JD & The Inefficient Shot
In today's draft prospect review, we look at a supremely talented scorer with one giant red flag. Plus, thoughts on the Celtics in the Finals.
Good morning, and happy belated Memorial Day! I hope everyone enjoyed their barbecuing and didn’t mind that I took the holiday off. I made up for it today though, not only with a new prospect deep dive on a player who I expect to be heavily linked to the Knicks come draft night, but some extended thoughts on what (if anything) New York can learn from the Eastern Conference’s Finals entrant. As always, if you’re not fully aboard, please correct that here:
🗣 News & Notes ✍️
🏀 Congrats to the Boston Celtics, who join the Golden State Warriors as our 2022 Finals participants following a much-closer-than-it-should-have-been victory over the Miami Heat on Sunday night. After the game, Celtics star Jayson Tatum referenced a familiar moment from this season:
So should we take anything from the fact that after that January 6 buzzer beater, the Knicks were a game ahead of Boston in the standings, and now here we are five months later with the Celtics set to play for a title?
Sure…first and foremost, New York needs to get a lot better. Boston, for as inconsistent as they were, always had the talent to make a run. Their season turned around with a combination of things - primarily by moving around some key supporting pieces and their stars getting better at making others better - but through 39 games, they were proof that all the talent in the world means nothing if everyone’s oars are rowing in different directions.
These Knicks have talent. Not as much as Boston, or Golden State, or any of the final four or even eight teams that were left standing. But they’re also not as far away as it can feel at times. You don’t win 37 games in a season where it felt like just about everything went wrong without some decent basketball players on your roster.
Now - and stop me if you’ve heard this one before - comes the hard part. Yes, the biggest challenge is getting that elusive superstar: their version of Luka or Steph or Jimmy or Jaylen…someone who can bend a defense to their will. That is hard but it is not impossible. The list of guys who can be the “best” guy on a title team if everything breaks right is, what…12 players long? 14 players? 16? Just as importantly, how many of those guys are on the same team with each other?
Maybe when KD collapsed in a heap on the court in Toronto three years ago, the era of the superteam collapsed with him and we just didn’t realize it yet. Of the last 12 conference finalists in 2020, 2021 and 2022, the same number - two - had zero All-NBA players from that season (this year’s Heat and last season’s Hawks) as had multiple All-NBA players from that season: the 2019-20 champion Lakers, with both LeBron and AD, and the 2020-21 Clippers, who had Kawhi and Paul George (although they advanced to the conference finals with the former sidelined due to injury).
Maybe there will be another superteam again at some point, but with the way superstar free agency is now non-existent1 and with the failure (at least thus far) of the Brooklyn experiment, perhaps we’ll see more and more teams try to emulate what the Celtics have done instead.
And what have they done? That’s where the Knicks should be taking notes. They have the one necessary superstar - someone who, whether he’s the 4th or 6th or 8th or whatever best player in the league, has elevated to that level of basketball nirvana where he can either get a good look for himself or for one of his teammates on every damn possession. Again: getting this guy will not be easy.
But aside from Tatum, what are the Celtics, really? A collection of players who work together to be absolutely elite at one key thing: defense. They also have a secondary creator in Brown and a tertiary one in Smart who certainly aren’t the best second and third bananas in the league, but they’re good enough to get the job done within this ecosystem. Aside from those three, we’re just talking about role players who do their job, and just as importantly, know what their job is and stay within that lane.
They - like the Warriors and to a slightly lesser extent the Mavs and Heat - are also largely home grown, with six of the eight players who saw time on Sunday night having been drafted by Boston. On that front, these Knicks - at least compared to basically every other version over the last two decades - are making progress.
But back to the aforementioned hard part. Where does New York’s superstar come from, and how much (if any) of that homegrown core will they need to break up to get him? Can they make the pieces fit better than they did this season? And is Tom Thibodeau the right coach to do it? These are all vital questions, but ones that are at least worth asking.
No, the results of January 6 and the standings after that game don’t mean these teams are in the same universe. They’re not, not right now at least. But these Celtics - their story, their progression over the years, and most importantly, their perseverance in the face of massive uncertainty mere months ago - should be an encouraging sign to New York as opposed to a discouraging one.
If they can learn from it, that is.
🏀 Mavs GM Nico Harrison spoke about Jalen Brunson's free agency on Friday2, and unsurprisingly, sounded like he was going to do everything possible to bring Brunson back:
"It's the top priority. We've got to figure that out. Obviously, we're not in control of it, but he's definitely a priority. We want to re-sign him. He knows it. We want him back. He'll be a big part of our future."
At this point, almost nothing would shock me. And I mean nothing. If Brunson’s starting point in negotiations was five years for $125 million, what would the Mavs do? Dare him to go get an offer from a team with space? Challenge the Knicks to come up with a path to the same amount of space and then begrudgingly engage them in sign and trade negotiations? Or just bite the bullet and make Brunson roughly the 50th highest paid player in the sport? In short, I think we’re in for a wild ride.
