In the previous article I wrote analyzing Tre Johnson, I alluded to the changing perspective of front offices and fans alike regarding the draft. The 2024 cycle was an emphatic indication of the sea change in teams’ approach to the event. With players from Reed Sheppard to Zach Edey being selected with high picks, it became apparent that teams were prioritizing cerebral players with analytically sound profiles over those with traits more traditionally associated with high upside.

What drove me to write about Kon was how representative his journey was of this shifting dynamic. Widely recognized as a subpar athlete by NBA standards, due to the optics of Knueppel’s game, I doubt he would have ever been considered worthy of a top-5 pick even as recently as a decade ago. However, because of his stellar efficiency and deserved reputation as an intelligent player, the Hornets’ selection of Knueppel was seen as a no-brainer.

My intent with writing this piece was to figure out one thing: has the pendulum swung too far? At what point is it acceptable to go against conventional draft logic and select a player whose deficiencies would have been considered disqualifying in previous eras? By investigating both contextual and individual statistics, in tandem with tape dating back 2 years, I found myself in firm disagreement with the direction the Hornets ultimately went in.

The Beginning

Standing slightly over 6’6 in shoes with a 6’6.25″ wingspan, Kon Knueppel may have left this draft with the highest approval rating of any non-Cooper Flagg prospect. Knueppel’s playstyle eschewed norms typically associated with star level production, he relied on technique and guile in lieu of dynamic physical traits. His fundamentally sound game, paired with an inscrutable demeanor, and an overwhelming amount of team success quickly earned Knueppel fans. And Kon would finish with one of the most impressive underclassman seasons from a perimeter player in recent memory, inserting himself into the group below along with fellow one-and-done Jase Richardson.

What makes Kon such a compelling case study isn’t just his ascension from fringe top-40 recruit at the beginning of his final AAU campaign, to top-5 draft pick 2 years later, but the rapid and tangible development he made in that span.

To gain a complete understanding of Kon’s game we must begin with his time spent on the grassroots circuit. Knueppel’s scoring and scoring efficiency have remained constants over the course of his career, having led his EYBL age group in scoring for 3 consecutive years and never once dipped under 60% True Shooting. However, outside of the high-volume flamethrowing from deep, Knueppel’s utilization at Duke held a faint resemblance to his time playing AAU.

During Kon’s time playing his AAU team, Phenom University, he served as the focal point of a motion offense. PhenomU would run concepts broadly similar to Duke, but with drastically different objectives. PhenomU frequently schemed looks for Knueppel to post-up in the middle of the floor, where his combination of size, strength, and touch were enough to overwhelm opponents at the high-school level. Actions like ‘Cross Punch’..

Outside of these schemed looks Knueppel was the frequent recipient of opportunistic buckets made possible by the Motion Offense and the miscommunication it brought about in opposing defenses.

And although these principles aren’t incompatible with quality offense at the collegiate or professional level, they did leave Knueppel unrefined in certain areas which became significantly more relevant during his time at Duke. One example would be Kon’s relative inefficiency attacking closeouts, where he was comfortable settling for short range jumpers and would seldom applied pressure on the rim.

Starting at Duke

Kon’s shift in usage once arriving at Duke was abrupt and apparent, the aforementioned post-ups and cuts were largely replaced with PNR ballhandling reps, as evinced below.

And for someone who came into the season a vocal proponent of Kon, frankly, the beginning of his Duke career was largely underwhelming. Duke almost exclusively schemed two plays for Knueppel, the first of which being ‘Zipper Stagger PNR‘, which exposed his inexperience operating out of ballscreens,

and the second play which comprised the majority of Knueppel’s organized offense was ‘Pin Ricky Flare‘, where again Knueppel struggled to generate quality looks if he wasn’t provided the requisite space to attempt a 3.

There definitely wasn’t a singular culprit behind Knueppel’s ineffectiveness as a driver, but the most obvious contributing factor was the misalignment between Duke’s offensive approach and Knueppel’s habits inside the arc. As previously mentioned, when Kon was ran off the 3-point line in highschool he expressed no urgency in getting to the rim, and was perfectly content with taking longer 2PA. Duke was the first setting where this characteristic of Knueppel’s game was met with resistance. In Jon Scheyer’s short time at the helm, an early emphasis he has made known is his desire for his teams to maintain a modern shot profile. In every subsequent year of Scheyer’s tenure, Duke has reduced their volume of midrange attempts.

The clash between the playstyle Scheyer had implemented within his team, and Knueppel’s personal style of play lead to ugly moments early on. With Knueppel’s ballhandling skills being fairly underdeveloped for his new, more perimeter oriented role, Kon attempted to rely on his physicality on create space and find finishing windows on drives. Knueppel’s forays towards the rim often lacked pace, and oftentimes Kon would over-penetrate and place himself in compromising positions inside the paint.

At roughly the halfway mark of the season, Knueppel’s statistical profile was far from the stellar marks he would finish the season with.

The Transformation

The defining change in Kon’s game this past season was undoubtedly his ability and effectiveness getting to the rim. Not only did his rim-rate increase by 8% from his final season of AAU to this past season, the complexion of these rim attempts also radically changed. Hand-tracking Knueppel’s rim-finishes reveals a player progressing from a forward to an out and out guard.

Knueppel having his playtype distribution significantly altered, while being forced to largely abandon his most reliable interior counters, AND STILL maintaining the efficiency he’d displayed at previous levels is borderline miraculous. And the catalyst for this improvement were the gains Knueppel made as a ballhandler.

While I still wouldn’t view Knueppel as an elite ballhandler by any means, the strides he made in this area, in conjunction with his physicality, made him a potent driver by season’s end.

For large swaths of the season, Knueppel’s inability to handle ball pressure or digs on his drives consistently prevented him from creating quality paint touches.

And I have a theory as to what was behind Knueppel’s leap as a ballhandler and driver. Kon seems to have married the technical gains he made, specifically developing better ball-control and an improvement altering ball-speeds, with the strong footwork foundation he already possessed from all the years spent playing out of the post. Post footwork translating to other facets of the game is an axiom espoused by coaches everywhere, and Knueppel seems to be the most recent testament to this. As the season progressed Knueppel was more capable of keeping his dribble alive inside the arc, making him a more potent scorer and playmaker.

Towards the end of the season, Knueppel started to thrive in the same actions that he’d previously been out of his depth in. Below is a succession of ‘Zipper Stagger PNR‘ plays conducted sublimely by Kon. Even when he isn’t able to finish the play with a basket it is abundantly clear the process is better.

When faced with slightly more exotic coverages Knueppel showed to be up to the task. Compare the clips compiled below, in the initial play versus Kansas. Knueppel is hedged as he runs the ballscreen and immeditely swings the ball at the first sign of ball pressure. The subsequent plays Knueppel keeps his dribble alive, turns the corner, and either draws a foul at the rim or finds an open teammate.

Knueppel’s enhanced foul-drawing compared to previous seasons was evident,

but what I found most impressive about this was how the in-season free-throw rate progression was equally significant.

What this shows is Knueppel recognized the respect he had as a shooter and parlayed the hard closeouts he was receiving into rim-attacks.

As delved further and further into Kon’s career, his self-awareness and work ethic became increasingly apparent. To acclimate this quickly when confronted with change is impressive from any player, never mind a freshman being thrust into the greatest pressure cooker program in college basketball.

A point raised by the always insightful Mike Gribanov (@mikegrib8 on X) was how notable it was for a team to achieve the level of success 2024-25 Duke did while primarily featuring underclassmen. Especially considering how veteran-laden the current college basketball landscape is, I wanted to establish a frame of reference for exactly how rare it was for a player to produce at the level Kon did this past season without the benefit of having experienced teammates. Using KenPom’s ‘Experience Rankings’, which weighs the age of their roster by minutes played, along with some other offensive efficiency and self creation metrics yielded the list below.

Unsurprisingly these thresholds produced a list of offensively slanted perimeter players, but at first glance what caught my eye was how size seemed to have a polarizing effect on this group’s NBA translation. The majority of players who returned overly positive EV from the query seemed to be clustered on the shorter end of the height distribution. However, height having a negative correlation with an all-in-one metric like Estimated Wins goes against all I know about these catch all stats, so I looked elsewhere. And what emerged as the obvious contributing factor to this relationship was the share of a player’s shots which were assisted.

Here lie my Koncerns

To see the strength of the relationship between this group of players’ NBA impact and their pre-NBA self-creation burdens I ran a simple linear regression.

