He is smart enough to know that is a low-percentage play. Teodosic relishes the near-impossible pass. We all love Milos Teodosic for his cleverness and derring-do, but that has a downside: He dished two total in 238 minutes as a rookie, a Yinka Dare (Rest in Peace) level of hoggery that would have counted as one of the lowest assists seasons ever.īaby steps! 4. Davis has 33 assists this season - almost two per 36 minutes. Davis will eventually have to master a boatload of more complex skills: longer passes to shooters in the weak-side corner, dump-offs, floaters, stop-and-start footwork, fake passes.īut you have to start somewhere, and this represents progress. It is the easiest one Davis hits a shooter in the strong-side corner - the closest target, in his direct line of sight. That is a crucial read for any pick-and-roll big man. On the flip side, here's Deyonta Davis using extended tanking minutes to make a play that matters: It is baldly and simply setting yourself up to lose, and without any of the player development benefits Memphis might net from playing normal lineups that would lose anyway. Playing triple-big lineups, and using Parsons at 2-guard, is not proper rebuilding - not when you have plenty of point guards and wings, including a few who might matter to the 2018-19 Grizzlies. Playing untested young guys at the end of a lost season is part of rebuilding - especially when a reverse-order draft, or something like it, incentivizes teams to lose.
This is a real thing that has happened in real NBA games. They have even dabbled with ultra-big lineups featuring Chandler Parsons at shooting guard. The Grizzlies have been starting him at small forward. Martin is a power forward with power forward skills. This is not something he can apply in the future. There is almost certainly no near-term in-game context in which the Memphis Grizzlies will ask Martin to hoist jump shots off the dribble. He's going to need that shot - and the pump-and-drive it unlocks - in real games.
Want Martin to practice his pick-and-pop 3-pointer? Fire away, big fella. But most of those revelations concern skills that arise in normal NBA contexts. Sometimes, you discover they are more ready to do those things in games than you had thought. There is some value in permitting young guys to try things outside their skill set. In his defense, Holiday was chucking like this early in the season, before Zach LaVine and Nikola Mirotic returned. This is one danger of tanking: players chasing numbers outside of any coherent system. This is Jarell Martin, a below-average shooter on open catch-and-shoot looks, grabbing the ball at the elbow and deciding, "What the hell, I'm going dribble left and shoot this bad boy." He vomited up an even worse off-the-bounce job two minutes earlier. The tankiest bunch of tank shots that ever tanked But he deserves serious consideration for both MVP runner-up and Defensive Player of the Year. He has averaged about seven drives per 100 possessions in that stretch, up from about four before then, per Second Spectrum tracking data.ĭavis isn't going to win MVP, and he shouldn't. If Davis is going to start roasting guys from the arc to the basket, we might as well fold the league and earmark an MVP or three for him.ĭavis has seamlessly absorbed more ball-handling responsibility since DeMarcus Cousins' season-ending injury. One quarter later, Davis absolutely dusted Al Horford - the rare big man who can at least approach Davis' foot speed - with another crossover. Lowe: How Lillard and the Blazers found a brand-new ceiling.This clip is literally Anthony Davis handling like a guard. We often hear how these unicorn big men dribble like guards, and it is usually an exaggeration. But when he needs to, Davis busts out stuff like this: Davis still averages less than one dribble per touch - not unusual for a big man finisher. But to reach his ceiling as a do-it-all force, the Pelicans knew he would have to grow as a ball-handler. He covered so much ground, he sometimes didn't need a second. The younger Davis was comfortable dribbling only once. Anthony Davis, crossing you upįour years ago, Kevin Hanson, the New Orleans Pelicans' assistant coach who has gone deepest into the player development weeds with Davis, told me about their next big challenge: coaxing Davis toward two-dribble moves. Here are 10 things with about 10 games to go: 1.
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