Picture this: a defender scrambling to recover, a shooter with just enough daylight, and the crowd rising in anticipation. That fleeting moment—a closeout—opens up a range of unique possibilities to generate points on that possession. You can partially thank spot-ups for the NBA’s recent scoring boom. Sure, on-ball scorers knock down threes at an unprecedented clip, but the secret sauce is how those open shots are created off-ball. In a league where spot-up plays have become the bread and butter, the variability of closeout creation might be the ultimate cheat code.
It’s no secret that NBA offenses have been improving year over year. We see teams consistently breaking through offensive rating records and this is in part due to offenses taking more efficient approaches to their shot diet. Teams are limiting the long midrange attempts they take while increasing the volume of closer shots at the rim and higher shot-quality three-point attempts.
The court is extremely spaced out which makes it difficult for defenses to cover ground and stay attached to their offensive counterparts. This enables players to have more space on their drives and get a more open shot at the rim, especially with how much NBA scheme is about engaging the tagger and drawing rim protectors away from the basket. Having multiple players who can create offense off of a closeout gives an offense more opportunities to attack defenses and derive these higher-quality shots within a 24-second shot clock. The culmination of these factors has resulted in 2-point shots achieving the same efficiency as 3-point shots in terms of points per possession.
With so much space to operate in today, primary creators can leverage their scoring tools and feel better than ever, and when advantage creators bring two to the ball, that means there’s a wide-open player somewhere on the court. While the value of high-level on-ball creators is undeniable, basketball is still a team sport at the end of the day. As important as it is to have great stars, supplementing an offense with better off-ball creation is how the best offensive teams continue to improve year after year.
Synergy, who tracks this for the NBA, defines spot-ups as possessions where the possession-ending event is a catch-and-shoot or catch-and-drive play. This could involve situations like catch-and-shoot threes, driving to the rim off a closeout, sidesteps or step-backs, or midrange shots created off the drive. One of the most straightforward ways to supplement NBA offenses is to consistently have five players on the court who can problem-solve against closeouts and leverage their tools in these situations.
Take a look at the roster construction of the NBA’s top offenses: at any given time, these teams consistently have at least four players on the floor who excel at dribbling, passing, and shooting at a high level. Teams like the Knicks, Celtics, and Thunder often have five players who can do this, and this truly maximizes the increased usage of spot-up possessions in the NBA.
Le’s dig into the data.
Going back to the 2017-18 NBA season, the average number of spot-up possessions throughout the league has marginally gone up yearly since then. In 2017-18, teams had 21.633 spot-up possessions per game. Now? That number has risen to 26.613 in 2023-24. That’s almost five (!) more possessions per game in seven years.
It’s not just the volume that’s increasing—over the past seven years, teams have also become more efficient at scoring on spot-up possessions.
Doing some basic regression analysis on the seven-season sample, we can see that there’s a strong positive linear correlation between spot-up volume and offensive rating.
The relationship between spot-up possessions and offensive rating can be described by the equation (line of best fit):
Average Offensive Rating=1.106(Average Spot-up Possession Per Game) + 85.53
This means that for every additional spot-up possession per game, a team’s offensive rating increases by approximately 1.106 points on average. Moreover, the R-squared value of 0.816 indicates that 81.6% of the variation in offensive rating can be attributed to the number of spot-up possessions, highlighting the strong connection between these two variables.
Logically, this aligns with the idea that having more spot-up possessions gives teams more opportunities to attack defenses and generate better offense. Essentially, spot-ups have become the fulcrum for NBA offenses in the war of attrition against NBA defenses. Framing the battle between offense and defense as a war of attrition, wouldn’t having five players who can attack off the catch in diverse ways challenge defensive personnel on a more granular level and create better scoring opportunities?