While the  r² here is moderately strong, again there are only so many conclusions to be drawn from what was already a small and fairly curated sample. Where the value lies in this cursory analysis is in illuminating how misleading scoring efficiency can be. The list above is littered with players who couldn’t shoulder a higher creation burden and were too deficient in other areas to warrant serious consideration for playing time. Herein lies the challenge in projecting Kon Knueppel, will he be able to become a load-bearing player for an elite offense and/or round out his game enough defensively to avoid being placed in basketball purgatory?

The Case for Helio-Kon

A case frequently made in support of Kon’s primary upside was his potential to develop into a high volume foul-drawer. We’ve already addressed the strides he’s made in this department, so could this trend continue in the league? In short, I am skeptical Knueppel is next in line of the Morey-ball disciples. Of course the absence of dunks in Kon’s resume has been discussed ad-nauseam (this past season Knueppel actually doubled the number of dunks he’d made over the course of his entire AAU career, with 2), its how often Kon has his shot-blocked at the rim that is my greatest cause for concern. Knueppel had 7% of his FGA blocked at Duke, per Synergy, which isn’t a particularly disqualifying number on its own, but puts him in a precarious position when compared to his now peers in the NBA.

Again, this is not an exhaustive sample we’re drawing from, but there’s no recent precedent for a player with Knueppel’s lack of vertical explosion becoming a formidable rim-pressure guard. In fact I think Knueppel, and the majority of the Duke players this past season, saw their driving efficacy greatly augmented by the presence of Khaman Maluach. Individually, Duke did not roster any players known for their prowess getting downhill, and Maluach was chiefly responsible for providing rim-pressure for the team. Clips like the ones below are examples of the attention Maluach demanded on the interior. In each clipped possession there’s a freeze frame on Maluach’s defender showing the defense’s approach, they were almost never willing to send help on Knueppel’s drives should they risk giving up an easy putback or dumpoff to Maluach.

Duke lead the nation this past season in Wide Open threes, and while their connective passing and willingness to forgo good shots for great ones definitely deserves credit, the attention Maluach demanded as a roller greatly simplified reads for Duke ballhandlers.

Again my friend and tan incredible draft mind in his own right @NileHoops beat me to the presses in writing about the inflation in perception many Duke prospects were granted due to Maluach’s gravity, and I would strongly recommend reading his draft notes here on the matter: https://medium.com/@Nile/nile-presents-2025-nba-draft-master-notes-part-2-of-3-626ef75aefbb.

Knueppel’s statistical fluctuations corroborate this relationship. Per Hoop -Explorer Knueppel’s AST% and rim-rate declined substantially in minutes without Maluach versus the minutes he shared with the superstar big.

This effect reverberated throughout the Duke squad, with the team’s mid-range frequency skyrocketing while their PNR frequency plummeted. Recall earlier when Jon Scheyer’s mid-range aversion was mentioned, without Maluach on the court Duke was forced into taking shots they were explicitly advised against.

Debunking the notion that Knueppel will develop into a prolific driver and free-throw grifter at the next level doesn’t necessarily preclude offensive primacy. After all, many of the players presented early as potential analogues found their way by becoming elite pull-up shooters. Knueppel’s shooting profile definitely makes this the likeliest outcome, but there’s still evidence his stellar touch indicators may belie how long a process it will be for Knueppel to reach these heights.

While Knueppel shot 12/30 on pull-up 3s in his final year of AAU, 10 of these makes came in transition or semi-transition, where he had a cleaner platform to self-organize for these attempts.

In the half-court Knueppel’s issues regaining balance on the move and creating space in close quarters were more evident. Even at lower levels Knueppel struggled getting his shot off cleanly under duress, the aforementioned 7% blocked FGA rate at Duke was identical in AAU.

And of course this isn’t to say Knueppel will be easily neutralized as a shooter at the next level, these are somewhat granular issues I fully believe will be addressed and ameliorated in the long run. But my thinking is the tandem of weaker change-of-direction ability and a drastically slower pace (Duke was 266th in Adjusted Tempo) was behind Knueppel’s precipitous fall from a 42% (30/72) off-the-dribble 3P shooter during AAU, to only making 1/18 3PA off the bounce in college. And the acclimatization period Knueppel would need to round his shooting into form could muddle his long-term offensive projection.

The Defense

As limiting as Knueppel’s change-of-direction is offensively, I think it could be truly debilitating on defense. For as much as Duke’s offensive scheme placed Knueppel in an uncomfortable situation early, the defensive scheme greatly compensated for his flaws. Duke’s conservative switching scheme paired with their ++ positional size (1st in the country in average height and 10th in effective height) masked Knueppel’s deficiencies. The team’s penchant for dragging out possessions with their constant switching, along with the deterrence afforded by their backline size, left a minimal amount of ground for Knueppel to cover in any given possession. I think plays like the clips below are responsible for some overstating Knueppel’s defensive ability, in these possessions Kon is guarding under circumstances where Duke’s already effectively ‘won’ the possession by merit of these players either attacking Knueppel in isolation or driving into a congested paint.

The areas where Knueppel’s difficulties changing speed and direction manifested most consistently were guarding capable pull-up shooters. Knueppel’s inability to mirror these smaller players forced him to give them a cushion, without the length to compensate for the distance he provided Knueppel was prone to ceding acres of space on these attempts.

Maybe even more glaring than Knueppel’s issues guarding pull-up shooters was his total inability to navigate screens. Kon almost never remained attached when tasked with working over screens, and when a teammate wasn’t in position to immediately switch onto Knueppel’s assignment an immense pressure was placed on help defenders to correct for the breakdown. Screen navigation for Kon is another struggle which has persisted since high school.

Predictably Knueppel’s issues changing direction were reflected in his agility testing. Although Kon’s jumps impressed relative to expectations, his 3/4 court sprint and lane agility only added to what was already a bleak defensive projection.

Final Takeaways

My intention with writing this piece is not to pan the Hornets for selecting Kon, but in the wake of Summer League I think now is an appropriate time to adjust expectations before a few inconsequential games dilute any evaluation. As it stands currently, there’s an overwhelming amount of data suggesting that even projecting Kon as a neutral defender may be unrealistic. The most likely outcome seems to be that Kon will be left in limbo defensively, he’ll unable to guard backcourt players because of his poor footspeed, and with no supplementary rim-protection or rebounding skills to speak of Kon will bleed possessions as a frontcourt defender. In search of players at Kon’s size who were also lacking in athletic traits yielded a mixed bag. There’s a handful of positive defenders here, even amongst the highlighted players who hit these thresholds in their pre-draft season. But outside of Cameron Johnson and Khris Middleton, who only hit this threshold in their freshman year (and Middleton was 0.3 DRBD% away from falling out entirely), there’s no other players who would be considered top 5 in their respective draft.

The list of players with Kon’s offensive resume to justify such high draft capital is even slimmer.

While it may seem encouraging that Desmond Bane is included in this group because Kon was frequently compared to him throughout the cycle, Bane’s dunks only bottomed out when he was thrust into a primary role. Bane saw his PNR volume almost quadruple from his Junior to Senior year, and this shit in usage coincided with the lowest number of dunks in his college career.

As heavily as I rely on these statistical queries to inform my opinion, I think its necessary to include all players’ seasons as a reminder of the developmental dichotomy. It seems as often as players undergo these outlier developmental arcs there are as many, if not more, players whose weaknesses crystallize much quicker than we’re willing to acknowledge. In Kon’s case, there’s little reason to believe an athletic transformation is on the horizon. And if he’s going to be a defender who needs specific lineup configurations to stay on the floor will his offense warrant those accommodations? The in-season improvement previously outlined gives me more confidence in Kon eventually ‘guard-ifying’ his shot profile and becoming a more capable creator off the bounce. But the idea that the self-sustainability of Kon’s offense can be reasonably doubted is enough to preclude from being a top 5 pick.

The post Summer League Primer: A Comprehensive Kon Knueppel Scouting Report appeared first on Swish Theory.

The larger lesson I’ve come away with from this Finals isn’t a novel insight by any means; it was an emphatic reinforcement of what makes exercises like rankings (which I admittedly find great joy in) a futile exercise. In the modern NBA, fit is everything, a fairly banal observation, I know, but in an era where punitive salary cap clauses place a premium on continuity, differentiating between players who can or cannot augment in-house personnel is paramount. Currently, the NBA is approaching a saturation point of talent, where there truly aren’t many players incapable of contributing in any setting. And as the skill level reaches a crescendo, drowning out the noise and identifying the players tailor-made for your current setting is key. And in this class, I’m not sure if there is a player more representative of this idea than Tre Johnson.