JD & The Inefficient Shot
Last week, I made the comparison between Benedict Mathurin’s highlight tape and a truly great movie trailer. Today’s prospect goes a step further. For the first third of the college basketball season, he was putting together a run akin to Francis Ford Coppola in the 1970’s, and his January 3 showing against Purdue was his Apocalypse Now.
With 37 points and 14 rebounds against Jaden Ivey and 3rd ranked Purdue, Johnny Davis had dropped a bomb on the 2022 big board.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
At that point in the season, Davis was arguably the hottest prospect in the country, averaging 22.3 points on 45.3 percent shooting overall and 35.5 from deep on over four attempts a night through 11 games. It wasn’t just the numbers that elevated him from freshman year afterthought to sophomore sensation; it was the way he was scoring that opened eyes across the country.
What was he doing that was so special? Three words: creation…
…creation…
…creation:
Game after game, Davis was giving a repeat viewing of the most valuable skill in basketball today. As a pick and roll ball handler, he graded in the 78th percentile according to Synergy, and operated out of those sets a whopping 29.3 percent of the time. Davis was consistently getting to his spots and converting tough look upon tough look without the assistance of a teammate, and by the end of the season, there was no comparison between him and the other lottery wing prospects when it came to off-the-dribble jumpers:
The uniqueness of Davis stands out even more when we factor in where he took these shots from. The second-year Badger attempted 148 jumpers inside the arc last season. That’s 41 more than Mathurin, Griffin and Ivey combined.
While long two-point range was clearly Davis’ preferred real estate, he flashed enough ability elsewhere to foresee a well-rounded scoring wing at the next level. That included 3-point shooting both off the dribble…
…and off the catch:
The latter is important for quelling fears that Davis will be a non-factor in the NBA if he’s forced to play off the ball more. His release isn’t the quickest and his form isn’t the most textbook, but Davis hit 38.9 percent of his catch & shoot opportunities in the half court per Box and One, albeit on only 54 attempts. More on this in a bit.
The other part of Davis’ game which is promising if unique is his finishing. Davis isn’t an elite vertical athlete, even off of two feet, but he showed nice creativity and touch on drives when he got to the basket:
The issue - and yes, this is where you should stop reading if you have your heart set on the Knicks drafting the Big Ten Player of the Year and don’t want to hear boo about them potentially passing on him - is that for as much as Davis had the ball in his hands with opportunities to create for himself, he didn’t get to the rim nearly as much as you’d have liked. His default was to dribble into difficult midrange looks, and while he has a reel full of conversions on shots that the other lottery wings mostly didn’t dare to attempt, by the end of the year, his overall efficiency left much to be desired. A big part of that was the lack of close range looks.
The nice numbers over those first 11 games - 45.3 percent overall and 35.5 percent from deep - fell to 41.0 percent overall and 27.6 percent from deep over the final 20. He also made zero or one 3-pointer in 13 of his last 15 games, a stretch which saw him shoot just 21 percent from long range.
It wasn’t just behind the arc that saw a drop off either. A lot of attention has been paid to the ankle injury Davis suffered in a March 6 game against Nebraska, and the fact that he hit just 11-of-33 on 2-pointers over his final three games after that injury, but Davis had hit just 12-of-33 shots inside the arc in the three games leading up to that contest. He also had several other concerning duds over the final two thirds of the season: 4-for-18 against Ohio State on January 13, 5-of-19 against Illinois on February 2, and 2-of-13 against Penn State on February 5.
When all was said and done, Davis finished the season with a 46.6 2-point field goal percentage, a 30.6 3-point field goal percentage, a 46.4 effective field goal percentage and a 52.0 true shooting percentage. The latter number is the lowest of any college prospect currently slated to be taken in the first 20 picks.
Looking back a little further, I found just five other lottery picks over the last 20 years who had a college season in which they took at least 15 shots per game and had an effective field goal percentage under 48:
Cole Anthony (‘20)- Freshman, UNC: 40.2 2P%, 34.8 3P%, 18.5 PTS, 4.0 AST
Anthony Edwards (‘20)- Freshman, UGA: 50.4 2P%, 29.4 3P%, 19.1 PTS, 2.8 AST
Jerome Robinson (‘18)- Sophomore, BC: 46.6 2P%, 33.3 3P%, 18.8 PTS, 3.4 AST
C.J. McCollum (‘11)- Sophomore, Lehigh: 43.5 2P%, 31.5 3P%, 21.8 PTS, 2.1 AST
Kemba Walker (‘11)- Junior, UConn: 47.1 2P%, 33.0 3P%, 23.5 PTS, 4.5 AST
A couple things on the above list…
Anthony Edwards is pretty clearly in a different category from the other five. As his proficiency from 2-point range shows, there was never a question of his shot creation ability; it was merely a matter of whether he’d commit to getting the best shots as a pro and not settling for (what was at the time) a far less efficient diet of off-the-dribble looks from behind the arc. Also, from a physical standpoint, he and Davis are not in the same universe.
