A rookie has earned immediate respect. An old dog is learning new tricks. And a tanker is innovating.
Let’s open the notebook to run through three NBA trends that have caught my eye this week.
Latching onto Knueppel
Not all shooters are spacers. And not all spacers are shooters.
The two traits are connected. Presumably, a player has to hit jumpers for the defense to worry about him on the perimeter, which then pulls opponents away from the paint, thus spacing the court for his teammates. And in most cases, the more a shooter misses, the less defenders will care to close out on him.
But there are always exceptions — because there is a human element to basketball.
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If a guy’s jump-shooting form is whacky, defenders won’t worry about him as much. But if it’s smooth, even if it doesn’t go in often, those same defenders may not want to get beaten. Having a last name that ends in ić earns you an extra few ounces of respect. All-time greats, whether they’re marksmen or not, tend to pull opponents away from the paint more, too.
Spacing is based on reputation, not production.
Isaac Okoro has hit 37 percent of his 3s over the past four seasons, yet gets played off the floor during the playoffs each spring. The most extreme example on the other side is Dwyane Wade, one of the greatest shooting guards ever, who rarely cared even to put up a 3-pointer, let alone make one. And yet, if a Miami Heat driver got into the lane, defenders rarely strayed from Wade, not just because he could make them pay with a back-door cut but also because they knew his brilliance.
You can live with Okoro beating you. But human instinct says never to leave a Hall of Famer.
And so, reputation has been on my mind, specifically as I watch the Charlotte Hornets and their rookie star Kon Knueppel tear up the rest of the NBA. Charlotte is 30-13 since Jan. 3 and owns the league’s best net rating over that time. (I stupidly forgot to include Hornets head coach Charles Lee as an obvious candidate for Coach of the Year during an awards column I penned earlier this week.)
One of its many surprises is Knueppel — not just because he’s the Rookie of the Year favorite or even because he’s already one of the league’s best players. It’s because respect is already there in a way that most rookies don’t receive it.
Knueppel has downed the most 3-pointers in the NBA this season, nailing 43 percent of his attempts from range. But it’s not common for a rookie on a team no one saw coming, especially not when it was sitting at 16-28 at one point, to inspire this much fear.
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When Knueppel is near, defenders won’t move away from him, not even during conventional help situations.
Earlier this week, during the fourth quarter of a rare Hornets loss, point guard LaMelo Ball split a double-team at the top of the key and headed to the rim. With two defenders behind him, Ball could have caused the Boston Celtics to scramble. Normally, help would have come from the corner.
But in this case, Celtics guard Payton Pritchard stared at Ball, who frolicked to the hoop for a lefty layup. Pritchard was guarding Knueppel, whom he could not leave alone in the corner.
Knueppel leads the league in BBall-Index’s “off-ball gravity” analytic, which measures the exact concept explained above. Only two players since the site began tracking the statistic in 2015-16 have churned out seasons with greater off-ball gravity: Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson.
The most impressive part of Knueppel’s first professional season isn’t the production. It’s the reaction he’s inspired from his peers.
The reinvention of Jordan Clarkson
Jordan Clarkson is answering questions with questions.
Has the former Sixth Man of the Year, an offensive aficionado whose value throughout a successful, 12-year career has disproportionately been tied to shot-making, ever crashed the offensive boards as hard or often as he has for the past month?
“Nah,” Clarkson shook off before cracking a smile. “Have I ever picked up 94 feet in my career, either?”
The answer to that is a casual “Nah,” too.
The Clarkson that exists today, the one who re-entered the New York Knicks’ rotation in mid-March after nearly two months on the outskirts of it, is not your favorite bucket-getter’s bucket-getter, as he was as recently as the beginning of this season. After barely playing during the winter months, the 33-year-old vowed to change.
Now, he’s a nose job and facelift away from becoming unrecognizable.
Earlier this week, he took away a fast break from Houston Rockets point guard Reed Sheppard, picking up Sheppard in the backcourt and attaching himself to the second-year sharpshooter’s shoulder. Sheppard tried to jolt past him but couldn’t.
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He gave up the ball 8 feet behind the 3-point arc, hoping to get it back on an immediate dribble-handoff with Rockets center Alperen Şengün. That didn’t open any space either. Clarkson jetted above the screen and pushed the dribbler out farther. Now, Sheppard was even closer to half court.
Sheppard went right to no avail. He crossed over to his left. Clarkson almost knocked the ball away. He pulled back to the top of the key, then dribbled left again, but Clarkson wouldn’t budge.
Fifteen seconds into the possession, Sheppard had to pick up his dribble, only for Clarkson to knock the basketball away from him.
From afar, Clarkson may have appeared set in his ways. Clearly, he was not.
Now, he bullets into screens. He’s full-court pressed on 9.4 possessions per 36 minutes since re-entering the Knicks’ rotation, according to Second Spectrum. His career average is 1.6. Now, he’s outdoing Jrue Holiday, who does it 7.6 times per 36 minutes.
He takes off for the paint from unconventional angles whenever one of his teammates releases a 3-pointer. Over these 11 games since becoming a regular once again, he’s offensive rebounding 8.1 percent of the Knicks’ missed shots while he’s on the court. For perspective, if that percentage belonged to a player for the full season, it would rank second in the NBA among guards, behind only the Phoenix Suns’ maniacal Jordan Goodwin.
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He’s shooting less often than ever during this 11-game stretch, a different type of hot streak than Clarkson has ever been on. The efficiency numbers, with less whimsical shot-selection and more read-and-react playmaking, are through the roof.
Clarkson says that his time out of the rotation “helped (him) a lot just to see the floor open.” It’s a refreshing reminder: Old dogs can become new dawgs.
“I’ve had a chance to try to win a championship, going to the finals (in 2018 with the Cleveland Cavaliers),” Clarkson said. “(There) was stuff that team was asking me to do. And I’m here again, having a chance to contend and play in the playoffs. So, with this team, I wanna bring that energy and set an example on that end. All of us are sacrificing for one goal.”
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Challenging the norms
Props to the Washington Wizards, who have snapped the NBA’s most under-the-radar thrilling streak.
One of the league’s elite tankers just went three weeks, a stretch that included 11 games, without winning a coach’s challenge. Earlier this week, in a moment no basketball fan could ever forget, Washington challenged a foul call while down 21 points in the third quarter and won it.
The history books will now tally one less hack for Anthony Gill.
Now, ask yourself: Could anyone, let alone someone with the qualifications to lead an NBA team — in this case, Washington head coach Brian Keefe — be this bad at challenges, especially when sitting next to him is an assistant with an iPad that has instant replays on it? Or could a franchise desperate to improve its odds at the No. 1 overall draft pick be even better at sinking to the bottom than any of us even realizes?
Keefe lost all five of his challenges over that 11-game span, which leaves two numbers to analyze: His zero percent success rate, but also how rare it has become for the Wizards to turn on the green light.
Some of the NBA’s top teams have turned wielding challenges into an art. For example, Oklahoma City Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault consistently challenges more than anyone else. He’ll do it in the first quarters or at the ends of games. His 64 percent success rate (as of March 22, when the NBA last updated its challenge data) is around league average, but volume matters. Daigneault is adamant about leaving the building without any challenges in his pocket.
But the defending champions have different goals from the Wizards, who have at least caught a hot streak.
A day after Washington won that challenge during a blowout whose result was already decided, the Wizards contested another call, this time in a five-point game against the Los Angeles Lakers. And they won it again.
That’s two straight games with a successful challenge.
It’s official. The tank is over. The Wizards are back.