Let me take a step back and get into my nerd bag to reiterate what I mean. It’s a lot like how Team Avatar dismantled the drill attacking Ba Sing Se in Avatar: The Last Airbender (If you haven’t watched the show, please do yourself a favor and watch it immediately). Instead of relying on brute force, they exploited the machine’s structural weaknesses—Toph weakening the supports with earth bending, Sokka identifying the critical points, and Aang delivering precise strikes to bring it down. This is a lot like advantage creation and extending those advantages through closeout creation, having players who can attack off the catch in different ways allows an offense to pick apart a defense piece by piece, forcing it to collapse under pressure. (Skip to 2:04 in the video if you want a quicker explanation).
The NBA Draft…?
As much as scouting the draft is about analyzing the players, it’s just as essential to grasp the evolving trends of the league they’ll be stepping into.
For the remainder of this piece, I’ll focus on five 2025 NBA Draft prospects I value highly for their production and multi-faceted skillsets. What truly sets them apart is their ability to create offense off the catch. To thrive as a spot-up player in the modern NBA, a player must:
- possess shooting gravity to command defensive attention off the catch.
- have driving and handling tools to react to hard closeouts.
- have the feel to pass and extend the play into a higher-quality shot.
All five players in this piece have the building blocks for creating offense off of closeouts, but each brings a unique approach to the table. This diversity in how they attack off-the-catch adds layers to an offense, enabling it to exploit specific weaknesses in defensive matchups. For instance, some defenders may excel at guarding strength-based matchups but struggle with lateral quickness. A player who can attack a tilted defense with a quick first step allows the offense to capitalize on that vulnerability. In essence, variability in closeout creation amplifies the ability to target nuanced weaknesses of all five defenders on the court, giving the offense a distinct tactical advantage.
The Prospects
Now that we’ve explored the concept, let’s dive into the five potential NBA Draft prospects and examine how they leverage their unique strengths to create offense off the catch.
Burst: Jase Richardson (Michigan State) | 6’3″ Guard
The most obvious way to capitalize on a semi-tilted defense is speed: a player using their first step and acceleration to widen the gap in the offensive advantage. Jase Richardson is the perfect example of a guard who can do this, beating defenses off-the-catch with his speed in a low-usage role for Michigan State this year. Going back to AAU and his senior year of high school, Jase has had a lot of experience being in spot-up situations – his second most used offensive play type in both contexts.
His first step is good, but Richardson excels at accelerating and using sharper driving angles to create separation. His ankles and feet can take sharper angles on drives, reducing how much he curls away from the rim, and enabling tighter, shorter drive paths. Accentuated by the acceleration in his second and third steps, Richardson capitalizes on these traits to explode into his last stride on finishing attempts at the rim or get to the middle of the floor to hurt the defense with his touch.
He’s also adept at recognizing where the help is coming from and making the pass to the open man off of these drives. While defenders do give him attention from the perimeter, Richardson’s volume and efficiency as a 3-PT shooter have not been extremely high in the past. He’s shot 30% from the perimeter on a 30% three-point-rate between 17U AAU and his senior year of high school, however, it looks like Richardson’s 3-point shot is on the uptick with a three-point rate of 34.6% and 50% in a small sample of games (9 games) for Michigan State so far. As this shot improvement sustains, defenses will have to guard him tighter from the perimeter, enabling Richardson to leverage his burst even further on off-the-catch drives.
Strength: Noah Penda (Le Mans Sarthe Basket) | 6’7″ Forward
Another way to create off-the-catch is to use brute force to carve space and extend advantages. When a player has outlier strength, they can often effectively penetrate the shell of set defenses. Some players combine burst with strength and apply large amounts of force toward the rim on off-the-catch drives, making it burdensome for a tilted defense. On the flip side, some players use their strength to take a slower, methodical approach which gives them a larger window to make a play while carving space with their body. A strong processor can often use this larger window to leverage their court mapping as a passer, finding a high-quality half-court shot by extending the advantage. Noah Penda’s quick processing and strength paint a true illustration of how this creation works off the ball.
