Fixing Julius Randle
with an eye on Marcus Morris as well
If you hadn’t watched any of the first quarter of Wednesday’s Knicks loss to the Sixers, and merely looked at Julius Randle’s box score stats to judge whether or not he was having an efficient scoring game, you wouldn’t have come away satisfied, but you would at least be accepting.
That’s because Randle (down 3% in PredictionStrike, to $3.52 per share) finished with 6 points on 6 shots, and also chipped in one assist. Scoring as many points as shots you take is about the bare minimum I can stomach before I really start to get annoyed.
(Currently, there are three Knicks averaging fewer points than field goal attempts: Bobby Portis, at 9.3 to 9.4, Dennis Smith Jr, at 4.9 to 5.5 but getting better, and surprisingly Damyean Dotson, who hasn’t quite found his shot yet. Mitch is easily the best at 5.8 attempts to produce 10.1 points a game.)
Randle is averaging 16.5 points on 14.1 field goal attempts per game. This isn’t altogether efficient by any stretch, but it’s not uncommon to look at star players and see low shooting percentages. After all, these are guy who often find the ball in their hands late in the clock and force a bad look that’s the best option under the circumstances. They also have the ball a lot late in games, when defenses tighten up and an isolation possession by your most talented player might be the best way to go.
If you’ve watched the Knicks at all this year, reading that last paragraph should have made your blood boil, because none of it applies to Randle, not even a little.
Primarily, Julius Randle isn’t a star. David Fizdale said as much recently when he dubbed his own team one without a star, which is part of the reason that trusting one another was so paramount to their success.
Yet, watching the games, you’d think Randle (and to a lesser extent Marcus Morris) were bringing the career arcs of Kawhi Leonard (- 5%, $9.97 per share) and Paul George (+ 1%, $19.5 per share) with them with some of the offense they’re allowed to generate (and I use the word “generate” loosely. What’s a verb associated with mold growing?)
Of course, this isn’t altogether fair. As has been lightly noted in some deep corners of NBA Twitter, David Fizdale wasn’t exactly handed the most functional roster. Of the ingredients he was given to cook with, Randle and Morris brought with them easily the highest efficiency on the highest volume with the most shot creation ability. Hence, they have been features of the offense.
In some respects, this is making the best of a bad situation, and it hasn’t been a complete disaster. After all, the Knicks have a better offensive rating with both big men on the court than with them off. That doesn’t mean things can’t improve significantly.
In Mook’s case, the answer is quite simple: ditch some two’s for threes. Morris currently has an effective field goal percentage of .495, which is more than fine. However, he’s now shooting 46 percent on threes and 37 percent on twos. That’s insanity. What’s worse is that according to BasketballReference.com, Morris is taking nearly half of his shots from between three feet and the arc. Take a gander at his shooting percentages from each distance:
Is this a regression to the mean situation? Looking at Mook’s career numbers (oldest at the top), it’s hard to make that case:
His conversion rate from three to 10 feet should definitely improve, and those are shots you’re comfortable with him taking. From 10 feet to the arc though is about par for the course, even if the percentages are a bit inverted from his last few years.
Of course, it’s very easy for me to sit at my laptop and propose this, and quite another for Coach Fiz to walk up to the veteran leader of this team and say “Hey bud…all those shots you’ve made a career of taking? Please don’t take those anymore. You can still text me at 3 am though.”
Coaching isn’t supposed to be easy though, and these sorts of convos are the ones Fizdale allegedly specializes in. Morris doesn’t have to excise all of these shots from his diet, but a little bit would go a long way
In Randle’s case, things are a bit more complicated. I started out by saying he had six point on six shots in the first quarter on Wednesday night. Watch the first 1:25 here to see five of those six attempts:
If you were keeping track, you’d have noticed:
A missed 14’ jumper with 14 seconds left on the clock
A missed 18’ jumper with 18 seconds left on the clock
A made step-back, top of the key 3-pointer with one second left on the clock
A missed, contested layup with seven seconds left on the clock
A made, wide-open, left-side three with eight seconds left on the clock
The shot that wasn’t featured in the video was a layup attempt that was technically blocked by Al Horford (- 9%, $4.85 per share), but was really more like Julius Randle performance art, with him doing an interpretative dance into Horford’s outstretched arms where the ball was dislodged before it even got halfway to the rim. It occurred on a possession where Randle brought the ball up and it never touched anyone else’s hands.
This phenomenon - Point Randle waving off Frank Ntilikina (+0%, $0.22/share) or whatever nominal point guard is in the game - has become perhaps the staple feature of New York’s offense.
Now (are you sitting down? Sit down for this…), I actually think this is a brilliant idea, at least on possessions where Randle grabs the board and is in position to start a transition possession off a live rebound. That’s the whole point of having a 250 lb. bowling ball who can handle the rock, get to the rack, and pass it just well enough to catch a defense off guard.