In the 2025 draft class, there may not be a more known commodity than Tre Johnson. In 2022 Johnson debuted at 3rd overall in 247’s initial rankings for the 2024 High School class and never dropped below 6th for 247. In RSCI (Recruiting Services Consensus Index), Johnson finished 5th overall. As stat tracking in the amateur hoops space has become more prevalent over the past few years, players are entering college with increasingly robust statistical profiles. This, paired with more accessible game film, makes this current crop of one-and-done prospects maybe the most thoroughly scouted group of players to enter the NBA. Take the evaluation of Tre Johnson below, from 247’s Adam Finklestein.

Written over eighteen months ago, if you were to remove the date, this scouting report could easily be mistaken for a write-up on Tre’s game from his lone season at Texas. If you were to analyze Tre’s game on a more micro-level, Finkelstein’s analysis could be used as support for the validity of ‘prospect determinism’, an idea dictating that players, even as early as high school, are more fully formed than we are willing to acknowledge. Coming into the season, I had made two fairly innocuous posts observing a perceived weakness (Half-Court finishing), and strength (Isolation scoring) in Johnson’s game.

Lo and behold, Johnson remained a subpar finisher in the half-court (46.5% with a 17% rim-frequency) and saw no issues translating as an Isolation scorer. Per Synergy, Johnson was 11th in the country in ISO PPP (.827) of anyone with 100 or more possessions, and the second most efficient freshman of anyone with this high of volume in the past decade (trailing only Dennis Smith Jr). Even with his ineffectiveness at the rim, Johnson’s individual scoring prowess put him in rare air amongst freshmen to have entered the league.

Keep in mind the query above was not conducted on a pool of only drafted players, but on every season of every player to enter the league since 2010. 12 of the 14 players in the query were, or are projected to be, top 10 picks, all were high pedigree prospects. However, even with Johnson’s impeccable resume as a scorer, plenty of evidence calls his lofty draft status into question. The issue of Tre Johnson’s defense is well known by now, and it has been widely recognized as an acceptable risk to take considering the caliber of offensive player Johnson profiles to be. Defenses lapses shown below have been met with a degree of hand-waving.

Texas made it a point to keep Johnson from the action defensively, typically assigning him to smaller, lower usage, perimeter players to suppress his fouling and keep him on the floor. And for as frequently as Johnson’s impressive anthropometric profile is cited as a reason for optimism in his defensive projection long-term, I was only slightly less underwhelmed by his individual defense when he was involved in possessions.

A fundamental belief of mine is that players’ offensive and defensive profiles shouldn’t be assessed independently; often, issues that manifest on one end are related to a player’s behavior on the other. In Tre Johnson’s case, the absence of rim pressure and defensive activity amount to one of the worst cases of applied physicality we’ve seen from any well-regarded prospect in recent memory. In the query below I included all players which met these thresholds in any of their college seasons, no matter the minutes share they played, and included the 14 with the most accumulated ‘Estimated Wins’ to this point of their career (disclaimer these numbers are from roughly the midpoint on the 2024-25 season so may not be exact for active players). The average Estimated Win Total for Top 10 picks since 2008 is 32.4; this group comes in well short of this mark at an average of 18.6 Total Win Shares.

Adjusting parameters in the query in order to cast a wider net and to explicitly search for players whose defensive struggles can’t be attributed to size alone, yielded an even more concerning list. On the left are players within the query with the highest Estimated Win Total. Understanding that a cumulative metric like Estimated Wins could potentially omit recent success cases, on the right are all the players within the query who have been drafted within the past 5 years. The players highlighted below are those who met the query in their pre-NBA season. Virtually all of the players who were selected with high picks, like Tre, were underclassmen whose physical limitations were dismissed as a byproduct of age. And while it’s early enough for these players to shift the perception of their careers, I believe it’s fair to say they have not yet returned value to their drafting team commensurate with the draft capital spent on them.

So, with evidence mounting indicating that, in all likelihood, Tre will be facing an uphill battle on the road to justifying a top 10 pick, what reason is there for optimism? What context would be most amenable to Tre’s skillset, and under what circumstances could a team transform Tre Johnson into an indispensable building block of their roster despite all the evidence to the contrary?

The Two Houstons

The seeds of this piece were planted the weekend of April 4th, after possibly the best stretch of basketball (or at least my personal favorite) so far this year. On that Friday, the recently crowned champion Oklahoma City Thunder were defeated by the Houston Rockets 125-111, and on the next day, a star-studded Duke squad was toppled in a shocking upset by the Houston Cougars 70-67. Both Houston squads came into their respective contests heavily doubted; the Cougars were 5-point underdogs while the Rockets’ spread was set at +6.5 points.

In the Rockets’ case, their victory has probably already been lost to time as an April regular-season win, even over the eventual champions, hardly qualifies as more than a footnote of the NBA season. But the narrative surrounding the Houston Cougars I found much more interesting and in a way was the true catalyst for this piece. For as much respect as I have for the Houston Cougars basketball program I, like many others, was confused as to how a team with no highly regarded NBA talent could have bested a team with three players who could very well be drafted inside of the top 10. Most (well-adjusted) people probably attributed Duke’s late-game collapse to their lack of experience. Per KenPom, Duke was 268th in minutes continuity this season. After a few early-season struggles versus staunch competition, Duke had laid waste to practically every opponent before Houston and as a result they just didn’t have the calluses which can only be formed in tightly contested matchups. This rationale, although flawed, probably does apply, but it still left me searching for a more definitive answer. How were two ostensibly overmatched teams able to overcome a perceived gap in talent and beat two championship-caliber squads? My attempt to find a satisfactory answer to this question has probably transformed the way I think about the game more than any previous exercise.

Anyone lucky enough to watch both games probably recognized the parallels between the two winning teams. Both squads weaponized their physicality via their relentless defense and commitment to the offensive glass to carve out extra possessions.

However, the similarities between these two squads are not confined to their defense and presence on the offensive glass. Further examination shows two almost mirrored stylistic profiles.

The players of both teams also had their individual stat profile curated similarly, with their teams opting for a more egalitarian approach offensively as shown by the tight usage spread between their players.

Even though the significance of these parallels may not be clear at the moment, I believe that because of the Houston Rockets current roster construction, they have positioned themselves to benefit from a market inefficiency which has been exploited by the Houston Cougars for years. And the environment they are cultivating is the exact context where a player like Tre Johnson could be optimized.

The Blueprint

Before delving into the specifics of the relationship between Tre Johnson’s skillset and each of the Houston based teams, I think it is necessary to discuss how the Houston Cougars became such a resounding success, what elements of the Cougars program they should look to replicate, and why the Rockets should consider the Cougar model a roadmap for their own success.

The success Houston has experienced under Kelvin Sampson has been nothing short of unprecedented. Prior to Sampson taking the reins at the onset of the 2014-15 season, the Cougars had been to the NCAA tournament three times in 25 years and were unable to win a tournament game in any of their appearances. When Sampson arrived in Houston, the program was entering its first season in the American Athletic Conference, a league composed of an eclectic group of Conference USA castoffs and Big East schools taking temporary shelter within the conference. Amid the chaos of the ad-hoc league, the Cougars quickly established themselves at the top of the food chain and never looked back.

What is most interesting about Houston’s meteoric rise into the upper echelon of college basketball, is how they managed to attain and sustain their success. Simply put, Houston may be the greatest endorsement for the importance of establishing an identity in basketball, and a cursory glance at their statistical profile would confirm as much.

As we’d mentioned at the onset of the section, Houston’s elite offensive rebounding is no surprise and a consistently low TO% is a staple of any high-performing offense. The success in these two categories making for quality offense shouldn’t come as any surprise. After all, these are pillars of Dean Oliver’s 4 Factors of Basketball Success. BUT what is especially interesting to me is how poorly the Cougars fare in Oliver’s other 2 Factors, Free Throw Rate and Shooting. For being a consistently elite offense for nearly a decade, the Cougars have been comparatively underwhelming with regards to their scoring efficiency. To establish a frame of reference for exactly how rare this confluence of factors was, I conducted a quick query of exactly how often good offenses played this slow with a shot profile as inconducive to success as the Cougars seemingly were.

Since 2008, 53 teams met the query above, with only the 9 pictured meeting these thresholds more than once. The Houston Cougars attained these marks 6 (!!) times. So, how does a team whose offense frequently unfold like the clip below, where the paint isn’t touched ONCE throughout the entire possession, consistently perform to the level Houston does?

