A lot of rookies who come into the league are not always comfortable with talking to the media or are not even comfortable with the English language.
However, the Suns’ Tyler Ennis ranks near the top when it comes to speech sophistication, at least according to this study from Harvard University. The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective did some research and took a limited look at the speech sophistication of rookies coming into the league.
They used a technique called the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula. It is admittedly imperfect, but it is a way to grade out the written word based on sentence and word length. If you want to hear Ennis for yourself, here is a video from the NBA Draft Combine where he’s answering a bunch of questions with no prompting whatsoever.
The research says that Ennis speaks at a 6.3 grade level and for comparison, his teammate, T.J. Warren speaks at a 2.4 grade level. He sounds pretty smart to me, but I suppose you can make your own decision on that matter. If it helps though, Suns coach Jeff Hornacek has said that Ennis has grasped the playbook pretty quickly.