It’s a less brilliant idea when said bowling ball uses that advantage to drive headfirst into one of the best defenders in the NBA without even looking for a mismatch elsewhere on the court. The second shot in the clip - the missed ‘17 jumper - also happened when Randle brought the ball up the court. The ball left his hand before Mitch had even crossed the foul line.
On the year, 31 percent of Randle’s looks are coming from the midrange, which is in the 71st percentile league-wide according to Cleaning the Glass.
These types of shots are atrocities against basketball humanity: early shot clock looks that are inefficient to begin with from a particularly inefficient taker of said shots.
On that note, Randle’s career percentages from each distance (most recent on the bottom):
These numbers indicate someone who gets a lot of shots contested from 3-10 feet and isn’t great at overcoming those contests (see: driving layup) and who also gets a lot of open looks outside of 10 feet. The closer they are, the more they go in. As long as he’s shooting .529 from 10-16 feet, you might say, he should keep taking these shots. He is, after all, in the 69th percentile of bigs on short midrange shots according to Cleaning the Glass (as opposed to the 41st percentile on long twos).
This is where context matters though. Randle’s first shot of the game was a bad one because it wasn’t open - Horford was right in his mug - and there was still 14 seconds left on the clock.
Is it too harsh and overly cherry-picking (this is one quarter of one game out of 82, after all) to be getting on Randle for three bad shots out of six attempts? I’d argue no, for a few reasons, all of which go to why I thought this was an important topic to focus on.
The biggest reason, getting back to what I referenced earlier, is that Randle isn’t a star. There are five, maybe 10 guys in the league who have the credibility to get away with taking these types of shots, and guess what: those 5-10 guys aren’t taking these types of shots.
Marcus Morris (+ 14%, $3.69 per share) is equally culpable here, but at least he’s balancing it out by being a dominant long-range shooter this season. It’s part of the reason why his on/off numbers (105.1 offensive rating on / 93.8 offensive rating off) dwarf Randle’s (102.1 on / 100.0 off).
Worst of all, unlike true stars who bide their time and save their bullets for when it matters most, Randle is dominating the offense early in the game, before defenses really bare down and commit.
Check out Randle’s season-long breakdown by quarter, with all numbers on a per 100 possession basis:
You’ll notice that in the first quarter, Randle takes more than one shot for every four team possessions. For context, James Harden (-6%, $11.61 per share), who lead the league in scoring and field goal attempts, takes 32.5 shots per 100 possessions in the first quarter. In other news, Julius Randle is not James Harden.
You’ll also notice that Randle doesn’t get to the line at all in the first quarter, at least in comparison to the rest of the game, and averages far fewer assists in the first half (4.5 to 6.5)
Now take a look at the New York’s ratings with Randle on the court, also broken down by quarter:
Well then.
It would seem that the “We gotta get the big guy going” philosophy hasn’t been working out so well for the team. Similarly, when defenses get especially tight in the fourth, Randle’s performance has also left a bit to be desired (notice also his 7.3 turnovers per 100 possessions in the final frame from above).
So what’s the answer? It’s certainly not as simple as telling Julius to shoot less and pass more, because that’s just not his game, and we saw what happened earlier in the year when he was trying to stick a square peg in a round hole. Also, Julius Randle is arguably the most talented offensive player on this team! He should be shooting and doing stuff with the ball!
But he also can’t continue on this track, because eventually, the rails will run out and we all die in a fiery blaze, Fizdale being at the front of the train.
That’s what’s so interesting: it’s Fiz’s ass on the line here. Quite clearly, simply giving Randle some basic rules to abide by (no contested two’s early in the clock; pass it back out if nothing is there; if you have a long two, take a step or two back behind the line before you shoot it) would seem to benefit everyone involved, as would putting the ball in Ntilikina’s hands more to start the game in an effort to generate easy offense to replace some of these barfy looks.
Maybe it’s coming. They’ve only played 15 games, after all, and maybe this is a lesson Randle could learn on his own at some point.
The numbers make it pretty clear though: the sooner this happens, the better off both he and the team will be.
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On This Date: Knicks post 28-0 run in 3rd quarter to beat Raptors
by Vivek Dadhania (@vdadhania)
In a – quite recent – flashback, the Knicks took a 11 point halftime deficit and went on a historic 28-0 run to defeat the Toronto Raptors. The win put the Knicks at 10-7 to start the season. According to Ian Begley, the 28-0 run was the longest run – at the time – since 2009. The Knicks outscored the Raptors 41-10 in the third quarter.During the third quarter, Courtney Lee & Tim Hardaway Jr. scored 11 and 12 points respectively. THJr also dished 4 assists in the quarter. In a rare occurrence, Enes Kanter had 2 blocks in the quarter. Surprisingly, Kristaps Porzingis did not hit a field goal in the quarter and only scored 2 points. He did, however, end the game with 22 points, 12 rebounds, and 3 blocked shots.
That’s all! See everyone on Monday!