Vassell, Bane, and a case for the Knicks to prioritize off-ball players

The quick and catchy “3-and-D” descriptor has become a tired trope, the basketball equivalent of “oxygen-and-sanity.” Thank you, NBA-Sherlocks, for your convenient, bitesize catchphrase that reminds us scoring and not being scored on are useful player traits. It’s hardly worth mentioning. To operate from any other evaluative starting point would be psychotic. Would you hang out with someone whose decision making process starts with a trek up to Everest’s death zone armed with a backpack of psilocybin? Don’t answer that, you beautiful maniacs.

To be fair, the Knicks do need reminders. To breathe, to wipe, to avoid tumbles into the warm embrace of a familiar abyss. Bare with me as I lay out some 3-and-D A-B-C’s.

There’s a stat on NBA.com that uses tracking data to calculate the number of minutes a player had possession of the ball over the course of the season. It’s very sophisticated. It’s called Time Of Possession. Using this, we can work out the percentage of a player’s total time on the floor that they didn’t have the ball. The time they spent either playing defense, spacing the floor, screening, cutting, or picking their nose.

For the Knicks, Elfrid Payton — shockingly — played without the ball the least, at 78% of his total minutes. On the other end of the spectrum, Mitchell Robinson played without the ball for 97% of his total minutes. The most ball-dominant non-point guard was Allonzo Trier, who played without the ball a mere 89% of the time, followed by Julius Randle at 90%, RJ Barrett at 92%, Marcus Morris at 93%, and Bobby Portis at 94%. Everyone else — excluding point guards Frank Ntilikina, Kadeem Allen, and Dennis Smith Jr. — was in the 95-97% range.

Maybe this is obvious. Half the minutes are defensive minutes, and there’s only one ball on offense. But it’s precisely this obviousness that is the point. The majority of NBA players will be off-ball for over 95% of their NBA careers. If a player can’t shoot and defend, they are a problem, and problems can’t play in the playoffs. Hence the 3-and-D fetish.

The bubble playoffs are a case in point. One of the most unexpectedly deadly 3-point marksmen on the planet right now, the Miami Heat’s Duncan Robinson, may be on an Eastern Conference collision course with one of the game’s most destructive defenders, the Boston Celtics' Marcus Smart. Both guys are linchpins of their team’s offensive and defensive systems, respectively.

Robinson is a 3-point shooting flamethrower temporarily adopting human form. He torches, torments, and turns defenses into panicked goo with the mere threat of a flick of the wrist. If he ever shoots the ball, the defense has failed, and defenders feel this lurking failure every second Robinson is on the floor. Defensively, he’s big at 6-foot-9, and smart enough to be in the right place at the right time. (Of course, he’s on the Heat, so he sucks.)

Smart is a defensive piranha, a piranha the size of a great white shark, a piranha-shark that’s had 14 pre-game espressos: a caffeinated piranha-shark who sees offensive game plans as blood in the water. Offensively, he keeps defenses honest with 35% shooting from deep on a characteristically aggressive 6.6 attempts a game. (Of course, he’s on the Celtics, so he sucks.)

Both guys are — in their own ways — off-ball maestros. Their elite skills remain elite without having the ball in their hands, so they are infinitely more effective than if those skills only kicked into action for the five-ish percent of the time that they had the ball.

Which brings us nicely to 2020 NBA Draft prospects Devin Vassell and Desmond Bane: this draft’s 3-and-D wet dreams.

Vassell is a 20-year-old, 6-foot-7 wing who is projected to be available for the Knicks with the No. 8 pick. I’ll let our draft experts fill you in on the details, but the bottom line is this: he’s the best off-ball defender in the draft, one of the best off-ball defensive prospects in recent memory, and is a 42% shooter from deep. People will talk about what he can’t do in the 5% of the time he will have the ball as an NBA player, but the other 95% is not in question.

Bane is a 22-year-old, 6-foot-6 wing who is projected to go somewhere in the second half of the first round. The Knicks have the 27th pick, so would likely have to move up to nab Bane. Again, I’ll leave the details to the experts, but the bottom line is this: he’s one of the — if not the — best shooters in the draft, nailing 43.3% from deep on 575 attempts over four years in college. He’s also a very good off-ball defender, with a switch-friendly NBA body and a great motor. Again, his 95% is not in question.

Coming out of the draft with the best defender in the draft who can also shoot, and the best shooter in the draft who can also defend seems like it would be a pretty good outcome. 

The Knicks have ranked 22nd, 28th, 25th, 27th, 18th, and 28th in defensive efficiency, and 29th, 30th, 21st, 19th, 23rd, and 29th in offensive efficiency the last six seasons. This sustained two-way futility may have something to do with consistently focusing on 5% skillsets and too easily overlooking the other 95%. 

Over this span, the Knicks’ most consistent defender was who? Lance freaking Thomas? A teenage Frank Ntilikina? The only pure shooter was maybe half a season of Doug McDermott? The Knicks consistently cannot resist the allure of flawed one-way players, who kinda-sorta-maybe-one-day will excel at some facets of one of the ways, some of the time.

Take bubble-ball darling and infamous non-Knick Michael Porter Jr., who is great when he’s great, but was borderline unplayable at times against the Utah Jazz in the first round because he’s such an easy target in the pick-and-roll. Denver Nuggets head coach Mike Malone couldn’t hide him from a salivating and rampaging Donovan Mitchell. MPJ’s 5% is cute, but the defensive half of his 95% is a calamity.

Maybe the 3-and-D mantra isn’t ubiquitous enough. Maybe we need to up the ante. Maybe we need to go on a shameless pre-draft marketing offensive to anchor the concept of scoring and not being scored on in Leon Rose’s brain. We can fill every bathroom in MSG, and in a five block radius, with urinal cakes that have Devin Vassell’s face on one side, and his three point percentage on the other. Or just set up camp outside the Garden and take shifts reciting Desmond Bane’s advanced stats through a megaphone 24 hours a day. 

We can plant the idea deep within his psyche. Like inception, but instead of sophisticated dream-within-a-dream tech, we use a Strickland-budget-friendly 3-and-D version of the sleep hypnosis tapes people in ’90s movies used to quit smoking: 

“…I value shooting and defense. I value shooters who can defend. I value defenders who can shoot. I’m a modern, analytically-savvy executive. I see the value of the three. Elfid Payton is molten hot trash. I see the value of defense. I will extend Frank Ntilikina…” 

Repeated. Fifty odd nights of that ought to get the off-ball ball rolling.