One thing I've noticed a lot in the StR comments sections this season is the assumption that this is a "young" NBA basketball team. But the better evaluation is whether it's a young team relative to the rest of the NBA.

It's been my theory for a while that Coach Joerger still has his feet on both sides of the fence - ostensibly developing the young talent, but attempting to win games at the same time. To this point, it's arguable if he's doing the former, and clear that he isn't doing the latter. And this, in my opinion, draws into question whether he's the right coach for a rebuilding team.

So I decided to run a quick and dirty (and not peer reviewed) analysis of the league through yesterday's games. I pulled a list of players from Basketball Reference for the 2017-2018 season - primarily I was looking for minutes played and players' ages. I averaged out the age of the roster, strictly based on the sum of the ages divided by the total number of players. The Kings are the 15th oldest team in the league based on this criteria (important context: Vince Carter and Zach Randolph).

Then I did a pretty simple calculation from there - I figured out what I call "Aged Minutes". Simply, I multiplied the ages of each player by the number of minutes that player has played for each team. Then I divided that number by the total number of minutes played for that team. The resulting statistic would be a rough "Average Age" or "Effective Age" for each minute played for each team. By this criteria, the Kings are the 14th oldest team in the league.

In essence, the Kings have some youth - but they aren't necessarily focusing on it.

As you would expect, there's a ton of context required here, but I thought it was an interesting exercise nonetheless, and mostly to compare and contrast the Kings and other "rebuilding" teams in the league. On the chart below, I've added the current Net Rating rank for each team (per NBA.com this morning):

Without going too deeply, I'd say that if you're at the top of that list, you want that number on the right to be pretty low. So if you're a Mavs, Grizzlies or Clippers fan the future is probably a bit scary right now. At the other end of the spectrum, you'd be pretty optimistic as a Celtics fan.

There's a lot of important context missing, of course. Salary cap situations, draft assets in pocket, the ability to bring in free agent talent, and impending free agents on your own roster (hello, New Orleans) affect the ability to turn around a franchise - in either direction.

But for our Kings, this analysis tells me a few things: the old guys are playing too much (and the young guys are playing too little), and that our "mentors" may be teaching our young kids how to lose, based on the team's overall performance to this point.

Outside of that, things do appear to be going swimmingly.

Discuss!