What Houston has done to find success at the highest level is implicitly acknowledge the limitations their overwhelming strengths (offensive rebounding) impose on their offense, and they’ve addressed these limitations by strictly and increasingly adhering to the ‘Hands and Gloves’ philosophy.

Houston’s Hands and Gloves

Hands and Gloves is a term coined by the always insightful @nilehoops to describe the symbiotic relationship between players whose skillsets are more based in their physical advantages and players whose strengths are typically utilized in more offensively demanding roles. At the risk of further butchering the definition, here is the quote from Nile’s article articulating the concept.

In the case of the Houston Cougars, they take this concept to the extreme. Despite often ranking in the bottom half of the country in 3PA rate, the Cougars have rostered a bevy of high-volume long-range gunners. Many of which were analytical darlings despite their paltry efficiency scoring inside the arc.

Now the picture is starting to become clearer: in the Cougars’ case, their commitment to maintaining a standard of physicality and rebounding efficacy on the court at all times reduced the potency of their downhill scoring. I agree wholeheartedly with their (assumed) assertion and think the opportunity cost of drives is significantly underdiscussed in the sport. For a team like Houston, where possessions are in short supply, they can ill-afford to risk accumulating turnovers on meandering drives into a congested paint. In addition to the rim aversion present in the majority of guards’ profiles, the lack of playmaking also stands out. Despite almost all the players above being smaller guards (Quentin Grimes and Jherrod Stiggers being the tallest at 6’5), there isn’t a single player with a positive AST%:USG% ratio, again emphasizing how narrowly defined their roles are. The responsibility of ameliorating spacing issues and maintaining the turnover margin falls squarely on these players’ shoulders, with little else outside of this being asked for them offensively. What makes the players pictured above especially unique in the ‘Hands and Gloves’ framework is not just the duty they are tasked with, but the degree of difficulty under which they are asked to execute.

After taking note of these trends within Houston’s teambuilding, I wanted to see if the relationship between a team’s environmental factors was more universal. Specifically, I wanted to see if teams lacking in schemed advantages (as represented by AST%) and multiple spacing options (3Pr) were more prone to placing a heavy burden on the shotmaking talent they did have on their roster. The query below is what I’ve termed a ‘Scoring Stress Test’.

As Mr. Oliver’s 4 Factors would dictate, what these teams sacrificed in their shot quality, they were forced to compensate for in other areas, specifically the TO Margin and Offensive Rebounding. The theory I had posited earlier also seems to be confirmed to an extent, as this query houses some of the best off-the-dribble shotmaking talent of the Bart Torvik era. Below are each team’s leaders in shot attempts for the season in the previous query. Each player is one of the more prolific shotmakers in the country in their respective season, and I do not think it’s coincidental that the two largest players have seen their shotmaking ability translate seamlessly to the NBA.

Now that we’ve established the necessity of high-volume pull-up shooters to teams who find success without traditional markers of an efficient offense, it’s time to discuss this idea’s implications for the Houston Rockets.

Houston Rockets: Closing the Gap

At the time of writing this, the Houston Rockets have just completed a trade for Kevin Durant, sending the Phoenix Suns Jalen Green and the 10th pick in this year’s draft. This trade has been universally praised and for good reason. Kevin Durant is still one of the most efficient scorers in the world, and while Jalen Green is still a promising young player, the value and fit were too good to turn down. With the transaction, the Rockets stand to make a leap not only because of who was traded, but the kind of players that were involved in the deal.

Circling back to the similarities present in each of the Houston teams’ statistical profiles, I want to focus specifically on the sections outlined below.

It is my belief that by trading Jalen Green and acquiring Kevin Durant, the Rockets will make a major competitive leap due to their improvement in these 4 statistical categories. More specifically, the improvement in these statistics will result in the Rockets’ profile bearing an even closer resemblance to the 2024-25 Houston Cougars.

Along with their suffocating defense, the defining trait of the Houston Cougars may be their pace. Consistently ranking near the bottom of the nation, the Cougars would not be able to control the pace to the degree they do without the interplay between their offensive and defensive philosophies. In studies on whether offense or defense has more influence on a team’s style of play, the overwhelming conclusion reached has been that offense has a greater impact on the pace of play. The most evident way Houston goes about suppressing pace is through their offensive rebounding. The two frames below are a perfect contrast in the effect offensive rebounding has on pace and may shed some light on the resurgence of double big lineups.

In both frames, we have the Alabama Crimson Tide, #1 in the country in Adjusted Tempo and the antithesis of Houston’s playstyle. In the first frame, the Crimson Tide are playing Illinois, a similarly modern team that deploys multiple floor spacers along with a stretch big. Illinois runs a ‘Middle PNR’ in 5-out spacing with the ballhandler being Kylan Boswell, who historically speaking, is an extremely ineffective downhill driver. As soon as Boswell steps inside the free-throw line…

…the possession is over. Zero pressure has been placed on the fairly diminutive Bama backcourt to contribute on the glass and they are granted a free release into transition, which culminates in Labaron Philon Free Throws.

Compare this to Houston’s matchup with Alabama earlier in the season, where they are running a similar ballscreen action for an equally limited driver in Emanuel Sharp. Because of their physical frontcourt personnel, Alabama is forced to commit their entire lineup to crashing the glass.

The threat Houston presents on the offensive glass flips the dynamic Alabama saw in the Illinois game. Now, HOUSTON is able to set up their halfcourt defense unencumbered. This forces Alabama to play off kilter and Mark Sears logs a turnover.

Offensive rebounding’s effect on transition play is a fairly well-known concept, and this is an element the Houston Rockets have in spades. The difference in these teams’ ability to establish a pace of play actually lies in their shot profile.

Previously, I’d mentioned the tradeoff the Cougars willingly made between their rim pressure, as represented by their free throw rate and 2P%, and their offensive rebounding and turnover economy. However, there is another, subtler, edge the Cougars gain from removing ‘no-hope’ drives, as you saw from Kylan Boswell in the first clip. By playing a more static style and concentrating on off-the-dribble jumpers and post-ups, the Cougars seldom have their shot blocked. This style of play also rarely puts the defense into rotation, resulting in few drive and kick opportunities and leading to their low C&S (Catch-and-Shoot) frequency over the years. The lack of ‘easy’ jump shots places an acute pressure on their perimeter players to be multifaceted shooters, hence the disproportionate number of off-the-bounce shotmakers on the Kelvin Sampson Cougars.

The relevance of the ‘Average Defensive Poss. Length Percentile’ column in the graphic above is intertwined with the Cougars’ seemingly suboptimal shot diet. In the Cougars’ preferred game state, the margin for error is very thin; along with the turnover variance that comes with drives, blocked shots are a massive variable that cannot be accepted given the constraints of their deliberate style. The devastating effect blocked shots can have on your defense isn’t a phenomenon only present in the NCAA, as Owen Phillips of the F5 pointed out earlier this year. In the past NBA regular season, only Live Ball Turnovers were more detrimental to defenses.

Ultimately, the foundation for the Rockets should be their offensive rebounding and their defense. But because of their proclivity for low-quality rim attempts, there was no top defense more consistently put in disadvantageous situations than Houston.

For context, the r² between Defensive Possession Length and Defensive Rating is -0.47, which by basketball standards is a fairly strong correlation, and the relationship between the two variables is equally intuitive. The more often a defense can prevent early advantages, the lower the offense’s shot quality should be. This is a large part of why we saw higher and higher pick-up points in the NBA this past season and an increased emphasis on turnover generation. The days of thinking of offense and defense discretely are long gone, and the fact that the Rockets mustered a top-5 defense IN SPITE OF their offense actively sabotaging them is highly impressive. And although this was probably not the impetus of the trade, the Rockets may have removed the greatest inhibiting factor to their defense, challenging the Thunder for top unit in the league.

For all the potential Jalen Green has shown as a dynamic and versatile scorer, his personal scoring hierarchy was incompatible with the shape this Rockets roster was taking. Although a score-first guard certainly CAN thrive in the Rockets’ system, it would have to be similar to how the Houston Cougars’ backcourt options have found success: erasing turnovers and relying on prolific pull-up shooting. So far in his career, though, Green has not shown any significant growth in his ability to take care of the ball, as evidenced by his playmaking profile from Databallr.

In Lehman’s terms, Green’s ineffectiveness as a volume scorer has not been offset by sound decision-making as a passer. On top of this, since entering the league Green has finished 1st, 1st, and 4th in Blocked FGAs at the rim. Again, this is in no way an indictment on Jalen Green’s future, but in the interest of maximizing fit for both team AND player, this separation is certainly best for both parties.

