Making sense of RJ Barrett’s offensive ups and downs
What has led to RJ Barrett having such an up-and-down sophomore season? Is it him? His surrounding personnel? The playbook? Jack Huntley examines the film to try to get to the bottom of sophomore year RJ.
For Knicks fans, no player is more confusing to ponder, more difficult to place, or more perplexing to watch than the 6-foot-6 cypher known as RJ Barrett. His ups and downs are an exhausting rollercoaster for our collective skull-blubber to rationalise. How do we properly daydream about the future, about The Last Great Rebuild, when a key building block looks like he’s made of marble one month and quicksand the next?
If we’re being honest, his inconsistency is a clue to the futility of the exercise. He’s 20 years old. He has weaknesses and strengths that are far from fixed traits. These weaknesses and strengths are context-dependent, so until we see him in a context that allow his strengths to shine, his weaknesses — currently writhing in the molten spotlight of traditional Knick anti-spacing — will disproportionately blur the eye test.
In reality, in this spice-obsessed galaxy of Knicks content, fence sitting isn’t an option. We fans demand concrete answers, statistical theories, and illuminating comparisons. It is boring and unacceptable to answer the defining question of our age — “what exactly is RJ Barrett?” — with, “not sure, need more data, come back in five years.” (*whispers* This is the answer, though.)
No, when it comes to the riddles of Rowan, we all must have a take or two or 10. So I come to you, fellow RJ theorists, with two takes: one spicy and pointless and unprovable, and the other mild and boring and I hope sort of informative.
Take 1:
RJ’s endgame is the pinpoint precise middle of Jimmy Butler and Caron Butler. If a single bead of Jimmy’s sweat and a single bead of Caron’s sweat were pipetted into a petri-dish, and subjected to cutting edge and vaguely evil covert NBA stem-cell therapy, the result would be a Frankenstein-ian RJ Barrett. Although it sounds crazy, this is scientifically plausible, partly because 1) everyone knows two righties make a lefty, 2) googling “sweat” and “stem” and “cell” returns results with super science-y unpronounceable words, and 3) RJ and Caron have eerily similar rookie numbers per the almost-certainly-peer-reviewed Basketball-Reference dot com. Prove me wrong or join me.
Take 2:
The handful of plays that Tom Thibodeau uses to get RJ going are actually all the same play, and his sophomore inconsistencies can be partly explained by defenses aggressively taking away this play. A lot of the time, RJ’s blips are actually just a schematic blitz, a defensive compliment exposing a wanting offensive plan B, at an individual and team level.
Let’s take a look at a few staples from Barrett’s playbook.
Play 1: RJ/Randle pitch, AKA get Rowan going downhilll to his left with an advantage
This is a fun play, often involving three screens in the first three seconds; a down screen on Julius Randle by Elfrid Payton, a flare screen on Randle by Mitchell Robinson, and then a ball screen on RJ by Mitch. The movement is disorientating for the defense, and isn’t just misdirection, because RJ’s defender is — of course — funneling RJ to the right after the initial pitch to Randle. He gets blindsided by Mitch’s pick, allowing RJ to come off the screen with daylight. He also usually has a runway to the screener’s defender and sits back in drop coverage, maybe further back than he otherwise would be because the initial screen his man sets is off ball, for a cutting Randle. Thibs runs this for RJ a bunch, but has also started to use it for Derrick Rose recently.
Play 2: Horns wedge, AKA get Rowan going downhill to his left with an advantage
Here, again, the initial wedge screen by Payton serves to get RJ’s defender on his back foot, before he’s hit immediately by a second pick from Mitch/Nerlens Noel, whose defender has to make a quick and difficult decision to either help on RJ or drop back to cover the lob. The closer this play is run to the rim — in traditional horns elbow alignment — the harder it is for the defending big to process and action a bang-bang decision to cede the lane to cover the roller, or impact RJ as he turns the corner.
Play 3: Pistol, AKA get Rowan going downhill to his left with an advantage
This is RJ’s bread and butter, his natural half court habitat, and by far his most frequent source of offense. Here he is using the screen — almost always on the right wing — to get a head of steam and finish at the rim. Mr Barrett’s happy place: coiled on the wing, just hanging out with Mitch, calm and in control, ball in left hand, helpless defender on hip, hunting buckets.
Here he is snaking back to the paint, after his defender aggressively denies middle on the initial screen, as he either rejects the screen altogether or waits for his big to re-screen his defender — who’s now parallel to RJ and vulnerable.
And here he is getting dimes when defenses switch or over-help to stymie his penetration.
RJ in pistol, with the wind on his back, and Mitch especially as a screener, is a loaded left-handed weapon. This play is one of the reasons some have been clawing and clamoring for lineups featuring RJ with maximum spacing — Julius Curry, Alec Burks, and Immanuel Quickley — around he and Mitch. Those two have developed a devastatingly harmonic hive-mind telepathy with this very simple play, even without the space elite surround-sound shooting would give them.