Penda wins with strength against tilted defenses, getting deep into the paint with his stocky frame and making plays off of two feet that maintain the flow of the offense. His patience shines in these reps where he often takes his time to let the play develop, attacking when the defense over helps and gives him an opening. Penda’s handle needs work but his margins on these drives are high with how much space he eats up on the court using his strength. The byproduct of his strength is that it enables him to attack set defenses off-the-catch well, reducing the threshold of how much shooting gravity he consistently needs to win on these drives. Regardless, in 14 games this year, Penda has shown he can be a good shooter off of two feet – he maintains balance and good elbow alignment in these stances which have shown up in his efficiency (37.8 FG%) and increased comfort to shoot 3-pointers (39% 3-point-rate). The issues with Penda’s shot come when movement is introduced, throwing his alignment and balance off and reducing the number of counters he can use as a shooter, whether that’s with stepbacks from the perimeter or his limited volume of off-the-dribble twos.
Change Of Direction: Xaivian Lee (Princeton) | 6’4″ Guard
Speaking of counters, an additional form of closeout creation is the art of using sleight of direction to problem-solve. The junior guard for the Princeton Tigers, Xaivian Lee is the team’s lead creator and pick-and-roll ballhandler where he slices up defenses with his elite change of direction on multiple planes. With how Princeton’s offense revolves around a philosophy of spacing the floor, constant motion, and having any of the 5 players on the court to exploit a mismatch, it can lead to a primary ball-handler like Lee playing in situations where he’s attacking closeouts consistently. Lee has great downhill pressure with his burst, but his elite trait is his combination of spatial awareness and change of direction. He has a great understanding of open space and where his limbs are relative to his body which enables him to determine easier scoring angles, throwing defenders off balance with how quickly he can change direction.
The initial idea that comes to mind with change of direction is moving the body across the transverse plane (east to west – turning and rotating), however, change of direction is also about being able to shake the defense with movement across the sagittal plane (north-south – acceleration and deceleration). Xaivian Lee is excellent at capitalizing on both of these aspects of change of direction, creating easier shots off-the-catch or collapsing multiple defenders and finding the open man on the court. Lee is also quite effective at creating separation off of step-backs and side steps, which gives him a high degree of optionality with direction. While he’s had a down year in overall efficiency with the increased offensive load in 11 games, Lee has always been a versatile shooter, especially on catch-and-shoot shots, which has meant that defenses have always had to respect his shooting gravity and react with strong closeouts. He has limitations as a finisher with his weight and strength as a 6’4 guard but with over 148 spot-up possessions in the past two years, Lee is still scoring 0.966 points per possession and 38% on his spot-up threes. Xaivian’s weight will be a major point of contention with his NBA upside, but his elite change of direction, processing, and shooting touch gives him a strong floor as an off-the-catch creator, especially next to the plethora of jumbo primary initiators in the NBA.
Functionality + Small Space Coordination: Labaron Philon (Alabama) | 6’4″ Guard
Good closeout creation can also come from players who are functional with multiple traits and extend advantages off of the dominance of their micro-skills. Alabama freshman Labaron Philon is a clear example of a player like this, maintaining possessions off-the-catch with a functional handle and his coordination in tight spaces. Philon has functional strength, burst, and touch but he wins by consistently keeping his dribble alive and navigating through a crowd.
Similar to Princeton’s offense, Alabama plays with a lot of space in the half-court with the intent to move the ball and attack off-the-catch. Alabama’s space gives a player like Philon the lane to get downhill against tilted defenses, but even when the court shrinks on the drive, he can problem-solve in those tight spaces to either find an open player or maintain the dribble long enough to find a shot for himself. The functionality Labaron Philon has in multiple areas allows him to be versatile with how he finishes inside the arc, whether that’s slamming his body into rim protectors to create separation at the rim using his strength or launching his patent floater against defenders that sag deeper into the paint. His ability to keep his handle alive gives him larger windows to process the defense and attack accordingly with his different functional traits.