Finding the Fit for Tre Johnson

First, for any readers wondering where the previously advertised scouting report is, I’d like to formally apologize for the digression. What first drew me to the idea of writing about Tre through this lens was how specific and pronounced his gifts are. Of course, the shooting is the main draw. I have repeatedly and emphatically stated Tre’s lone season at Texas very well could be the best shooting season from a freshman in the past 15 years. But history would dictate that no prospect with Tre’s negative intersection of applied physicality and defensive instincts could possibly return top-5 pick value. So what is the sell? In short, I believe Tre Johnson could be the ultimate ‘Glove’, and by selecting Johnson a team could take their first step in recreating the revolutionary blueprint laid out by Kelvin Sampson and the Houston Cougars.

The case for Tre Johnson being drafted inside the top 10 is two-pronged. Naturally, it all begins with the shooting, as anyone reading this probably noticed, the archetype most frequently grouped with Johnson in the piece’s initial queries was movement shooter. In an attempt to gauge exactly how much margin for error Johnson’s pairing of feel and touch would give him I conducted the query below, with Ben Taylor’s ‘Offensive Load’ stat used to paint a more complete picture of players’ offensive burden.

Again, Johnson’s profile compares favorably to elite shooters of past drafts, but in Johnson’s case, there’s reason to believe there’s a reservoir of untapped potential compared to past players in a similar mold. Comparing Johnson’s three-point rate and volume to the other players above with the lowest 3Pr in their pre-draft year, Luke Kennard and Tyler Herro, shows the potential trajectory Johnson’s shot distribution could take in the league.

Like Johnson, Kennard and Herro’s college teams struggled to scheme easy opportunities for players. Kennard’s Duke squad was 280th in Assist%, and Herro’s Kentucky team were 194th. When Johnson is dropped into a roster with more connective playmaking talent, he should easily be able to convert some of his contested mid-range attempts into threes.

The Nembhard Corollary

In my opinion there hasn’t been a more fascinating player in the past 5 draft classes than Andrew Nembhard. Nembhard was undoubtedly an elite college point guard, but as a prospect, his statistical profile was fairly non-descript. And compared to other players who are inevitably mentioned as testaments to 2nd round value, its difficult to find the evidence Nembhard was capable of producing to the level he has in the league. What I eventually decided was that the basis of Nembhard’s unexpected success is his exceptional positional size, and in Tre’s case, I believe the same principle applies. When compared to the players in the previous query, Tre ranks first in every measurement and athletic test despite being the youngest of the group.

This should be the foundation of any optimist’s case for Tre Johnson. A suboptimal Texas context, with no significant passing talent to speak of, masked Johnson’s true shooting potential. And when Tre is surrounded by more cerebral, defensively minded, glass-cleaning frontcourt players who can assume some facilitating responsibilities, his potential will be fully actualized.

Currently there’s plenty of evidence that Tre could quickly become a context-changing shooter. Dating back to 2022, Tre has shot 51.8% (29/56) on 3PA coming off screens. Even though Tre is not the most well-rounded athlete, movement shooting is where his athleticism is most functional, and because of the degree of difficulty in his attempts it’s easy to see him placing immense pressure on the defense in this way.

As the season progressed and Johnson became the focal point of opposing defenses (to an absurd degree at times), a common counter was to utilize Johnson as a screener. This is one of my favorite schematic wrinkles, especially in a context where Tre is sharing the court with other non-spacers, utilizing his scoring gravity to trigger mismatches for interior-based scorers should prove effective.

Reorienting Tre’s usage to more of a movement shooter will require more ‘0.5’ decision making, which Tre doesn’t have much experience with at the time. Johnson is much more of a reactive decision maker. Although these aren’t especially challenging reads, I expect this to be a focus early on.

As his processing becomes better aligned with this usage, it will be key for Tre to trim fat from his shot diet as well. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt when accounting for Texas’ personnel, to maximize his potency as a shooter, Tre will need to take these spot-ups instinctively.

In the end, these are quirks in Tre’s game which I anticipate will be ironed out in short order. There’s no real precedent for this precocious a shooting talent failing to translate as a scorer, and frankly, I do not think the shooting on its own is Tre’s ‘superpower’ as a prospect. In my opinion Tre’s penchant for taking care of the ball at such a high usage is truly special amongst scoring prospects.

Above is another ‘Stress Test’ query, but on a player level. On the surface these players do not seem to have much in common, and I’d understand someone’s skepticism in seeing a group featuring one player who is currently playing in China (Tremont Waters) and another who has been above league average TS% 3 times over the course of a 14 year career (Alec Burks) and any desirable company for a prospect. I would argue that this group has the distinction of some of the most resilient scorers in the Bart Torvik era. All of these players demonstrated an ability to manufacture offense independent of their context, and for the players who failed to find NBA success there were typically extenuating circumstances at play. In Tremont Waters’ case his height and inability to shoot early on prevented him from sticking in the league, but even this past season he spearheaded the #1 offense in China. Alec Burks is a more nuanced case, in my opinion Burks came into the league just a few years too late for his game to translate. As downhill guard without exceptional vertical athleticism or the perimeter shooting to keep him afloat, Burks struggled mightily acclimating to the popularization of 3-point shooting that swept the league.

While I don’t foresee Tre experiencing an outlier developmental arc like Donovan Mitchell or SGA due to the previously alluded to physical deficiencies, I am bullish he will become one of the more successful alums on this list for two reasons. First of all, Tre did not have the benefit of being part of a high-level offensive rebounding team, placing an outsized pressure on him to create without logging turnovers. And secondly, I believe Tre’s scoring portability and unique playmaking strengths are tailor-made for the direction the league is headed.

There are 5 games of Tre’s season I found particularly instructive of how his creation situates him to find success at the next level, Texas’ contests with the Tennessee Volunteers and Texas A&M. These teams were two of the best defenses in the country, but interestingly made up 4 of Texas’ 7 best relative performances this season.

Both these teams had stylistic parallels in their aggressive, swarming defense. Tennessee with their frenetic switching, hedging ballscreen coverages, and aggressive gap help. Texas A&M also switched but frequently opted to extend their pressure past half-court to slow down opposing offenses. Both rank near the bottom in the country in opponent 3Pr, willing to cede late clock 3s in order to cut off the paint entirely. This philosophy should sound fairly familiar: aggressive help, comfort giving up 3s, and relentless ball pressure were the defining traits of both NBA finalists! And it was versus these coverages that Tre’s calm under pressure, shrewd interior passing, and dynamic shooting truly shined.

The relevance of Tre’s size amongst shooting-oriented prospects was on full display versus these teams. Johnson was able to make teams play for late and/or lazy switches with his high and dynamic release.

Despite the congested paint, Johnson consistently made high-value passes without turning the ball over.

Johnson’s ability to pass over and around the defense while avoiding turnovers forced Tennessee to tone down their aggression in ballscreen coverages as well. In the first clip for instance, from Texas’ first matchup versus Tennessee, where the Volunteers maintained their hard-hedging ballscreen coverage. Johnson’s ability to keep his dribble alive and see over the lifted bigs allowed him to manipulate and beat the backline defenders in rotation

This occurred to the point where, when the teams rematched in the SEC tournament, Tennessee softened their ballscreen coverage greatly and reduced the nail-help to prevent the defense from becoming overextended. Johnson still managed to find a way.

This is an extremely small sample, of course, and even though the scheme has similar tenets to NBA defenses, these certainly aren’t NBA defenders. But these kind of plays and performances, while always captured in the box score, are what make Johnson the ideal ‘glove’ player in the NBA. With offensive rebounding becoming increasingly prevalent in the league’s meta…

Precise interior playmaking will become a necessity for perimeter players. And Johnson proved himself to be extremely adept with these naturally high-risk passes all season.

Conclusion

It doesn’t take a veteran scout to recognize the flaws in Tre’s game, and typically, any player who requires so many caveats and accommodations should probably not receive the level of investment Tre Johnson inevitably will. But what Tre is representative of, in my mind, is a departure from teambuilding dogma. A player who possesses outlier talent in the areas Tre does can be essential to forming an identity like the Houston Cougars and Rockets have sculpted over the years. What this exercise has taught me is there is a universality to basketball, and any team whose success is rooted in generating turnovers, rebounding, and maximizing the possession battle will require maximal turnover economy and close-quarters scoring from their backcourt. And a guard like Tre Johnson, who has met this criteria at such an early age, would be a defensible choice for any team keeping this roster building strategy in mind. In all likelihood I do not ever see Tre being the best, or even second-best player on a title-winning team, but he does make the acquisition and integration of perennially undervalued interior players a much simpler endeavor. And that may be where the edge lies in drafting Tre Johnson.

