When we look at the question 'Is a player good', the most obvious answer is how he contributes to a team when they're winning. When a team is losing, we look at how good he is in a vacuum and mostly just focus on his individual success. After all, it requires a team to succeed, and the Utah Jazz are missing those key assets to win games. So it's not fair right now to look at someone like Taylor Hendricks and ask "Is he helping the team win" because no one really is.
So because his play isn't impacting the wins, we have to look at how his play looks in a vacuum and we're sorry to anyone who may be a fan of his, but he isn't exactly playing well.
He's not playing badly, but you can see some issues with his game. For instance, he takes nearly 20% of his shots from between 3' and 10' of the basket, and nails about 46% of those shots. The problem is inside 3' and outside of 10' he's averaging 75% and 67% respectively.
That doesn't help matters when he shoots just 36% from the three-point line but takes nearly 60% of his shots from behind the arc. He's not terrible at shooting threes, but he doesn't need to take so many.
Rebounding also hasn't been great. Over the last 13 games, he's had just five of which where he broke the six-rebound barrier. For a power forward that many wanted to use in place of John Collins (8.5 rebounds per game), you'd hope he'd be better at rebounding. Hendricks is pulling in just half of Collins' mark, so clearly he's not the player inside we'd hope he'd be.
There is an upside, his perimeter defense is shockingly very solid and he's an upgrade inside on defense compared to Collins, but he's also limited offensively and doesn't have a dynamic move set that you'd hope a Top 10 pick would have.
Upside, but an incomplete project right now.
If you watch him, you can see that, but Hoops Reference seems to think that just because he's starting now on a bad team, that he's had a rookie season worthy of a "B".
He has looked better as the season has gone on, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that Hendricks' season wasn't a disappointment to some degree. He was seen by many as a potential starter and the reason we could trade Collins, but now he's the second-best rookie of a class of guys who hasn't exactly lit the world on fire with their play.
Everyone is high on the potential here, but performance matters more than potential. We're far from writing off Hendricks but there are a lot of guys we would have taken over Hendricks at this point. AS of right now, we'd give him a "C".