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Enes Kanter plays for the Utah Jazz, and he is only 22 years old. As a point of reference, Adam Keefe was 27 when he was starting for the Utah Jazz on an NBA Finals team, and playing 26 mpg for Jerry Sloan. You wouldn't really call Keefe a potential NBA Championship level starter; especially not if you look at his career resume. It is practically dwarfed by what Enes Kanter has done . . . and done at the age of 22 and under.
From the 1963-64 season till today we have *some* stats. We don't have ALL the stats, but it's still a pretty big data set. And within that data set of easily indexed and searched NBA History we find that our guy -- the same guy some people have already turned their backs on -- is a pretty special guy.
| NBA Ranks ('63-15) | |||||||||||||||
| Enes Kanter (22 years and younger) | Entire NBA | Just Bigmen | Utah Jazz | ||||||||||||
| 1 | 16 | + | PTS | t - 139 | t - 45 | 4 | |||||||||
| 2 | 10 | + | PTS | 10 | + | REB | t - 51 | 35 | 2 | ||||||
| 3 | 20 | + | PTS | 20 | + | REB | t- 15 | t- 15 | 1 | ||||||
| 4 | 10 | + | PTS | 5 | + | REB | 1 | + | 3PTA | t - 103 | t - 27 | 3 | |||
| 5 | 0.6 | + | FG% | t - 57 | t - 49 | 2 | |||||||||
Yes, those numbers are accurate. For a Utah Jazz player at the age of 22 and younger (which there are 60 different players who qualify for that) he is in the Top 5 of all the major things I've found to be notable. He's 4th in total 16+ point games. He's 2nd in Points/Rebounds double doubles. He's 1st in 20/20 games. He's 3rd in 10 point, 5 rebound, 1 made three games. And he's 2nd in 60.0 fg% games. That's not bad at all when looking at the Jazz.
If you are looking at just bigmen (centers and power forwards, but not including threes who also play four, like LeBron James, Andrei Kirilenko, etc) he's Top 50 in each of those five things as well. And if you open up the flood gates for the entire history of the NBA for each position he's still not *that* bad. He's Top 100 in three of the five things. And if he has a strong second half of this season, where he's still 22, he could easily climb in some of these ranks.
Enes Kanter has an impressive resume so far. He's never going to block shots like Rudy Gobert. He's never going to hit threes like Mehmet Okur. And he is clearly never going to be the second coming of Karl Malone. But as a designated scorer, who can post up, score in paint isolation, off of offensive rebounds, and on spot ups, or the pick and pop . . . he's put up some nice numbers so far as a guy who isn't yet old enough to rent a car.
For the record, Rudy Gobert is also 22 years old, and he's not making much of an appearance on many of these searches. And that's fine. He's a very different kind of player and he needs to do very different things on the court. A good team needs many players to be successful.
In his short career Kanter has been individually successful when scoring is concerned. Hopefully he learns to have good games as a part of a winning team. Though, it seems more likely that he could become Al Jefferson -ish. Their cumulative careers at the age of 22 show some similarities. Big Al was more paint oriented, and thus got to the line more and shot a better percentage, but Enes is more capable of making jumpers, and even hitting threes.
If the trade market is any indication, teams don't want to pay full price for a big who can score buckets. It seems absurd to want to move him without trying to FIX the problem first. Especially not for such a hard worker who is so young.