The 2022 NBA rookie class has been punctuated by early production.
Evan Mobley has been a boon for a playoff team all year. Scottie Barnes continues to make strides as a self-creator. First overall pick Cade Cunningham has made leaps and bounds every other week seemingly as he’s acclimated to the league with the Pistons. More first-year players than seems standard have displayed impactful skills early.
Jalen Green, picked right after Cunningham by the Houston Rockets, struggled with consistency and efficiency out of the gates. In fairness to him, the surrounding context for him in Texas has been rough; the Daniel Theis signing didn’t pan out, the Kevin Porter Jr. point guard experiment was brutal for the first half of the season (much better in 2022). Green notably struggled with physicality in spite of his overwhelming athleticism.
Yet, I’d posit that struggles to acclimate should have been the expectation. It’s really hard to be an NBA player! It takes time to get accustomed to play and the time required for each individual isn’t binary.
However, things have changed over the last third of the season! Green has made a sizable in-season leap in nearly every facet of his game that’s borne fruit to more efficient and impactful play. Since February (16 games), Green is averaging 19.1 points per game on 59.5% true-shooting, up from 49.7% his first 35 games played (league average true-shooting is 56.2%). He’s canning 38.3% of his roughly seven three-pointers per game. He hasn’t scored in single digits since January.
Last night’s overtime win over the Los Angeles Lakers, perhaps the biggest Houston win of the season, was an encapsulation of Green’s growth. He scored 32 points, setting a new career high!
Green possesses an absurd ability to create space for himself and dent or bend a defense. To say he’s one of the 10-to-15 best athletes in the NBA already is not an oversell. The flashes have been there throughout the year, but he’s been able to put them together with regularity lately; In February he’s shooting 61.5% on just under two pull-up two-pointers per game (38.7% on the season) and 37.5% on three pull-up 3’s per game (31% on the season), both absurd and eye-popping.
Is 61.5% on pull-up twos sustainable? No, but the process is so encouraging. Earlier in the season, he used screens, but he didn’t really use them. It was just part of a set or action and not a mode to create easier looks (this speaks more to Houston’s offense than Green as a prospect). He’s made a concerted effort to set his defender up with hesitations and in-and-out dribble to run them into a well-set screen and buy himself even more space or the chance to pick apart a defender in an empty corner set.
If he opts to drive to the rim rather than pull up, he’s also benefited from better pacing and more control. Earlier this season, he’d almost smother himself in the paint at times, finding his way to great looks, but struggling to capitalize. He was almost too athletic for his own good, which is a wild proposition!
After shooting 57% at the rim prior to February, he’s shooting 66% at the rim since then, per Cleaning the Glass, a marked improvement. Slowing down his overall tempo and throwing in counters and fakes, starting and stopping, and tossing out the occasional knuckle or curveball to supplement his line drive exceptionalism has been a boon. He has one of the best first steps I’ve ever seen as a prospect; adding things to make it even harder to just load up on him in the paint is a significant development for him as a scorer.
While the scoring is his calling card, it’s also what affords him passing windows. How he’s able to grow into and develop as a playmaker is as much of a determinant of his ceiling as his scoring gravity; the two components are intertwined. The more dominant and efficient Green is as an on-ball option, the more that will contort defenses, and that tension he puts on a 5-man unit determines the lanes and advantages he can create for his teammates.
He’s still mostly a reactive decision-maker, acting upon what happens rather than dictating what does or preemptively making plays as the defense shifts. That’s not a bad thing, just where he’s honestly at as a player. However, he’s started to find some quality balance out of pick and roll and particularly as he gets to the paint, making quick reads to the corner, slot, or dump-offs to the interior.
Blitz the ball screen, and he’s shown more control and composure, hitting the rolling big. The pocket pass has become more of a tool for him as well playing more minutes alongside Alperen Şengün (MORE please). He still needs to iron out the ball placement and timing, but he’s made real strides compared to where he was earlier in the year.
This Rockets team is a ways off from reaching competency, and I still have real questions about their future, but it’s impossible to deny how impressive their rookie class has been. Green is central to that, and his progress speaks volumes to the future in Houston.
