The first step for Jaden Ivey
No regular schedule for this sort of post but I want to do some stuff that isn’t just game-day stuff that also isn’t long-form. One thing that people often ask is for specific examples of things that I am looking for when I watch, so I am going to do posts like this where I take 1 clip and do a quick breakdown of something we can see in it. Nothing overly in depth but the sort of thing might be helpful/informational to some people. Any ideas for a name for these types of posts are welcome.
Jaden Ivey had an excellent opening night with several eye-popping moments. His athleticism and explosiveness jump off the screen, but there is one play in particular that I want to highlight. And try not to mind the potato quality I don’t know what happened.
That is an awesome play, even the newest of hoops fans don’t need me to point that out. The thing we want to focus on here is where he picks up his dribble.
From that point on he is not taking another dribble and is still getting all the way to the hoop, the one dribble he takes is barely inside the arc.
If you talk to scouts, this is a big marker that they look for that separates an explosive driver from a non-explosive one. Can you get to the hoop from beyond the arc with one dribble.
Why does that matter?
You move faster when you don’t have to dribble, which is why a drive like this feels so sudden.
It’s far harder to make a play on a driver when they are not dribbling. When a player is just holding the ball going in for a strip carries a much higher risk of fouling.
So that is the first thing to note. Not every dude in the NBA can do this and it is exceptionally hard to stop. It allows Ivey to attack small holes in the defense, makes him more likely to draw fouls, and gives defenders a short window to react, and even if they do there is often not much they can do. So now you know a specific reason as to why a Jaden Ivey drive just looks different from others beyond just going “wow he is athletic”
Is there any more sustenance to this observation?
Yes. The reason I point this out is to note how things will progress from here. Teams will register Ivey’s ability as a slasher quickly and start to adjust. The only realistic way for a defense to react to this is to bend the defense toward Ivey the moment he gets the ball. Effectively put a guy directly in the path to the hoop before he has even picked up that dribble.
Here is why this matters, by defending this way, defenses will effectively dare Ivey to beat them with his passing and that is the reason why it is so important for Ivey to show growth in his ability to read the floor and make accurate passes.
This was the weakest part of his game in college, Purdue’s cramped spacing made it easy for opponents to wall off the hoop which would result in Ivey taking off into a dead-end where he often coughed up brutally poor turnovers and shot attempts. Right now it looks so easy for Ivey because, as a rule, NBA defenses will make rookies prove it, even a rookie as highly touted as Ivey.
So for the next few weeks, it will likely continue to look easy for Ivey while defenses take the time to ensure that Ivey actually requires them to bend that way. Once they do start to bend it is likely that he will struggle for at least a time. Less informed people will say “oh well he’s just hitting a rookie wall” but now you will be smart enough to see that Ivey isn’t entering some mythical cavern, but that defenses have made an adjustment.
Will he succeed in beating teams with his passing?
Time will tell. But that is how you go from “really good player” to “genuine star”. Good players can make defenses bend, stars can punish the adjustment. It will be the first hurdle that Ivey has to clear in his young career.
As an additional note here, if you look back to the Jeramy Grant experience in Detroit, this is exactly the progression he went through. You can go look at his splits from when he first arrived. Upon arrival he tore up opponents with exactly this same trick, Grant is so long and explosive that from a stand-still he could get to the hoop with just one dribble.
Once defenses adjusted to that trick, Grant’s efficiency plummeted. He wasn’t a good enough passer to hit the open man and he didn’t have good enough ball skills to slither around defenders. And once again, his numbers didn’t drop because “well he just didn’t play as well”. His numbers dropped because he wasn’t good enough to punish the adjustments.
So now you know. I wanted to highlight this right away with Ivey so that we can track this progression as the season goes on..