Indiana Pacers Player Reviews: Point Guards

Breaking down the seasons of Tyrese Haliburton, Andrew Nembhard, & T.J. McConnell 

By: Caitlin Cooper I @C2_Cooper

To wrap up our player review series, Tony East and I saved the deepest position for last, turning our attention to the playmaking ball-handlers on the roster, who each put their stamp on the game in a unique way. In that regard, whereas Tyrese Haliburton generally prefers to survey, looking here, there, and everywhere to manipulate weak-side taggers with the uncertainty he creates with the combination of his range, touch, and skip pass, T.J. McConnell turns the floor into a maelstrom, swirling the defense into a tizzy with his relentless baseline attacks. Andrew Nembhard, meanwhile, pilots the pick-and-roll with both guile and moxie, moseying to his spots with an air of grit while using subtle tricks to improve the efficiency of his movement.

Altogether, given that Haliburton is an All-NBA caliber talent, who is backed-up by McConnell, as the league's leader in drives per 100 possessions, and supported by Nembhard, who shot 54.2 percent on pull-up twos and 50 percent on catch-and-shoot threes during the playoffs while averaging 9.1 potential assists per game, there's a case that point guard isn't just the deepest position for the Pacers, the Pacers also might have the most depth at point guard of any team in the league. Plus, even better yet, they outscored opponents by 6.2 points per 100 possessions in the 597 minutes that any two of them were on the floor at the same time.

For those reasons, this is a very fun episode -- in which, yet again, we selected one play, one number, and one over/under to summarize the season of each player while also looking ahead at what comes next. To make it easier to follow along, the clips, numbers, and lines are included below, albeit with some spoilers for those who may prefer having something to read while watching. Enjoy and special thanks to everyone who followed along with this series!

T.J. McConnell

One Play: Isolation drives

(As a note, McConnell was Tony's assignment for this episode, but I still wanted to offer some commentary on the clip. Ok, here's my blurb)

As referenced in the introduction to this article, T.J. McConnell led the NBA in drives per 100 possessions. Additionally, according to Second Spectrum, among players with at least 100 passes, he also led the NBA in passes to the corner per 100 possessions. Typically, he attacks baseline, pushing the ball downhill to consistently get two feet in the paint to Nash under the basket and collapse the weak-side zone for corner threes and 45-cuts. In that clip, however, he's also demonstrating his ability to attack without a screen, driving from a standstill to score over the length of Jaden McDaniels at the basket. In addition to staying lower than his defender, part of what makes McConnell so effective as a driver is his variety of finishes and ability to turn floaters into jump shots. After all, that isn't a blowby drive. McConnell never fully turns the corner, he's decelerating and ultimately pushing backward off his left leg to create space. McDaniels has a superpower for ducking under and surging out from screens to cut off driving angles, so the fact that McConnell doesn't require a screen for him to go under is even more notable, as was the usage he took on as a scorer during the latter portion of the season.

Of course, for a player who perhaps most embodies the team's mantra of "paint-to-great," this is an exhausting brand of basketball, and perhaps also partially explains why, after playing nearly as many minutes in the second half of Game 4 against Boston (16) as he averaged during the regular season (18), he went just 3-of-9 from the field. Notably, two of the fourth quarter makes came with him either cutting from the wing to the basket or into the dunker's spot -- operating as a solve for some of the congestion that was caused by his off-ball spacing at the end of Game 3.

That said, he was among only a handful of players who averaged double-figures in scoring coming off the bench in the playoffs, and there's no question that he has a knack for making sense of spacing that shouldn't make sense, at least when he has the ball in his hands. In that regard, the degree to which he's tasked with conjuring that same magic next season, as the team looks to reintegrate Bennedict Mathurin, whose usage swells to 27.6 percent in minutes with McConnell compared to just 19.8 percent when playing with Haliburton, while also potentially playing minutes with Pascal Siakam staggered in tandem with Isaiah Jackson, should be interesting to monitor -- especially since those four have only played 19 minutes together.

Plus, while there can certainly be some finagling with Siakam and Obi Toppin (assuming he's re-signed), there's also the emergence of Andrew Nembhard as a ball-handling playmaker, too.

One Number: 156.2 - percentage increase in scoring after Bennedict Mathurin's injury

One Over/Under: 20.2 - points scored per 100 possessions next season

Andrew Nembhard

One Play: Manipulating the defense when the on-ball defender ducks under the screen

Andrew Nembhard was the darling of the Eastern Conference Finals, and for good reason. Think back to the prior match-ups against the Celtics. At the beginning of November, when Nembhard started in place of Tyrese Haliburton in what became a historic, 51-point loss for the Pacers, the second-year guard finished the game with 14 points and only three potential assists in 20 minutes played while shooting 1-of-7 from three. In Games 3 and 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals, he averaged 28 points and 15.5 potential assists, as he nearly made more threes (7) than the rest of the team combined (8). In that regard, it wasn't just that he had control of the offense as the primary ball-handler, it was that his shot came around in a big way in the postseason, and that he was aggressively looking for his shot -- which opened up the rest of his game. Just look at the difference in those clips. Rather than immediately advancing the ball against the under and then turning his back to the ball while relocating, notice how he gets off the ball and then stares down his pass to get it back, only looking away from the rim to shift the defense just enough to glide towards it. Or, how about when he stayed on ball, leveraging his physicality to counter for the under with a bump-and-go to still get to his spot.

