Behold! The science says Andre Drummond is the most explosive big man in the league (yes, really)
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WHEN LEBRON JAMES walks onto the court for tipoff against the Detroit Pistons, he might as well tug up his shorts, bend his knees and get in his defensive stance right away. James may not know it, and the millions watching may not know it either, but there's almost no chance he'll retrieve the ball on the opening jump.
That's because just a few feet away, crouching at the center circle, stands jump-ball wunderkind Andre Drummond. The 22-year-old, despite standing shorter than a large portion of his jump-ball adversaries, has won 69.4 percent of jump-balls since he has been in the league. That's an astounding figure that ranks as the best career rate among all active players and tops for every sub-7-footer on record, according to tracking by analytics site Nylon Calculus. Only 7-3 Arvydas Sabonis, 7-1 Shaquille O'Neal and 7-3 Zydrunas Ilgauskas have been more successful at winning the ball out of the air since this data became available in 1998.
This particular skill isn't just about height. If it were, Yao Ming wouldn't have a 43.2 career win rate. And it's not just about having limbs for days either, or else Anthony Davis would check in higher than 39.5 percent.
What Drummond has, and others near-300 pounders lack, is freakish athleticism that allows him to reach towering heights faster than anybody. But that's only the beginning of it. More to the point: What Drummond has worked to develop -- including terrific reaction time and elite neuroprocessing -- might be the most mechanically perfect body in the NBA.
And the science proves it.
A SIMPLE QUESTION is posed to Eric Leidersdorf, the lead biomechanist at the sports science lab P3 Peak Performance: How would you define athleticism in a single 140-character tweet?
The bearded Stanford-grad pauses as he sits at his desk in Santa Barbara, California. He launches into a lengthy monologue filled with scientific jargon, as if he were a modern-day Sir Isaac Newton. Phrases such as "kinematic quality," "force generation capabilities" and "eccentric workloads" pour from his mouth.
After nearly a minute of expert technical explanation, Leidersdorf stops himself and begins to laugh.
"Or honestly, just be like Andre Drummond."
More than 100 NBA big men have walked through the doors at P3 -- a former disco dance hall nestled about a football field away from the shores of Santa Barbara -- to get tested for their biomechanics and to optimize their movement patterns. None of them, according to P3's scientists, walked out of there having checked more boxes on their assessment than Drummond.
"He checks off all the same boxes that the perimeter players do," says Dr. Marcus Elliott, the founder and lead scientist at P3. "That's super rare for a big man. You almost never have a guy that big who's comparable to a 200-pound guy. There's usually a give back."
Stan Van Gundy, Drummond's head coach and the Pistons' president of basketball operations, had to see it for himself. As Drummond spent six weeks at P3 this past summer to train and get ready for his upcoming contract season, Van Gundy flew out and received a first-hand overview about what P3 was all about and what its technology had to say about his star player.
It was a pivotal summer for Drummond. The playoffs were within reach and so was an All-Star bid. Real dollars were at stake too. If Drummond stayed healthy and honed his craft, he would be in line for a potential max contract in the summer of 2016.
Van Gundy read the charts that detailed Drummond's performance data. And what he learned was jaw-dropping.
It's not just that Drummond has a high vertical (30 inches) and generates more force in the vertical plane when he jumps than 90 percent of all P3 athletes. It's not just that he moves laterally better than 87 percent of all NBA players tested -- guards included. It's not just that his second jump is lightning-quick and it rises four inches higher than his positional mean. The baffling thing? He does all of these things and more.
"Drummond has what we call a big jump vocabulary, meaning he can jump in a whole lot of different ways really well," Elliott says. "We get some athletes who are amazing jumpers that are in a really limited setting. If things are set up just right for them, they're freaks. Drummond will go off two legs, he'll go off his right leg, left leg, right leg on an angle, left leg on an angle, all those things, he does it exceptionally well."
Ask Drummond what stands out the most about his time at P3 and he immediately points to the stimulus-response test -- when a P3 staffer holds two tennis balls, one in each hand, extended out to his sides like a uppercase "T." The task for the athlete, who is facing the staffer a couple feet away, is to slide one meter laterally in the direction of the ball once it is dropped. But the athlete doesn't know which ball will be dropped.
This task measures reaction time, force generated and speed -- three critical barometers for an NBA athlete like Drummond. Simply put: When reacting to a visual stimulus, Drummond generates more force in the lateral plane, which helps to power his way through traffic than any other big man tested at P3. And he does it quicker than 91 percent of big men tested.
Drummond turns 23 years old this August and, before that, the plan is to spend the summer at P3 once again. The status as the NBA's best big man is there for the taking. Drummond just has to go up and get it. It just might take longer than he's used to.
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