Spurs' 'Biggest 3' prepared to lead young, new-look attack
Keldon Johnson, Devin Vassell and Jakob Poeltl have been given new responsibilities this season, and so far all three have looked up to the unenviable task of leading such a young team.
The San Antonio Spurs have not implemented much in terms of set plays during training camp. With all the youth and new faces on the roster, the focus has been on emphasizing a free-flowing attack and building on-court relationships, while avoiding any unnecessary complications that may come with an overloaded playbook. If this team was full of veterans who had already spent years together in San Antonio it would be a different story, but at this juncture, with the personnel they have, it’s more important to establish peer-to-peer familiarity than it is to get bogged down with X’s and O’s.
New wrinkles will be added along the way, just as they were last season, but Gregg Popovich has always utilized a more systematic approach to offense than he has a deep bag of complex sets. Sequences are dictated by the defense’s reaction to simple early offensive actions and reads, and the game flows from there. But there has almost always been a floor general to initiate said sequences in San Antonio, a label that’s difficult to assign to any one Spurs player at the moment.
Even with Dejounte Murray in the fold, and despite his reputation of being mostly a defensive presence, Poeltl was the tangible but often unnoticed fulcrum on which the Spurs’ offense balanced last season. And now, sans an All-Star point guard running the show, he may be asked to shoulder even more responsibility. From stepping up and freeing ball-handlers with drag screens early in the clock, to executing dribble-handoff sequences, to turning, facing and watching for teammates swirling and cutting around him, Poeltl’s presence on the floor will provide a chance for this roster — which doesn’t yet feature any on-ball dynamos — to function more efficiently. At least as efficiently as its talent will allow.
Poeltl already has a knack for steering the offense despite never having been a real threat to score when he’s got the ball in his hands up top. Defenses have to stay honest when guarding him out there, because if bigs sag off too much he’s going to hand the ball to his teammates on the move, set a screen and free up space for them to shoot; but if they get too tight, he’s shown the ability to find teammates slicing through the back door.
Considering how much time Poeltl spent as Dejounte Murray’s pick-and-roll partner last season, it’s going to take a minute for him to adjust his game to a new group, and even to new responsibilities and opportunities he may have within the offense. On a number of occasions this preseason, he’s kept the ball after faking the dribble-handoff and caught his defender unprepared for the drive. Nikola Jokic, Poeltl is not, but he’s got a few tricks we may yet see in the months ahead.
“It’s my mindset to be more aggressive in this situation. I’m still trying to find my rhythm and trying to find a rhythm with my teammates, and when it’s a good situation for me to call for the ball or when I should let the offense flow. So it’s a learning process for me and everybody else,” Poeltl said at shootaround Friday. “But it’s also recognizing what our strengths are and maybe trying to find different ways to score this year. We were very pick-and-roll heavy last year, so maybe we have to find some other options this year.”
Poeltl’s presence in the high post is going to be a foundation for a lot of what the Spurs do offensively this season, and Keldon Johnson and Devin Vassell would be wise to use it as the countertop on which they butter their bread. While neither is likely to suddenly transform into a one-on-one halfcourt killer, they’ve both shown they can be dangerous when the motion of the offense rotates their direction.
On the front end, we already have an idea of what Johnson’s developmental path might look like. His spot-up 3-pointer has become almost shockingly consistent when you harken back to the moon ball he used to throw in the air during the first two years of his career. These days, when he’s left open — which somehow still happens constantly — you expect it to go in, and that belief was only bolstered Tuesday night by a 4-for-5 performance from deep in his first action of the preseason. Apparently the pre-camp dislocation of his shooting shoulder did nothing to bother his form.
But from there it gets a little more interesting with Johnson. His offensive game has largely been comprised of spot-ups and rim-attacks coming off of movement during his first three seasons, with a little bit of in-between junk thrown in for good measure. He loves to either catch-and-shoot or use a rotating defense’s momentum against them by bullying his way into gaps when the ball swings his way within the flow of the offense. The issue, however, is Johnson has struggled to consistently finish once he gets inside.
He shot 62 percent at the rim last season (which ranks in the 35th percentile among all forwards, per Cleaning the Glass), and while he’s always had the strength to get where he wants to go, the finesse part of the equation has made it difficult to solve the problem. He’s improved his short game over the last couple of years — the little floater he’s developed certainly wasn’t in his bag early on — but if the status quo remained unchanged it was difficult to see much room for a drastic upswing in his developmental trajectory. He kind of was what he was: a solid, improving role player who you’d love to have in your starting lineup for years to come, but would likely fall short of any type of stardom relative to the rest of the players at his position around the league.
The status quo has changed, however. Johnson lost more than 20 pounds during the offseason, and you could tell the difference in just one game. While the lights-out shooting performance drew most of the attention against the Utah Jazz, the extra step on defenders was eye-catching if you were watching closely. The weight loss isn’t going to turn him into Ja Morant, but in the NBA even a foot or two of added space can mean the difference in taking a heavily contested shot at the rim and getting a clean look. We saw examples of that in his return to the court.
