Can We Use Data To Figure Out if Puka Nacua is an Emergent Star?
Early flash-in-the-pans are nothing new to the world of sports. But how can we compare those players to the one lighting up fantasy discussions right now?
Los Angeles Rams rookie wide receiver Puka Nacua reminds me a lot of another No. 17 – but it’s not Davante Adams or Garrett Wilson. It’s not Terry McLaurin or Jaylen Waddle, either. It’s Jeremy Lin.
When Lin burst onto the NBA scene, he seemed virtually unstoppable. In his first nine games – a little bit under the equivalent for the first two games of a 17-game season – he averaged 25.0 points and 9.2 assists per game. He sunk over 50 percent of his field goal attempts and earned a true shooting percentage of 58.3 percent.
His box plus-minus of +9.6 over that span of games would have finished second behind LeBron James that year.
That’s not how his year ended, however. He finished with per-game rate of 14.6 points and 6.2 assists with a field goal rate of 44.6 percent and a true shooting percentage of 55.2 percent. His final box plus-minus was +3.8.
None of those numbers are bad – some of them are extremely good – but they are a dramatic difference from his promising start. Though he started every game the following year, he settled into a long-term career of being a perennial, if valuable, backup who saw about 25 minutes a game and 30 starts a season.
Closer to home for a football blog, Matt Flynn threw for 475.5 yards and 4.5 touchdowns in his first two starts. He averaged 8.3 yards per attempt and 7.05 adjusted net yards per attempt. Those measures would have ranked sixth and seventh over the course of the 2011 season and he parlayed those numbers into a three-year, $19.5 million contract with the Seattle Seahawks.
That ranked 22nd among all NFL quarterbacks in 2012, but it was still enough to assume he would lock in his position as the Seahawks starter before some random third-round pick named Russell Wilson beat him out for the job.
Flynn wouldn’t get another starting job in the NFL.
Puka Nacua Is In Good Company
All of this is to say that short streaks of incredible production are great, but they don’t demonstrate that we have a true phenom on our hands. On the other hand, how often do receivers produce like Nacua did? Not very often.
Since 1970, the NFL has only had 67 instances of a player going on a streak lasting at least two games of ten receptions and 100 yards. Almost all of them occurred after 1994. That’s a little over twice a season. Crucially, however, many of those streaks are by the same receiver over multiple seasons or one receiver multiple times in the same season after the streak was broken.
Only 48 players have done it and 43 of them were wide receivers. It’s rare for a receiver to do it while being untalented. 38 of those 43 receivers made at least one Pro Bowl, though some of them did so at returner or other positions. 32 of them earned at least 60 yards per game over the course of their careers.
That’s not bad – 74 percent of player who went on this streak ended up being 1000-yard type receivers over the course of their career. It is possible that he turns in a career like Brett Perriman or Mike Furrey and doesn’t make much of an impact outside of that, but that seems on the lower end of likelihoods.
But Puka Nacua Defies Comparison
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