The post Finding the Fit: Tre Johnson, a Tale of Two Houstons, and Winning Ugly appeared first on Swish Theory.

To put it simply, a flaw in the subcategories for one player can be irrelevant for another: each prospect is unique and individual, and their path to NBA success can pull from vastly different traits. If you were grading skills broadly, you could theoretically have two players listed as ‘B’ in driving, but they could both be very different types of drivers.

One skill I always find particularly intriguing is ‘Feel’. The term can sometimes be hard to define, and each person likely has different types of ‘feel plays’ they value more than others. Generally, rotations and defensive positioning are seen as the primary barometers for feel, and I don’t disagree with this. Modern basketball offenses are so diverse, full of inversion and misdirection at a pace we’ve never seen before. Merely being able to master one position or one defensive role likely isn’t enough to stick for non-centers.

I am going to be exploring feel and what I deem to be ‘valuable’ types of offensive feel through Javon Small, who I believe to be the smartest player in the draft class. Small is currently 14^th on my big board at the time of writing and someone I’d happily use a mid to late first-round pick on. He is the best off-ball player in the class and a superb passer, something I’ll analyse and chart at length later in this article.

At times, I am of the opinion that Feel can be oversimplified. Similarly to driving, feel is complex and can be quite role-dependent. I would also like to share how I scout passing and all the different facets of passing that matter to me, noting why all passing is not the same, and why versatility matters. We can sometimes see a flashy pass and get enamoured, but you want to study the body of work and post the flashy stuff if you think it matters or is part of something bigger.

AST:TO is often used as a broad indicator of offensive feel. I am of the opinion that turnovers are bad and having a wildly negative AST-TO ratio is probably a bad sign unless you are a nuclear shooter or hyper athletic lob-threat. But does having a high AST-TO automatically mean you have feel on a basketball court? Quite often, players who are incredibly high in this stat can simply be table-setters on teams running high-powered offenses full of off-screen plays. I am not suggesting these skills aren’t valuable, but more that it can be worth contextualizing the types of assists players are getting. More filtering is needed to truly grasp a players “feel”, whether that be more granular stats or film analysis.

To me, defensive feel is much easier to define than offensive feel. I think there are two main reasons for this, the first being that bad defensive positioning is just so glaringly obvious on tape to the naked eye. If the tag man falls asleep on a Spain PNR, a layup is given up. If someone crashes on a drive and doesn’t rotate back out quickly enough to defend ball reversals, a wide-open jump shot will be given up. If a player panics as his defense is rotating, he may over-commit and end up fouling a mediocre three-point shooter.

The other reason is that scheme and surrounding personnel can play a large role. Teams that run the Princeton Offense naturally create opportunities for back cuts. Iverson Loop is a favourite set play of mine that will almost always create a wide-open backdoor layup. These are ‘cuts’, but created via schematic or tactical brilliance. Also, playing with an elite passer such as Nikola Jokic or Trae Young will give you more opportunities to showcase off-ball feel than if you are on a poor roster.

The balance comes with the fact that you cannot completely ignore good cutting because it comes within the context of a good scheme. Peja Stojakovic was a terrific off-ball mover when playing in Rick Adelman’s high-powered offense alongside two elite passers in Chris Webber and Vlade Divac. The fact that the corner offense was so meta for its time doesn’t change the fact; it’s just worth keeping in mind when studying this stuff. A good cut also doesn’t get you an assist or at times even the ball thrown your way, sometimes it will create space for someone else such as with a 45 cut.

This piece serves as more of a philosophical dive than a true draft profile, but for the sake of being complete I will say that Small is a plus playmaker, a very good off-ball mover who should shoot well at the next level. His three-point percentage is slightly lower than I’d expect it to be in the NBA, largely because, as a first-option, over half of his attempts were off-the-dribble three-pointers. The likely biggest weakness on offense is that he doesn’t like to challenge rim protectors. He has a decent floater in his arsenal but will often prefer to pass out of those situations.

Literature on Feel

Feel, being as complex as it is, requires study beyond the tape. Part of growing as an analyst in Basketball is reading pieces that challenge you, but also help you learn. As a guy who never played the sport, my background is unique and self-created. Other guys have different paths and skillsets. One of the best pieces ever written on feel is by my good friend Evan Zaucha, who now works at a high level in the sport.

Evan is a neuroscientist who pondered whether feel can be improved upon, and turned this late-night pondering into one of the greatest articles ever written on basketball.

This article is well worth your time and changed the way I look at the game of basketball. Evan makes several conclusions in the article, but there are two tha I’m really going to focus on:

• Ev concludes Feel is one of the 2 hardest skills to develop, alongside dribbling, with a general conclusion that mental skills are harder to develop than technical skills.
• Ev breaks down ‘feel’ into three parts: Processing Speed, Pattern Recognition and Visual Processing.

I’m not going to regurgitate a watered-down version of Zaucha’s masterpiece, but for the sake of moving things along in my own piece let’s just quickly explore these three through a play from my timeline where Louisville runs ‘Horns Out Knicks Spain’.

The pattern recognition aspect is Chucky Hepburn identifying the play, snaking to the right after the screen flip and seeing the defense angle their bodies to his left. He’s been running PNRs all his life and Kelsey would have installed this particular play in practice. In addition to this, he also sees his back screener angle his screen to the right-hand side.

Things are not always so simple, though, and players often have to react to what the defense does, not what they think they’re going to do.

The visual processing in this instance is seeing that #11 from Notre Dame has jumped into the paint to defend him as opposed to sticking with the back screener (a possible surprise). He continues processing by throwing it to the back screener, who leaked out of the paint for three. The processing speed is a constant throughout the play because if Hepburn picks up his dribble or stops after seeing the guard in the paint, Notre Dame would be able to recover out to the ‘leaker’ in the Spain PNR. Windows can shut it in an instant in basketball, so being able to do these things consistently is a true barometer of high-end ‘feel’.

These descriptions are similar to how the great NFL analysts will discuss quarterback play. You have a route combination to beat a specific coverage; if they’re vanilla, you know what you’ve got and don’t have to hesitate. If the coverage is disguised, you have to adjust on the fly, whether that’s taking a checkdown or something else. The speed you do that and how quickly you can move your feet (in the case of Hepburn above, it was his handle) will impact how likely you can adjust on the fly.

Another article that changed the way I scouted was Jake Rosen’s piece on how to look for processing speed on a court, in which the majority of ways Jake identified processing speed were off the ball. This largely tracks, as cutting is the most commonly identified type of intelligent ‘feel’ play. The one on-ball skill that Jake noted can be used to spot processing speed is when a playmaker is going through their progressions. You might run a double drag and your defender gets caught under the screen, so you know you have a clear run to the rim. But there will be other occasions where things are not that simple and you have to go further into your script, if not play in a way that wasn’t on your original script.

To Quote Rosen:

“The easiest way to detect fraudulent processors is when the first read is forced. Whether it’s a drop off to the roll man, or a lob for a scripted ATO play, blindly following the first read is a huge red flag. Not only does it show they didn’t read the defense on that particular play, it also means they were too overwhelmed with the idea of going through progressions”

There is nothing wrong with hitting a first read if it’s there. The issue is, defenses are getting longer and longer, and defensive tactics are becoming more aggressive. The picture you have in your head when you start the pick-and-roll will sometimes be completely different to what you see a couple of seconds later. NBA analyst Polarfall always likes to differentiate the very best playmakers from people who make ‘pre-planned’ decisions. You may go into a Double Drag wanting to get an easy layup, but you need to be able to read if you aren’t going to get that and have already made the decision to hit the popping big man before the defense has time to adjust.

That is the main change I have noticed as I’ve covered this game tactically for the last decade. Things can get complex quickly, and, more and more often, players are more comfortable temporarily leaving players open to overload certain areas of the court. Teams will try and counter this with stuff like 45 cuts, Stampede Action and Dead Corner concepts, but great passing is a way to cut through all of this, as if you’re against a truly elite processor, there isn’t always a ton you can do.

Passing Versatility

I’ve outlined some of the pieces that impacted the way I watch film and process playmaking on the court – now lets look through this lens with Javon Small. Small is a player projected in the mid-second round, but I’d feel comfortable taking him quite a bit earlier. I believe he can be a rotation player on a very good team due to his mix of playmaking, off-ball interest, feel, shooting, and capable paint scoring.

