It’s like owning two apartments in the same apartment building

Plus, spoiling the NBA awards

May 26, 2021

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to the Bill Simmons Podcast and nearly spit out my coffee from laughter after hearing Simmons describe Nikola Jokic’s half court offense.

Everybody has got their spot. LeBron has figured out a couple of different spots over the years. Jokic has two spots. And for me, its like, if you’re an offensive player and you’re completely elite in two separate parts of the half court, I don’t know what you do. Is there anybody who has two spots like that right now because I feel like everyone else has one spot.
It’s almost like he has two apartments in the same apartment building or something. And he can just kind of go up and down depending on where he wants to live.

After pondering the relatable analogy of owning two apartments in the same building, I started to think of ways to visualize what Simmons was trying to describe.

The chart below shows the areas of the court where Jokic takes a higher or lower share of his shot attempts from than a league average player. This is a similar to the team-version charts that I made last week, but just for a specific player this time.

It turns out, Jokic has more than two spots. He can operate from the top of the arc and down in the post, but is equally adept at working from the right elbow and in the short midrange. The variety of his offensive game is what makes him so difficult to guard and game plan against. Take away one part of his game and he just pivots to the next part. Or as Simmons would say, evict him from one apartment and he’ll just move into his other one.

I put together a few more charts showing the favorite spots of some notable players in this year’s playoffs. The players in the chart are grouped together by their series matchup.

Since these shot distributions are relative to league average don’t be surprised by the lack of hot spots in the corners. Most of the guys on this chart are high usage players that frequently have the ball in their hands on offense. These kinds of players are rarely spotting up in the corner. The one notable expectation is Michael Porter Jr., who up until Jamal Murray’s injury was regularly stationed in the corner on offense. But as The Athletic’s Seth Partnow recently detailed, Porter has seen his role on offense change since Murray’s injury and his share of shot attempts from the corner has declined accordingly.

The one other thing that jumped out to me from looking at the chart is how uniquely positioned the Memphis Grizzlies are to hang with the Utah Jazz. Dillon Brooks and Ja Morant, but also Kyle Anderson and Jonas Valanciunas, relish floaters. No team took a higher share of their shot attempts from the short midrange than the Grizzlies during the regular season.

That’s relevant since opponents of the Jazz during the regular season took 25 percent of their shots from the short midrange, second most in the league according to Cleaning The Glass. In other words, the floaters that the Jazz defense tries to force opponents to take are the same ones that the Grizzlies offense is happy to settle for. Advantage Memphis.

Another reason to be optimistic about the Grizzlies’ chances is that in the regular season, the Jazz were stupendous at limiting opponent three point attempts. Teams that played against the Jazz took just 32 percent of their shot attempts from long range, the second smallest share in the league according to Cleaning The Glass. That might not make much of a difference against the Grizzlies since as a team they took just 24 percent of their shot attempts from deep during the regular season. Meaning, the types of shots the Jazz are good at taking away aren’t shots the Grizzlies look for anyway. That’s something to keep an eye on as the series progresses.

What we know about what we should know about by now

One of the more harmless, but nonetheless annoying mistakes the NBA has made in recent years is waiting till after the playoffs to announce the winners of the regular season awards. Up until 2017, winners were announced during the first round of the postseason. But since 2017, in a obvious money-grab, the NBA has hosted a stuffy awards show in which they crack lame jokes and hand out trophies. By the time the awards show takes place, fans have already forgotten about the regular season and the significance of every player’s performance during that time.

Luckily, the NBA seems to have realized the error in their ways because on Monday night they presented Jordan Clarkson with the award for Sixth Man of the Year.

And then last night Julius Randle received the award for Most Improved Player of the Year.

The voting went mostly chalk with the only real surprise being that some voters left Clarkson and/or Randle off their ballots entirely.

Since the other awards are likely to be presented in similar fashion over the next few days, let’s take a look at what we know about the state of the remaining races.

Thanks to Max Croes, we actually have a pretty good sense of who is going to win most of this year’s major awards. Since 2017, Croes has diligently maintained an awards tracker in which he details the public ballots of confirmed and likely voters before the awards are officially announced.

“Google alerts, Twitter searches, and lots of podcasts at 2x speed,” is what Croes told me his process is like for sniffing out when a voter reveals their ballot. But since there are about 100 media members who vote on the awards, Croes also relies heavily on crowdsourcing to make sure he has all the details right.

“Each year there are fans of MVP candidates who really go to work sending me votes, tips, or hunches,” Croes told me. “I try to review everything sent to me and will only put a vote into the spreadsheet if it's publicly sourced and I've reviewed it. “

As of this writing, Croes and his helpers have been able to track down the MVP ballots of 40 different voters. And according to Croes’ tracker, it’s possible that Nikola Jokic could finish as the second-ever unanimous MVP. All 40 voters that Croes has confirmed have Jokic first on their MVP ballot.

It’s important to note that the ballots that Croes has confirmed aren’t a random sample of the final ballots. It’s possible that the voters who are least likely to reveal their ballot ahead of time are the voters who are most likely to cast a contrarian ballot. Still, we already know Jokic, Joel Embiid, and Stephen Curry are the three finalists for the MVP and that lines up with Croes’ tracker thus far.

Here’s a couple of additional charts showing the state of the remaining races based on confirmed ballots in Croes’ tracker.