies so far, I decided to explore their popularity since the NBA season started.
First, I looked at how often these players were searched on google as illustrated in the graph above. As you can see, it seems like Jalen Green was easily the most popular rookie to start the season, with google searches for Cade spiking for his NBA debut and with Scottie Barnes and Evan Mobley starting to gain some steam. Chris Duarte’s strong debut seemed to grab some attention, but both he and Green have tailed off a bit (in terms of google searches) as the season has gone on.
Next, I wanted to gauge the opinion of NBA Twitter so I grabbed the last 10,000 tweets relevant to each rookie and performed sentiment analysis (read more here) to see how positive the discourse around each rookie has been thus far.
Unsurprisingly, the 2 rookies with the most positive tweets are Evan Mobley and Scottie Barnes. It’s undeniable that each of them have had great starts to the season and are the frontrunners for rookie of the year.
I hope you enjoyed this fun way to look at rookie performances to start the year. If you liked this post and want to see similar content, subscribe to the newsletter, I plan to have more NBA content on the way.