Something I always take note of is the variety of assists a player gets. I think even the top-end playmakers, such as Nikola Jokic, Steve Nash, and Luka Doncic, have passes or deliveries they lean on disproportionately. Even still, these 3 guys stand out as being capable of making a variety of passes, adapting to the playfinishing personnel they have on the court with them. To further explain this theory, I hand-tracked all of Javon Small’s assists from the past season. If an assist contributed to two categories in a relevant way (IE, if Small came off a screen, then drove and kicked it), I added a number to both categories.

As you can see, there is a lot of variety here. I believe this is important because at the NBA levels, some passers have very specific tendencies, and these can be game planned for. For example, the old Brooklyn Nets teams had D’Angelo Russell and Spencer Dinwiddie as their lead guards. Russell had a very strong preference towards interior passing, whereas Spencer Dinwiddie had a heavy bias towards drive-and-kick passing. Being able to hit the whole floor in the half-court is extremely important, even though Russell was still a plus playmaker in the grand scheme of things.

It is also worth noting that passing variety on its own isn’t a reliable indicator of feel. You could theoretically be able to make every pass in the book and make it accurately, but still be a low feel or poor processing player. Instead, I feel the ability to make different types of passes elevates the value of feel, which is why I talked about contextualizing AST:TO Ratio earlier. Small’s AST:TO Ratio moves me because of the difficulty and variety of the passes he executes in a high-level on-ball role.

Something I feel is essential when scouting a prospect is to consider the surrounding context. This does not mean I would completely overlook a prospects’ flaws because they’re in a bad context, but, rather, you weigh it in as part of the evaluation. With regard to passing variety what you should contextualise is that sometimes your front-court options will dictate the types of passes you throw.

For example, when scouting Kasparas Jakucionis it is painfully obvious that Illinois did not have a consistent lob-threat due to the fact that their center, Ivisic, was more of a stretch-five. This does not necessarily mean Kasparas cannot throw lob passes or prefers not to, but it’s a variable to consider. In the case of Small, West Virginia’s bigs largely preferred passes to be thrown as they were rolling; they didn’t have much of a true vertical threat. Still, having watched Small, I don’t believe he had an aversion to throwing lob passes, but instead was adapting to his personnel – those he did throw were accurate and the right read.

Effectively, passing variety shows you can solve problems in a variety of ways, which can increase a playmaking ceiling down the line. You can still be a positive playmaker without it, but the more passes you’re capable of, the more ways you can solve problems in the half-court.

Javon Small

As I’ve mentioned, I believe Small to be an incredibly smart player who can do anything on the floor. West Virginia were a good team last year, and Small played a large part in that stepping up to the plate after Tucker DeVries’ season-ending injury early in the season. Darian DeVries is one of the best offensive minds in college basketball, and Small’s passing was a great mesh with this, opening a whole realm of possibilities.

Something I’d like to note is I always try and make sure I’m being realistic and balanced. At times it can be tempting to find a clip of a prospect doing something once or twice and labelling it as a ‘flash’. It’s something I try and fight doing because you could find a clip of Dwight Howard hitting a three or Andre Roberson hitting a movement three if you looked hard enough. I have chosen to highlight Javon Small’s passing because after a full scout I believe it to be a difference making skill that can help a team, not because I’m trying to force anything.

What you will notice with a lot of these plays, is just how active Javon Small is off-the-ball. He takes great pride in moving to create advantages for his team-mate and it means there is passing potential off the catch due to his movement to take movement threes.

Below is the quintessential Javon Small play.

West Virginia runs ‘Point Over’. He cuts backdoor, loops back around, gets top locked. Many players just stop here or continue to try and get open in the same way, but Small keeps it moving and clears out eventually receiving the ball on a handoff, then making a quick dumpoff pass to Amani Hansberry who largely prefers to receive the ball in face-up situations. This is a great example of how he never stop moving and makes passes quickly.

Making passes in one motion after receiving the ball is a very common play-type for Small. Below he comes off the screen in a ‘Garfunkel’ set and makes the dumpoff pass to Hansberry at the baseline quickly enough so Hansberry can score without resistance.

After Tucker DeVries went down. Small became the fulcrum of the half-court offense – other guys stepped up where needed, but he was the advantage creator. They also sought to weaponize him off-ball largely due to his willingness to do it, but also to avoid predictability and stagnation.

Part of how they’d do this was by using Floppy Action and other double staggers.

On the play above, Javon Small makes the bounce pass to Amani Hansberry after coming off the double stagger. Hansberry likes these bounce passes as they’re a good way for him to quickly get into floaters and quick jumpers.

The play below is a good example of his good visual processing.

Small comes off the screen and is getting blitzed. More often than not Small expects to dump the ball off inside the paint, but on this occasion, his screener is a 6-foot guard. Small sees him moving to the corner so he stops and throws a pass over his head with the left hand, choosing a whipped pass to give a closeout the least chance of happening.

A concept that Polar introduced to NBA Twitter was the concept of ‘proactive passing’. The idea behind this is that you at first react to what is happening, but then throw a pass in anticipation of the defenses next move. I refer to any pass where it’s thrown as the defense is rotating (as opposed to afterwards) as a proactive pass. Small makes a lot of these:

Here they run their ‘turn’ series for him. The main option is for him to drive to the rim himself as the roll didn’t really get open. But watch how he reads #23 – the defender is in a position to clog the lane, but Small sees his back turned to Toby Okani so he throws the pass in anticipation. Effectively, he throws him open on this play )to use American Football terminology). He also correctly chooses the bounce pass as it’s Okani’s preference and allows him to pick up and finish off the glass in one motion.

Holding Defenders

Small does a great job holding defenders in a variety of ways. Sometimes it’s with his eyes, sometimes he extends windows for his roll men to give them more space and further stretch the defense.

I’m normally quite a harsh analyst on passing because I think at times basic passes can become highlight plays because of some finesse or trickery on them. But Small made so many proactive passes this season into tight windows and did a great job at both understanding and predicting defenders, like this play against Kansas:

WVU open the game by running a Shallow Double Drag which is designed to clear nail help and create a 2v2 in the PNR game. Kansas decide to hedge on the screen. Small’s roll-man is briefly covered by #3 but he waits for the mesh point and throws a beautiful wraparound pass to Eduardo Andre as Hunter Dickinson is rotating back. He stayed patient and made the pass right as he predicted that #3 would want to recover out to the shooter.

Dickinson is technically still right in front of him when he decides to make the pass. Proactive Passing doesn’t mean the pass has to be instant – windows are always opening and closing on a basketball court – it’s just all about having a feel for timing.

Small’s bounce passing was consistently accurate, managing to maintain the leverage of his roll-men quite often.

Again, you see his ability to make proactive quick passes as defenders are getting into position. He has a great feel for finding the timing on his passes, as the ball is quite often past defenders before they’ve even reacted. His processing speed and pass selection are both top notch. From a fit perspective, it’s easy to envision him thriving alongside someone with short roll ability or a powerful driver from the mid-range area.

Here’s a play where all of this comes together and we see his ability to hold defenders still.

WVA runs a Drag PNR into a give and go designed to punish the drop defense. The shallow lift in the roll and replace action isn’t open, but Small stays patient by pulling a favorable switch further away from the action. Watch him fake the swing pass to the right to pull the recovery defender out of the paint, then hit Eduardo Andre inside. You can even see him get #14 to jump – it’s these subtle manipulations that can win in the half-court. He kept the swing pass open for the whole possession and kept leveraging the threat of it to eventually generate an interior read.

As Rosen discussed, staring down the first read all the time isn’t a good sign, as it showcases rigidity in decision making. Current NBA Basketball isn’t akin to following an instruction manual. Superhuman athletes roam the court and coaches are trying wackier defensive tactics than ever before. Gone are the days of teams running flat 1-4 PNRs with both corners and the slot occupied with spacers. The court is more positionally fluid than ever, so being able to read on the fly is as important as it’s ever been.

Effectively, you’re going to see weird stuff so you can’t rely on making pre-planned reads. These plays often stand out as containing unique angles, misdirects, or anything that elicits surprise in the viewer. In essence, a prospect being able to break your camera is a good sign.

Below is one of my favourite passes of the cycle.

This looks a simple read in the PNR, but Small actually makes two moves here: before the bounce pass, he gets the defender to jump at the idea of the high pass. He chains it together so quickly that it’s quite hard to see on the video without really slowing it down. He extends the window for his roller because if he’d thrown it earlier, #10 has a better chance at making a play.

