Just a little background before starting this. My best friend from high school went to the University of Kentucky for college, so I've been watching SEC basketball for the last decade. Over the last two years, I watched Glen Davis go from surprise star in 2005-2006 to a guy who could still perform but was letting the extra weight slow him down in 2006-2007 and drop his draft stock. It's certainly nice to see him succeeding as he seems like a truly good person.

In the meantime, ESPN has thrown up a lot rankings related to rookie performances and I thought I'd throw some of them up here, since our very own Big Baby Davis is making quite the name for himself. John Hollinger is the stat man over at the World Wide Leader. He has a stat called PER, which stands for Player Efficiency Rating and is a way to look at per minute productivity of players. This is important because it can show how good a sixth man truly is compared to guys we believe to be stars in this league. You can check out the breakdown of PER here.

In the meantime, Hollinger put together his PER for rookies. According to the rankings, Big Baby is #1 among all rookies. Hollinger mentioned in a chat that he would expect the PER to go down as Davis gets more minutes (particularly with Perkins hurt), but maybe he'll keep up the performance. Either way, it's certainly nice to have a rookie stepping up out of the shadows of the superstars. Combine that with quality play from Rondo and Perkins and things are coming together nicely aside from Garnett, Pierce and Allen.

There was one other ranking worth checking out. David Thorpe (also of ESPN) gives his own top 10 of rookies and Baby is 5th there behind Kevin Durant, Al Horford, Jamario Moon and Corey Brewer.

Obviously there is plenty of time left in the season and Big Baby could very well hit the rookie wall. In the meantime, let's enjoy the performance to this point and the fun times Glen "Big Baby" Davis brings night in and night out.