Jerome Robinson didn’t enter the draft after his down sophomore season; he went back to school and raised his eFG% from 47.7 to 56.4, which is a big part of the reason the Clippers took him 13th overall, one spot ahead of Michael Porter Jr. The same goes for C.J. McCollum, who ended up staying at Lehigh through his senior year. By that time, it was clear that his sophomore season was the outlier, as he went from a 54.1 eFG% as a freshman to 44.7 and then back up to 49.6 and finally 58.0 before the draft. Maybe we’ll look back on Davis in the same light.
That leaves Cole and Kemba, two inefficient point guards with undeniable on-ball skills whose value as pros was always going to come down to the outside shot. Walker worked, and worked, and then worked some more to get his 3-pointer to an acceptable place, and that ultimately led to four All-Star births, but it was his ability to run an offense that gave him a comfortable floor as a pro. Even with that ability though, the lack of an outside shot left significant doubt as to whether Walker could ever be an above average starter as late as the end of his rookie deal. Similar questions are being asked about Anthony now after two seasons in the bottom 25 percent of all NBA point guards in efficiency.
Johnny Davis, notably, isn’t a point guard. In fact, there are significant questions about his playmaking ability even for a wing. He averaged just 2.2 assists per 36 minutes, a 0.93 assist to turnover ratio, and a 0.46 assist to usage ratio which is lower than you’d like for a guy who has the ball in his hands as often as Davis.
Watch him here on consecutive possessions against Houston, first throwing a terrible pass leading directly to a fast break (which, granted, he hustled back to defend) and then on the next play, bypassing an open corner three to take a contested long two…while three open teammates stood around and watched from behind the arc:
Inefficient gunners who shoot as a first, second and third option used to have a role in the NBA as microwave-type sixth men, but that role is improving year by year throughout the league. The days of Jamal Crawford being allowed to come in and commandeer large swaths of game action despite poor overall efficiency are long gone. There are too many good shooters in the league now. Second unit engines are expected not only to create a matchup advantage, but to make the right pass if it presents itself as well. It’s part of the reason why a guy like Alonzo Trier can’t get a job in the NBA despite clear ability as a prototypical bucket getter.
I’m not saying Davis is Trier, but without something in his offensive arsenal that is dependably efficient, the slope from “productive NBA player” to “can’t get time in the rotation” gets a lot more slippery. As a result, you almost certainly won’t be hearing his name in the top half of the lottery.
That said, there are reasons for hope. As mentioned above, the limited-volume spot up numbers are good. Davis was also a tenacious defender in college, and while his lack of foot speed can sometimes hurt him on that end of the court, he competes hard and navigates the floor well. His size - 6' 5.75" in shoes with a 6'8.5" wingspan - also bodes well for his ability to guard most wings at the next level.
In the end, we have to ask one question: are we simply overthinking the guy who might wind up being the best wing creator in this class, or would this be another Kevin Knox-level mistake of making a ceiling-play gamble when a damn good floor may be staring at them in the face3.
Reflecting on the conversation above regarding the Celtics and learning some valuable lessons from their success, the answer will come down in part to the role Davis will have and how they plan to bring him along, and of course, intel. Guys who can create something out of nothing don’t grow on trees, and the opportunity to draft one at his size is rare. Most importantly, the Knicks need one of these dudes, but a great one or at least a really good one. Inefficient shot creation marks the grave of many a Knicks team over the last 20 years.
But how much of JD’s warts were due to injury, or the fact that he felt he needed to do too much for his own good? Is he a classic case of a guy who will look much better when surrounded by better teammates? Or is this someone who had a brilliant month and a half of shot-making and we’re still getting high off the fumes of that run?
My guess is that we’ll find out what the Knicks think of him come draft night. I bet he’s there at 11, with Chet, Jabari, Paolo, Ivey, Sharpe, Griffin, Murray, Daniels and Mathurin coming off the board in some order, plus one surprise, because isn’t there always a surprise in the top 10. That means Davis will be there. Is he the guy? We find out in three and a half weeks.
And finally…
A call to arms! App developers (preferably ones that are Knicks fans, although it certainly isn’t a requirement), hit me up at jcmacri@gmail.com if you have experience developing apps in the social media stratosphere. Thanks in advance for your interest!
🏀
That’s it for today! If you enjoy this newsletter and like the Mets, don’t forget to subscribe to JB’s Metropolitan, or his new hockey newsletter, Isles Fix. See y’all soon! #BlackLivesMatter
Remember, the Nets needed to acquire not one but two stars in free agency to get their big three because you only have so many assets to trade for a star. Maybe a team with two stars on the roster will have enough left over to trade to for a third, but I don’t see an obvious candidate in the league at the moment. Also, are we sure that’s the wisest path?
H/t Michael Scotto for the quote
I’m guessing New York will have their pick between Davis and either Mathurin, who we covered last week, or Jeremy Sochan, who is pretty much the polar opposite of Davis as a prospect. We’ll cover him soon.
"But how much of JD’s warts were due to injury, or the fact that he felt he needed to do too much for his own good?" I think you answered your own question. Put this kid on Duke and see the results.