Small also loves throwing wraparound passes. You’ve seen one or two so far, and it’s something he’s good at and feels comfortable doing. He’s ambidextrous on these passes, though ultimately he is probably slightly more comfortable using his left hand.

Modern Concepts and Athleticism

Something I love about Javon Small is how he’s already executing some of the modern concepts and tactics that we are seeing rise in the NBA, particularly in regards to throw-and-gos. These are not new to basketball, but teams such as the Cleveland Cavaliers have made them a feature of their half-court offense in recent years. Kenny Atkinson in particular preaches fast-paced principles and pass-and-move concepts, as opposed to set plays. Below is an example.

The play basically dies, which happens often against Kelvin Sampson’s defense. But Javon Small simply flows into a give and go with Amani Hansberry to get things moving again. It’s effective because Hansberry’s man is sagging off, as he’s not a great shooter. Small gets into the teeth of the defense before jumping and hangs in the air so he can allow things to develop more and make the right read.

There are a few things I note here. Caitlin Cooper has long been a proponent of jump passing and nearly every fellow Film writer I know including myself owns a T-Shirt to celebrate this. Caitlin noted that jump passing is important for Haliburton because he “jumps because he has an idea, not because he has run out of ideas”. I noticed on film while watching Javon Small that he likes a Jump Pass. In the case above the Jump Pass gave him a little time to read the low-man and pick between the 45 cutter or the corner shooter. He does similar on the play below, where he uses a jump to create time to read the low-man, then decides a kick-out is a better option than dishing into the paint.

Some may have preferred him to make the interior pass, but he underestimated the length Colorado threw at him early in the play and adjusted on the fly. Small uses the jump pass to open up two-options for himself, before ultimately deciding to read #6 inside the paint. As noted before, he chains this together rapidly and is capable of making quick adjustments with his handle. He turned what was a misread into something valuable, like he does again here:

WVU runs a Gut Chicago set on the BLOB play. There isn’t much open at first, so Small lofts a pass to his center and runs a give-and-go, creating a lob opportunity and an easy bucket. As noted in the pass tracking, Small didn’t throw a ton of lob passes – largely because the opportunities were not always there – but he is someone I project to be capable of throwing them.

I mentioned the Cavs above. Their backup guards (Ty Jerome in particular) were excellent at always keeping things moving and making quick decisions. Some call this ‘0.5 decision making’. It’s very easy to project Small doing this stuff at the NBA level, largely because he has already done it at the collegiate level. I’ve pondered whether I’ve been too optimistic on how easy these instant decision concepts are to install. Sure, you can tell any of your players to do these throw-and-gos, but the ability to do it at game speed and move quickly is the differentiator. Because of this, feel is crucial to how much value you generate from these concepts, especially on the cutting side.

Javon Small also shows great core strength on many of his passes. It should be noted that Javon Small is very athletic, full stop. Among point guards all time his combine score ranks in the 96th percentile per Nick Kalinowski (KaliDrafts).

Small shows this hand width and core strength on tape by making some crazy one-handed passes:

Javon snakes the PNR, stops and throws a great one-handed pass to Toby Okani before the defense can even react. This showcased nearly everything we’ve touched upon so far – pattern recognition by reading his defender and snaking, adapting to the changes in coverage and seeing the soft spot in the defense while doing it quickly (Zaucha). He doesn’t stare down the obvious read which is the roll, instead realizing a later progression is going to be open (Rosen). Finally, he makes a jump pass because he had an idea he wanted to execute. The one-handed pass shows core strength. This is everything I’ve discussed all coming together at once, and these weren’t one-off passes either. His handle and processing speed are on full display again in the clip below:

Cutting

Small is an exceptional cutter, able to make them quickly but also uses a lot of veteran tricks to maximize himself. Here’s a play that exemplifies this while also touching upon the jump passing we detailed above.

WVU go with a basic 5-out look and show as if they’re gonna run ‘Doom’ action (Double Zoom). Javon Small is on the weak side and briefly pushes off on his man to get a little separation, then cuts backdoor. He hangs in the air and throws a great dump-off pass. Again, he uses the Jump Pass as he had an idea as opposed to running out of them. These veteran tricks are all over the film and mesh with his passing and court mapping.

He did the same in an early-season matchup against Gonzaga:

Darian DeVries spammed this ‘Peja’ action (Back Screen into a Handoff) for his son Tucker while at Drake. WVU look to set this up on the SLOB play. Watch Small push his man (who is expecting Peja action) downhill to create a blockade then cut backdoor to generate the free-throw attempts. Small’s defender is basically only thinking about top-locking Tucker DeVries and Javon makes him pay with some smart and effective movement.

Yes it’s a defensive lapse, but good cutting will create these. You won’t create a defensive lapse out of thin air.

Small also had a couple of plays where he saw things instantly on SLOB plays as the inbounder and created points.

WVU are trying to set up some form of an away screen for Sencire Harris. He gets top locked and Small responds almost instanteously by throwing to Eduardo Andre and going for a backdoor cut which works as #3 is playing conservative defense on Andre. Again, these things look simple, but Small thinks so quickly and was doing this sort of stuff on a nightly basis.

Conclusion: Revisiting Feel, Passing and Processing Speed

I’ve explored the thoughts of others throughout this piece and deep-dived the passing variety and effectiveness of Javon Small.

Small’s offensive feel was just seriously impressive. Not many small guards engage off-ball, but Small not only engages but simply sees things so quickly. A lot of how much this might matter will depend on the shot. I believe Small’s percentages are largely tanked by the fact over 65 percent of his attempts were off-the-dribble 3s. It’s unlikely he’s going to be playing as big a role as he played at WVU so I expect the shooting numbers to stabilise a little.

The major question I have for Small is how much he can challenge bigs as a scorer. There were times he could drive and somewhat get swallowed up and almost be reliant on a cut to make stuff happen. This isn’t necessarily a gigantic deal because players should be moving anyway but working out how he wants to challenge bigs will be the major question I’d ask. But the processing, passing variety and general feel should translate immediately.

He seems pretty scalable because of his passing variety. The only real instance I can think of where he might not fit would be on a team that runs very little pick-and-roll, but even then I think his cutting, off-ball movement and smarts mean he will find opportunities to score and create from the second-side quite often.

Javon Small, with all his passing talent, indeed had a strong A:TO. However, I noted earlier that I like to contextualise Feel and analyze AST:TO in a more comprehensive way. A:TO has its value and is probably a good filter generally. But ultimately it’s worth your time to dive deeper and find other ways to filter guys out, whether that is with more statistics or with film watching. I hope sharing how I scout passing , feel and playmaking can help with that.

The reason I like to do that is to put it simply, it’s very hard to make it in the NBA. Having feel alone will not keep you on a court. The types of ways you can ‘feel’ the game matter as does the rest of your game. Zaucha’s three cornerstones of feel showcase that it can be complex to understand how feel works and how impactful it will be. Small understands the game, can adapt to defensive wrinkles and can adapt to them quickly. This is all fuelled by an impressive handle; feel cannot stand alone without technique.

Diving into the film allows you to gauge how much the feel might matter at the next level. Many high AST-TO guards get drafted, it just isn’t always enough. That is what I mean by ‘contextualising feel’. I sought to add to this by showcasing how I scout passing and the types of ‘high processing speed’ passes I look for and how to spot them.

In the modern NBA, spacing is said to be at an all-time high. This is largely because we shoot more threes than ever and have true five-out stuff. The 2002 Sacramento Kings broke the NBA with their spacing which was Chris Webber and Vlade Divac both being able to shoot mid-rangers. But the more i watch the less I become sure that space is actually always there. Part of this is because NBA defenses want you to shoot mid-range shots, but defenses are also just long and smart. What has stood out to me in these Finals is how compacted things are; things are played in a phone booth when it comes down to it. Even though we utilise the three-point line more than ever, traffic is there. Things are clogged, and you need to find solutions within the space you are given. It’s why I often fade hyper-athletic, speedy prospects because I think agility and finesse can be extremely important in these phone booths.

It’s not as simplistic as saying processing is the only way to beat it. There are sub-optimal processors who can attack these compact defenses we see and do a good job of it. In the case of Javon Small, and just Javon Small, I think his answer to this problem is that his handle, his instant processing and his ability to throw a variety of passes can unlock doors. That’s the problem he might solve for you. I try and treat every prospect as unique, and the solutions they provide for one team will not necessarily be the same they can provide for another. As I have displayed by contextualizing the stats with tape and scheme analysis, Javon Small can provide a lot of solutions for a lot of teams.

Favourite Fits: Clippers, Pacers, Timberwolves, Hawks

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