Pelton mail: Who might emerge as best young Team USA player?

This week's mailbag features your questions on some shot-hungry Wolves, a team with a surprising history of winning close games, who might emerge as the best Under-23 Team USA player and whether the Suns are facing a prolonged eclipse.

You can tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.

I don't know that I would necessarily include Jeff Teague as a high-usage player, but Andy is definitely correct to note that theMinnesota Timberwolveshave an unusually high number of players with the ability (and desire) to create their own shots.

To quantify this, we can take a look at a part of my SCHOENE projection system that adjusts player usage and efficiency to make sure they collectively are using only the number of plays the team is actually projected to have based on its pace. Over the 10 years that I've been doing SCHOENE projections, Minnesota has one of the biggest downward usage adjustments for any team:

The adjustment is the amount by which we'd have to multiply each player's projected usage so the team averages 20 percent, weighted by minutes played. On the other hand, here are the teams with the lowest projected usage rates over the same span.

If you're wondering about the Oklahoma City Thunder, after adding Carmelo Anthony and Paul George, they actually only rank eighth in terms of most projected usage this season. That's because Russell Westbrook's usage already was projected to regress to the mean;Enes Kanter and Victor Oladipo were relatively high-usage players for them last season; and their role players are generally low-usage types.

Intriguingly, this year'sJazzhave more usage to make up than any team in the past decade, and by a wide margin: Utah is further from last year'sMiami Heatthan the Heat were to the team ranked 10th on the list.

So which team would you rather have? Taking out this year's teams, the 10 teams with the most projected usage have averaged a .548 winning percentage, or 45 wins over a full season. The 10 teams with the least projected usage have averaged a .431 winning percentage, or 35 wins.

Of course, you probably didn't need this kind of analysis to know that the Cleveland Cavaliers were going to struggle after LeBron James' departure or that the 2015-16 Philadelphia 76ers would lose plenty of games. The more interesting question to me is whether usage is overvalued or undervalued, so I compared the performance of these teams to their lines -- and found they were just about right, on average.

The high-usage teams were projected to win 54.4 percent of their games, and the low-usage teams were projected to win 42.8 percent. So it seems conventional wisdom has a surprisingly good handle on the value of shot creation at the team level, and there's no particular reason to worry about whether the Timberwolves' inability to keep everyone happy will hurt them on the court.

Zach was writing in response to Friday's piece about Minnesota's long track record of losing close games. No team has overperformed in games decided by five points or fewer over the last 10 years as much as the Timberwolves have underperformed (coming up 19.7 wins shy of expected), but a few teams come close.

The Hornets/Pelicans also came out on top when I last looked at these rankings, for 2004-05 through 2009-10. The Dallas Mavericks were second at the time, but they have since regressed to the mean. If you can find a common denominator among these teams, you're ahead of me.

My favorite thing from this chart is that theKingsmake the list -- despite being 16 games below .500 in close games over the past decade -- entirely because they were so much worse in more lopsided games. Sacramento's unlikely success in close games is all the more reason to believe Minnesota hasn't struggled in them simply because of a bad roster.

Yes, there has been an interesting run of the best young talent in recent drafts coming from overseas or north of the border -- at least in international terms, sinceKarl-Anthony Townsrepresents the Dominican Republic but grew up in New Jersey. Using 23 as the cutoff also rules out Anthony Davis, who is plenty young enough to be an anchor for USA Basketball but is now 24.

Looking at last season's top 25 under 25 list compiled by a team of Amin Elhassan, David Thorpe and me, Jabari Parker was the highest-ranked American international age 23 or younger. Next up were Myles Turner and D'Angelo Russell.

If we're looking for sheer upside, the answer is probably someone from this year's draft class, where the top six picks --Markelle Fultz, Lonzo Ball, Jayson Tatum, Josh Jackson, De'Aaron Fox and Jonathan Isaac--plus No. 9 pick Dennis Smith Jr. all are Americans. One of them will perhaps emerge as the most promising young American by the end of this season. (My projections have Ball leading the pack.)

Incidentally, the concentration of young international talent in the NBA might ultimately give the league the option of going to a USA vs. the world format for the All-Star Game, if the new draft model is found lacking.

I don't know about three or four, but theSuns certainly aren't as bad as they looked in their 48-point loss to the Portland Trail Blazersin their home opener. That game plus Friday's home loss to the Lakers dropped Phoenix's projection in FiveThirtyEight's CARM-Elo model by five wins to 26, on average, which is still better than the Chicago Bulls and even with the Kings. (To your point, the Suns also do have a better rating than theAtlanta Hawks, who win slightly more games, on average, in simulations because they're in the weaker East.)

Of course, we only have to look back as far as the Golden State Warriors getting blown out by the San Antonio Spurs in their home opener to see how misleading a dreadful opening-game performance can be. Because the Warriors are in that group, the other eight teams to lose at home by 20-plus points over the past decade averaged a respectable .468 winning percentage that season, including three teams (the 2007-08 Warriors, 2015-16Memphis Grizzliesand 2015-16 Houston Rockets) that went .500 or better. So all hope is not lost for Phoenix.