Most of Philon’s issues come with the potency of his 3-point shot. Between his senior year of HS and 17U AAU, Philon has shot 35.9% on 150+ attempts but that has not translated yet in 10 games with Alabama where he’s shooting 24% on 5.4 3PA/100. Alabama’s offense is a good emulation of good NBA offenses today, and when you combine this sample with his senior year of HS and 17U AAU, he’s generating 0.912 points per possession on 149 total possessions even without an elite 3-point shot to fall back on. There’s a strong proof of concept that Philon can be an effective closeout creator and with the touch indicators in his profile, there’s a high likelihood that he can become a strong shooter off-the-catch.
Size + Fluidity: Cooper Flagg (Duke) | 6’9″ Forward
While there are plenty of other ways to describe creation off-the-catch, the last one I will be talking about in this piece is about being the ultimate tweener. The term tweener often has a negative connotation when it comes to a player, usually describing a player that is a jack of some trades and a master of none, excelling at no true position. Another way I have come around to using this term is to describe players that can be cross-match nightmares for defenses: a player that has the positional size to overpower smaller players and the fluidity to break down larger defenders.
If you’re following the NBA draft, it is unlikely you haven’t heard of the 17-year-old forward playing for Duke this year. Cooper Flagg gets his generational moniker from his premier defense in an abundance of roles and how developed his offense is for a player that young. Relative to age, even with some early efficiency issues, Flagg has excelled as a primary creator for the Blue Devils in 10 games so far this year. He’s still in the early stages of experimenting as an on-ball creator, but off the ball, Flagg has showcased that he is already a functional off-the-catch scorer.
Cooper Flagg can also be used as an example of a strength creator off of closeouts, where he’s bullied much older players with his size and functional strength, but it’s the intersection of size and fluidity that makes him so problematic for defenses to deal with. This intersection is an extension of strength creation where players can get lower than their defender and carve out space using their body as a lever. Where this differs from how a player like Penda creates off of closeouts, mass isn’t the sole factor in generating force against defenders, it’s the lever principle generating more force due to the size of the player and how low they can get on drives. Due to amazing shin angles and how low Flagg can sink his hips on drives, it extends the distance between where the input force is applied (Flagg’s shoulder against the body of his defender) and the fulcrum (Flagg’s hips) which generates even more force without requiring outlier mass on his frame. This allows Flagg to carve space regardless of the size of his defender consistently, enabling him to score inside the arc and spray passes when the defense sends help to guard him.
Flagg’s handle is still a work in progress as he can’t consistently pass off of a live dribble, but he uses jump passes to expand his passing windows and get a better mapping of the court.
Flagg’s efficiency woes at Duke have mostly come from his poor 3-point shooting, 22.2% on 6.9 3PA/100. A crucial part of closeout creation is the shooting gravity a player possesses, and while the efficiency has not been good, the volume he takes forces defenses to pay attention to those shots. Moreover, I believe he is due for some positive regression as the season progresses with how he’s shot in previous settings. 36% from the perimeter between his final year at Monteverde and 16U AAU on over 174 attempts, Flagg has been exceptional on spot-up threes where he’s shot 41.4% on 70 attempts in that same sample. As he grows stronger, the stability shooting off two feet should improve and accommodate for larger distances, enabling him to get stronger closeouts from the perimeter and leverage his traits off-the-catch.
Curtain Call
All five of these players have other skills that give them a strong baseline in the NBA, but their most formidable trait is how they create off of closeouts in different ways. Spot-ups are the fulcrum of NBA offenses because the quality, variability, and volume of this play type can often be the difference in the balance of an offense winning or losing the possession battle. Having a team with five players like this on the court who can attack the defense in varied ways captures the greatest strength of an elite offense: the constant exploitation of mismatches to create advantages on each touch a player gets within a team possession.
Stay tuned for my upcoming piece on the 2025 NBA Draft cycle, a companion article that will explore the other side of the NBA spectrum!
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