Play 4: Flow corner dribble hand off, AKA get Rowan going downhill to his left with an advantage (plus a rare last bonus clip!)
Thibs runs a bunch of these weak-side handoff sets using Randle, as a general default offensive go-to, often with Bullock or Burks, who Randle tries to spring open for an uncontested three. When RJ is the recipient, though, he comes off the handoff looking to drive rather than shoot. The last clip is of RJ using a pair of ball screens going to his right, a rare thing, and I included it because he still finds a way — like a plant to a sliver of light — to get back to his left hand!
The through line of all these sets and actions is that they play to RJ’s strength: getting to his lion-dominant left paw with a whiff of an advantage. Understandably, then, defenses that prioritize denying paint penetration by aggressively blitzing the ball at the point of pick-and-roll attack have given RJ serious trouble this season. It was most obvious — and most painful — in the Knicks’ recent back-to-back against the abominably neon Miami Heat.
In the first game, RJ had his worst performance of the season, with just three points on 1-of-6 shooting in 19 minutes of action. In the second game, he was a little better, with 13 points on 5-of-14 shooting in 26 minutes — but still pretty bad. Miami was blitzing everyone — Quickley, Rose, and even Payton — in the pick-and-roll, but it was RJ who was most noticeably rattled. The second-year man is still learning how to deal with this type of half court harassment, and can’t — yet — split the advancing trap or effectively counter attack the hedger’s outside foot with 15 feet of flapping wingspan charging his personal space.
Part of the reason defenses are so willing to play this aggressively is that they are unafraid of two things: 1) Mitch/Noel/Taj Gibson on the short roll, catching the ball at the foul line and making a play, and 2) whichever of RJ/Rose/Payton is on the perimeter, to varying degrees failing to space the floor. It’s a defense that fractures the Knick offense in a way that exposes its constituent parts, and, if the help rotations are smart, can funnel the ball in a sort of controlled cascading chaos to its preferred recipient: a non-playmaking big or a non-shooting guard.
Teams with switchy and mobile bigs like Bam Adebayo or Draymond Green are more likely to be comfortable with the risk-reward ratio of this aggressive style. Sure enough, after shaking the hangover of discombobulation after the Miami games with a trio of solid showings — 21 points on 57% shooting against the Atlanta Hawks, 15 points on 46% shooting against the Orlando Magic, and 21 points on 50% shooting against the Minnesota Timberwolves (all teams whose bigs play drop coverage) — RJ had another dud, four points on 1-of-9 shooting, against Green and the Golden State Warriors.
Here are three possessions from the tone-setting first quarter of that game.
The problem isn’t that RJ turns the ball over at a particularly high rate when he’s pressured, or fails to make the right reads giving the ball up, but that he starts to play as if his low usage rate (the first Miami game and GS game above were his first- and fourth-lowest usage rates of the season) is indicative of a bad performance.
The real genitalia-bound kicker of this defensive aggression, beyond an obscene amount of Elfrid possessions (he had his highest usage rate of the season in the neon-vomit Miami loss), is that it triggers and indulges one of RJ’s primary weaknesses in tandem with taking away his primary strength: his tendency to hunt his shot when he can’t get his normal diet of looks. This is a lot of the reason many armchair RJ theorists have been questioning his tunnel-like transition decision making of late — because after a season and a half of NBA RJ, if there’s one thing we know, it’s that Rowan likes to shoot his way out of slumps.
For Barrett, these blitz-themed blips are a kick in the developmental shins, but not much more than that. Our sky and his ceiling aren’t falling, he’s just been reminded — rather rudely — of an opportunity for growth. For the team, as long as they run out units featuring more than one of RJ, Payton, and Rose running pick-and-roll action with Mitch, Nerlens, or Taj as the screener, they will see more and more of these defenses.
In the third quarter of the Warriors game, Golden State decided to blitz the mummified Rose-Taj pick-and-roll, and the Knicks let them off the hook simply by missing some great looks. Burks missed one, wide open in the corner. Taj missed an easy layup. IQ spent three or four possessions in acres of space at the top of the key without touching the ball. Thibs will have them punishing this ballsy defensive strategy more regularly, with reps, and it may even force both coach and front office hands to pull the pistols trigger on some rotation and roster changes.
When it comes to the sporadically cypher-like RJ Barrett though, the evaluative upshot is this: don’t panic. The game-to-game lows are really a defensive overreaction to, and compliment for, the heady left-hand highs. They generate more offensive anxiety than they rightfully should, being enabled by the uniquely extreme lack of positional shooting and playmaking at the lead guard and center spots, respectively. The opposing defenses against which he either thrives or barely survives, now, as a 20-year-old, don’t tell us anything definitive about his eventual role — Ruthless 1A with a Batmobile license? Helpful 2B in green tights? Situational 3C mean-mug specialist? — but they do decode some of the gulf between his best and worst sophomore selves.
This is a developmental curve thing, and a roster context thing, rather than a why-is-RJ-our-beloved-son-and-savior-occasionally-made-of-inefficient-quicksand, thing.