It's that type of assertiveness, especially when considered in relation to how Haliburton was guarded in the postseason, which should only breed confidence in the pairing moving forward. If an opponent face-guards and/or top-locks Haliburton, Nembhard can run offense while also defending at the point-of-attack. Meanwhile, after missing the entire preseason with a kidney stone and then managing a balky knee followed by a bad back, Nembhard made exactly half of his 50 catch-and-shoot three-point attempts during the playoffs, and Haliburton was a more frequent screener. In combination, those improvement areas suggest that the two of them could potentially become even more complementary to each other. Put simply, this isn't the purgatory of the Turner-Sabonis tandem, in which there were obvious areas where they would infringe on each other with both needing to play the five. Generally speaking, it's easier to play multiple point guards at once, especially in a Rick Carlisle offense, than it is to find elbow room for two centers, while also attempting to guard without a rangy power forward. By comparison, the Pacers have won the minutes with Nembhard and Haliburton on the floor (+5.92), including the playoffs (+4.68). From the perspective of the Pacers, if Nembhard opts to sign an extension this summer, this is easy -- in part, because he's easy. He isn't a star yet, but if he becomes one, then figuring out how to divvy up the ball between he and Haliburton will be a tremendous "problem" to have. In the meantime, just enjoy the second-round pick who blossomed during the playoffs and projects to continue lessening the burdens of the team's already existing star.

After all, the reason why the Kings were losing the minutes with Haliburton and Fox on the floor (-5.4) wasn't because they were both point guards; it was because of how unwieldly that roster was and the fact that they couldn't manufacture stops, surrendering 118.5 points per 100 possessions -- which would've been the equivalent of the league's worst defense that season.

Granted, the Pacers don't exactly have a robust defense at present either, but Nembhard is more often part of the solution, not the problem -- as he's shown he can assist Haliburton on defense as well as offense.

One Number: -4.4 - swing net rating for how much the defense for the Pacers improves with Nembhard on the floor, the highest impact of any player on the roster, according to CTG

One Over/Under: 20.9 - usage rate without Tyrese Haliburton on the floor

Tyrese Haliburton

One Play: Floating

(Another note, Tyrese was also Tony's assignment for this episode; however, per usual, I'm still going to write about the clips he selected)

Tyrese Haliburton didn't go to his floater as often this season, as he sourced 10.7 percent of his shots as runners compared to 12.1 percent a year ago, but when he needed to stop-and-pop, he was incredibly efficient at finding nylon -- converting 55.4 percent of his floaters, which ranked first among players categorized as playmaking ball-handlers, according to Synergy. As the clips go to show, that type of shot -- and the fact that he actually looked for his own shot -- can be a valuable counter against drop coverage, especially when the other three defenders stay home on the perimeter, removing his potential release valves. As a pass-first guard who can at times be overly deferential, the moments when he hunted that shot even against a collapsed defense in the playoffs were certainly notable -- including his game-winner when he rejected the pick and split the defense, anticipating the under and going where the defense didn't want him to go as he managed to find daylight through a pinhole.

Of course, the playoffs were also revealing in that, while still recovering from his hamstring injury and repeatedly being listed on the injury report with back soreness, he didn't always appear to have quite the same lift and his accuracy on those shots dipped to 45.2 percent as did his overall drive frequency. Additionally, given that the defense was more aggressively geared around forcing him to his left, an advantage of that type of coverage is the ability of the on-ball defender to contest his runner when he raises up with his dominant hand. Moving forward, as a player who doesn't often get to the line, a possible counter for this would be to go to his hostage dribble more often, which as can be seen in the clip against Utah, requires the stability of his back to jail his defender and regain access to his right. Or, perhaps, perfecting the trick he pulled out late in the season against the Pistons, when he intentionally let the ball fly wheeling downhill to his left. Either way, the real challenge for Haliburton, so long as he's healthy, exists at the other end of the floor and with his ability to maintain his stamina, both for the long-haul of the season as well as during games, when the rigors of showing on screens and avoiding giving up mismatches morphs the two ends of the floor into one, depleting his assertiveness to seek friction against exaggerated coverages.

Granted, that's less of a concern when he can rely on Pascal Siakam to play 4-on-4 or rely on the point guard depth behind him and beside him to run some of the offense, but that reaches a tipping point when, as was the case in Game 5 against the Knicks, he's guarding more picks as the screener defender (22) than he used as the pick-and-roll ball-handler (15).

As is alluded to by the over/under for this segment, the Pacers scored a mammoth 122.4 points per 100 possessions with Tyrese Haliburton on the floor this season, but they need him to be on the floor for the duration of the season -- and, just as importantly, they need him to withstand functioning fully as himself so they, as a team, can reach the ceiling that he's capable of raising.

One Number: 0 - number of All-Stars with a lower free-throw attempt rate (.217)

Over/Under: 2.5 - number of players who have a higher team ORtg on-court next season