One of the things I like least about All-Star season is the proliferation of disparaging takes about purportedly marginal All-Stars. It happened with D’Angelo Russell a couple of seasons ago. This year we are getting an extra heaping when it comes to players like Julius Randle, Nikola Vucevic, and Domantas Sabonis (two years running.) There are also the inevitable grumblings about Donovan Mitchell making it in the West, something that predated Shaq’s cringe-worthy Inside the NBA moment from earlier in the season.
It’s not that some of these debates aren’t worth having, but I do wish they wouldn’t lean so heavily into snark and dismissiveness. These players are really, really good! And with the year we’ve had, perhaps erring more on the side of celebration would behoove us.
So in that vein, here are a few observations on two beleaguered stars whom I have been enjoying.
Julius Randle
Julius Randle is having a career year. Even with all the caveats about somebody having to pile up numbers and historic scoring volumes, 23/11/6 on 59% true shooting is nothing to scoff at. Randle is averaging career highs in accuracy from the mid-range and beyond the arc (42%). He seems to have become much better at picking his spots, processing what the defense is giving him and making decisions that are both quick and correct.
With three minutes left in the third quarter of a loss to the Warriors, Randle gets the ball with space at the top of the arc. Notice how he sizes up Kelly Oubre Jr. closing out on him.
Randle is in the process of bringing the ball up to shoot when he pauses.
Three things happen in quick succession after that: Randle realizes that Oubre Jr. is dying on the closeout, Oubre Jr’s arms go down, and Randle transitions smoothly into his dip and launches the 3. Bucket.
Striking that balance between pausing and not overreacting to what ends up as a half-hearted closeout is part of Randle’s evolution as a player.
About a minute later, Randle again gets the ball at the top of the arc, only this time Oubre Jr. is much closer as Randle loads.
Randle is quick to go straight into his drive around Oubre Jr. and is able to draw the foul.
Randle is still the rampaging force he has always been; the Knicks score +4.4 points per 100 possessions with Randle on the floor vs. off it, and they grab offensive rebounds at a much higher rate.
Where Randle has really shown his maturing decision making is as a passer. In the clip below, he waits for Steph Curry to come over to double, but correctly delays making the pass just long enough. Watch how Randle glances towards Burks’ original spot as well as Elfrid Payton on the right wing.
That little delay gives Burks the time to relocate away from any help from Kent Bazemore. Randle’s eye dance sends Steph Curry sliding back towards where he thinks Burks is (giving Randle the opening for the pass to Burks) and Kent Bazemore diving into the passing lane to Payton.
After assisting on a tick under 16% of his teammates’ made shots over the past three seasons, Randle has taken a quantum leap to where he is assisting on 25% of his teammates’ made shots so far this season. I have always enjoyed Randle, but at times in seasons past there has been a bull-in-the-china-shop quality to his method. This is a new, more sophisticated Julius Randle.
Donovan Mitchell
There is a lot to say about Mitchell and the Jazz (separately, I also suggest that people read David Aldridge’s latest.) More on that soon. Casually perusing topline box scores, Donovan Mitchell’s numbers this season are generally similar to his numbers last season, for the most part. One shift: He has shifted 10% of his shots from the mid-range over to three-point land, an evolution that makes sense for someone on Quin Snyder’s team. Of all 30 teams, the Jazz attempt the highest proportion of their shots from 3 and are bottom four in mid-range frequency (side bar: the Jazz are bottom five in proportion of shots at the rim. So far that hasn’t prevented the Jazz and the Clippers from rolling out top five offenses, but I worry about any team that avoids shots at the rim. The Jazz are also an average team when it comes to FT rate. Could be nothing, but something I’ll be monitoring when games slow down.)
Back to Mitchell: That 10% represents a pretty significant shift since it means that he is eschewing a quarter of his mid-range diet, even though the Jazz as a whole attempt more shots in the mid-range with Mitchell on than with him off. As with Randle though, the burgeoning growth in Mitchell is less with his shot profile than with his playmaking. He is averaging 5.3 assists per game after averaging 4.3, 4.2, and 3.7 over his previous three seasons. Some of this is due to all his teammates just raining fire from everywhere. But Mitchell can claim a larger share of that too; he is assisting on 27.5% of his teammates’ made shots while on the floor this season.
Mitchell finds gaps and moves into space as a way to bend the defense just enough to create a passing lane and open up a shot for teammates. He will add in a hard dribble at exactly the right moment to bait the defense into thinking he is ready for launch.
That hard dribble at the free throw line is enough to convince Kawhi Leonard that Mitchell is about to put Ivica Zubac on his hip. With nary a wasted movement, Mitchell delivers the ball to Joe Ingles in the corner.
That economy of movement is something that all the best passers have perfected; it allows a high dribble to simultaneously act as as pass fake. Here for instance, Mitchell fakes both Marcus Morris and Lou Williams into thinking he is passing to Derrick Favors rumbling towards the rim.
At the precise moment that Williams leans towards cutting off the passing lane, Mitchell delivers the ball to Bojan Bogdanovic on the move (albeit a click behind him) with a runway into oodles of space.
The eye test suggests that Mitchell is just better at reading the moment this season. And going back to that economy of movement, here he uses a side step to avoid a charge on Kawhi Leonard while simultaneously generating momentum for the pass out to Bogdanovic for 3:
Mitchell is averaging slightly fewer drives per game this season, but passing out of them more frequently, while averaging more assists on those drives and fewer turnovers. A lot of these are differences on the margin, but tweak enough dials incrementally and they add up to something meaningful. Even as he remains Utah’s best break-glass-in-case-of-emergency weapon, Mitchell is playing more efficiently within himself.