Three Things I Noticed on League Pass: Jaden Ivey hits the jets
Hit the jump for this week’s edition of Three Things I Noticed on League Pass, starring Jaden Ivey, the Jalen Williams-Isaiah Hartenstein connection, and the Suns.
Jaden Ivey, with a jetpack
Ivey's gotten off to a really nice start to this season, and is looking more and more like the player he was at Purdue. The jumper coming around is the biggest thing helping that along, but when I watch the Pistons I can't help but notice how goddamn fast this guy is.
Just look at the way he zooms up the court in these clips below. Especially on the first and third plays, you can see him basically hit the NOS and blow everybody else out of the water like he's Dominic Toretto. (In the original movie, before they somehow became master criminals and were actually just street racers.)
If you dig into the tracking data, you can see that Ivey has the NBA’s seventh-fastest max speed on offense in the entire league — and that totally makes sense when you watch him with the ball in his hands.
J-Dub, and I-Hart
In a development that should surprise absolutely nobody, these two make for a delightful duo. Isaiah Hartenstein is such a creative screener, passer, and dribble hand-off hub, and that makes him an excellent for partner for Jalen Williams.
Yes, that’s a between-the-legs hand-off in the first clip. And then a fake hand-off, an ass-screen, a back-door pass, a pocket pass, and a kick-swing sequence to get Shai Gilgeous-Alexander an isolation at the top of the key. Beautiful basketball.
They did the same type of stuff in pick and rolls all night against the Kings last week.
That reel has everything. A lob, a driving and-one floater, a bank-shot floater, a drive-and-kick sequence that ends with Hartenstein throwing a righty hook off the backboard, a pocket pass, a ball screen that gets strung out and results in an interior dish for a dunk, and finally another jumper for J-Dub. Get used to this.
The Suns, inverted
I’m a sucker for teams inverting the roles that players usually play. This set doesn’t really start off that way, but it ends up like that.
Tyus Jones setting a screen-for-screener pick for Jusuf Nurkic to kick off a Devin Booker-Nurkic pick and roll is just some standard action. But a point guard in the dunker spot, finishing an interior dish from a center, is an inversion.
And it’s one I love, because it takes advantage of the one thing Nurkic is still doing fairly well (making these interior four-on-three passes) by putting an opposing defender in an unusual position. Austin Reaves is not usually the guy counted on to be the back line rim protector, and to decide between stepping up to contain a roll man or else stay with his own guy. And he gets caught in space here, with the Suns easily taking advantage of his inexperience navigating that situation.