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Saturday 22 February 2020 20:40, UK
De'Aaron Fox is one of the fastest guards in the NBA but the Sacramento Kings play at the league's sixth-slowest pace. What can be done to optimise his talents?
As opposed to the NFL, the NBA does not require players to go through stringent speed tests prior to joining the league. Those who attend the annual Draft Combine do have their straight-line speed measured, but the results are not taken as seriously as they are in American football; it is thus hard to ever actually measure who the fastest players in the NBA are, let alone the outright fastest.
But by any measure, De'Aaron Fox of the Sacramento Kings is amongst the fastest players in the league. And according to himself, he is the fastest.
Certainly, he is a blur, able to cover the whole court in a few seconds and fewer strides. Fox is just as fast with the ball in his hands when he needs to be, a dynamic force, and especially so in transition. Indeed, his impact in that aspect of the game has always been ahead of what he can do in the half-court.
In his only year at the University of Kentucky, Fox spent 30.7 per cent of his time in transition, an incredibly high amount for any college player considering the last largely outmoded nature of its play (admittedly something Kentucky are less guilty of than most of their peers but which still plagues amateur basketball as a whole).
After a fairly forgettable rookie NBA campaign, Fox broke out last season on both ends of the court, using his speed to get out in transition on offense once again but also getting up into opponents on defense, pestering them on the perimeter and having a knack for chase-down blocks like no other small point guard. His game management, nuance of tempo, decision-making and passing game are much improved as well, and he is not merely a player reliant on his speed, but it is certainly his defining and most obvious attribute.
This season, once again, Fox's most-used play types (ie the percentage of possessions he is involved in out of all his total possessions) are once again those in which he is either the pick-and-roll ball-handler or in transition. Tellingly, he shoots more efficiently (61 per cent to 42.8 per cent), turns the ball over less (11.8 per cent to 14.6 per cent) and gets to the free-throw line more often (20.7 per cent to 17.5 per cent) when in the full-court game. It is, therefore, a bit of a concern he has spent almost twice as much time as the pick-and-roll ball-handler.
This is not an anomaly. It seems to be the strategy of the Kings as constructed to play at an artificially-lowered pace, and it also seems to be a design of the roster that the team has few wing players who can run with Fox. Buddy Hield, Harrison Barnes and Nemanja Bjelica can also shoot and/or score the ball well, and Bogdan Bogdanovic is a good isolation scorer, playmaker and all-around offensive stud himself but none of them are great athletes, and the transition game is always going to work best with others who can readily free their legs and cover ground.
While Richaun Holmes and Marvin Bagley in the frontcourt figure to be better at this, Bagley has missed much of the season with injury; therefore, when it comes to transition, then, Fox has been left as a one-man-band.
It is therefore fair to examine whether the construction of the team that is ostensibly built around him is going to ever suit optimal deployment of his talents.
Among their oodles of publicly-available useful player tracking data, NBA.com/stats tracks player's average speed. This alone is not a suitable measurement for whom the fastest players are, as usage is a big factor - for example, James Harden of the Houston Rockets is the slowest player in the league by miles according to this stat, yet is known to have a good burst of speed when he chooses to use (he just spends so much time pounding the ball into the ground that it doesn't much show).
It also is biased towards players whose primary roles are to shoot jump shots off the ball, as they can move around without having to take many dribbles that would inevitably slow them down; this is the only way that Indiana's Doug McDermott, a man who starts most possessions in the corner before curling to the wing looking for a jump shot, is the 24th-fastest player in the NBA by this metric despite being one of the league's lesser athletes.
Nevertheless, you would still expect the league's self-appointed fastest player to be somewhere near the top. Yet of the 506 players to have played in the NBA this season, Fox actually ranks 256th, per nba.com/stats, less than halfway down the list. Behind Noah Vonleh and TJ Warren, of all people. Tied with Robin Lopez, Khris Middleton and Lauri Markkanen, no less.
This statistic chimes with the fact the Kings as a whole have the sixth-slowest pace ranking in the NBA this season. Considering they have Fox at the helm as their supposed franchise cornerstone, this does not make sense.
Of course, it should keenly be noted here Fox has taken another leap this season anyway. After a slow start in which he missed time due to injury and looked out of sorts in what he did manage, he bounced back in a big way once his health came back to him, averaging 22.8 points and 7.6 assists in 14 games of January.
Over the season's last couple of months, he has had big clutch performances as well, and has the highest drawn free-throw rate of any non-Jimmy Butler guard in the NBA this year. Fox is playing much better in the half-court, more decisively and regularly getting to the rim and being able to sell the contact for calls, while also efficiently dropping those pull-ups from the left-hand side of the free-throw line that he likes so much.
If his team are to be built in this slow way, though, then Fox's outside shooting from beyond that range will need to continue to improve as well.
On the season, Fox is shooting only 30.4 per cent from three-point range on a low volume of 3.2 attempts per game, marks both considerably behind the league average for this key shooting position. If the Kings as constructed are to ever get into contention for the serious places at the top of the West, they will have to significantly add to their offensive personnel, yet if they do so, they will also have to negotiate the fine balance between acquiring the best talents, and acquiring the best talents alongside a poor-shooting point guard.
Take, for example, the current case of the Houston Rockets. Admittedly beginning long before the trade, a look at the player Russell Westbrook has become heavily factored into the decision to trade Clint Capela to the Atlanta Hawks. Notwithstanding contractual reasons and a well-documented love of 'small ball' in general, the Rockets also wanted to move Capela off the team so as to create greater space for Russ, who finally has put away many of the jump shots he has never been good at and who is attacking the rim with regularity, scoring in the 20-point range in a league-best 27 consecutive games. Capela's inability to spread the floor got in the way of that.
Fox does not have Westbrook's size or leaping ability, but he does have great speed and better finishing ability at the basket, and so he will not want the lane clogged up with team-mates that get in the way of him attacking it. Yet if he is unable to space the court himself with the jumper, that spacing will suffer anyway.
If the Kings are to ever contend, they will have to deal with the fact that games get slower in the playoffs. The quality of opponents' defenses is invariably better, particularly in transition, and the greater physicality and effort level makes games more of a ground-out affair, even in the pace-and-space era.
The fact they already play slow could serve them quite well here, in a sense, yet the fact they are not able to regularly run as a unit alongside Fox, thereby not getting themselves some easy baskets, does mean they run the risk of cheapening one of the best attributes on their team.
If Fox as an individual cannot up the outside scoring rate, there must come some doubt as to whether he is good enough to build a team around.
Fox has become an extremely good NBA point guard in only two-and-a-half years. He attacks on both ends of the court, has become an aggressive possession-winning defender, and he has really improved both his individual scoring nous and the ability to work off that threat as a playmaker.
But if he does not improve the quality of his jump shot, he will not reach his full potential.
If the Kings do not allow him to realise his full potential by giving people to run with in transition, nor will they.
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