He looked more fluid turning the corner and beating his man to the backboard on a couple of occasions, and in one instance, hitting a hesitation move in a crowd before popping through a crease to get by rookie Walker Kessler — last year’s Naismith Defensive Player of the Year — for the layup. It’s one moment against a guy who’s never played a regular-season game in the NBA, but Kessler is a legitimate shot-blocker, and Johnson has not exactly been impervious to young defenders affecting his shot in recent years. Given his style of play, any bit of added quickness is going to help him get to the shots he loves; and for at least one night, that extra burst didn’t seem like a mirage.
While the offensive side of things is always going to be the sexier conversation for the majority of people consuming basketball games, perhaps the most notable element of Johnson’s performance was his defense on Tuesday. Throughout his young career he’s been tasked with guarding players taller than him, utilizing his strength and girth to battle with ‘fours’ rather than perimeter players. But the Spurs have gotten bigger in the frontcourt, and skinny Keldon now gets to slide down to his natural position. He’s had issues in the past staying in front of quicker wings and guards, and has rarely been asked to defend at the point of attack, but that was not the case in Utah.
Johnson has always offered the Spurs a bit of versatility on defense, considering their shortcomings at forward, but he’s been lodged between positions — not tall and long enough to make a substantial impact in the paint, and not quick enough to defend an island on the perimeter. Yet San Antonio’s starting group was switching everything on Tuesday (with the exception (for the most part) of Poeltl’s man), and Johnson was sticking to everyone he faced — sliding his feet and cutting off ball-handlers, and staying on the hips of players on the move. That was not the Keldon we’ve become accustomed to seeing.
One preseason game against a bad Jazz team only tells a fraction of the story, but the earliest returns have yielded promising results. Players don’t typically change their entire profile on the offensive end four years into a career, but Johnson may be giving teams a substantially different look on the defensive side of the ball going forward.
Speaking of promising results, Vassell has looked as advertised out of camp. Players and coaches have been raving about him for weeks, and it’s easy to see why. The third-year swingman has been more aggressive than we’ve ever really seen him, and he’s appeared to have completely internalized the Spurs’ “point-five” concept. When he catches the ball he’s either shooting, attacking or passing with decisiveness — tentative Devin has yet to surface through a handful of games.
“I wish you guys could really see how much time Devin put in the gym, and how much work he’s put into his body this summer to be able to go out here and play at 100 percent this season. It’s crazy,” Johnson said after the game in Utah. “To see him come out here (Tuesday) and hoop and kill and get to his spots, and do the things I’ve seen him do over and over and over again during the summer, it’s amazing. I’ve seen it firsthand.”
Vassell has been a true off-ball threat during the preseason, not just a spot-up shooter. He’s attacking closeouts and utilizing his added size to be more physical around the rim, he’s firing off picks and flowing directly into his mid-range sweet spots, he’s gotten a few extra pick-and-roll opportunities where he’s looking to distribute nearly as often as he’s looking to score, and despite some early struggles shooting the ball, the 3-pointer has been there for him. Pop has even used him as a screener in the pick-and-roll a few times, though one wonders how much of that is simply preseason experimentation.
If young Spurs have been taking turns making leaps over the last several seasons, the timeline suggests Vassell’s spot has come up in the order. Given the way San Antonio’s offensive system works, with constant motion flowing into a cycle of dribble-penetrations and kickouts, he’s going to have plenty of chances to score throughout the course of any game. What remains to be seen, however, is how he and Johnson respond in the final minutes of close contests, when everything slows down and the Spurs need individual players to create matchup advantages on the ball.
Up to this point in their short careers, both have been opportunistic secondary and tertiary options who have not been required to be ‘The Guys’ in big moments. And while expectations for this season are low from a win-loss perspective (at least for the public), finding more clarity on exactly who Johnson and Vassell are within the roster hierarchy is going to be critical as this team continues its rebuild. There are going to be pressurized moments for both players in the coming months, and only time will tell us how they respond when the game is in their hands.
It may never be as easy as it looked Tuesday against a Utah team that frankly seemed disoriented at times, but it wasn’t necessarily about the quality of the opponent. It was about the way the young Spurs were played.
“I saw great leadership from our young veterans. The starting group did a wonderful job executing, competing — that’s what it takes,” Pop said after the game in Utah. “They played together and there were a lot of good things on the court on both ends of the floor. They’ve gotten better with each game, and hopefully that will continue … but I saw a lot of maturity out on the court (Tuesday).”
There’s a long road ahead for this group of very young players, but on the surface they seem to be prepared for the challenges that await.
I like it. The biggest three are likely to lead unless there’s some surprise.