How John Wall Can Take Next Step Up the NBA Superstar Ladder
Washington Wizards point guard John Wall has always fought to live up to expectations as the first overall pick in the 2010 NBA draft.
Few players in the NBA bring his combination of end-to-end speed, lateral quickness and precise ball-handling. He's an absolute blur in the open court. His drives to the rim are triggered by explosions of acceleration and punctuated with gravity-defying leaps toward the rim.
It's impossible to teach his raw athleticism, and that's why most scouts, such as those from DraftExpress, were drooling over his potential.
On the cusp of his fifth NBA season, and with a max contract extension in hand, Wall hasn't quite blown anyone away. Though he made his first All-Star Game last year, he was hardly a contender to make Team USA this offseason and is not considered among the NBA's elite point guards.
What must he do to reach that level?
Everyone points toward the jump shot. His athletic superiority in both high school and college didn't necessitate its development. He was always quicker, faster and a better ball-handler.
The NBA changed matters quickly.
The book on Wall has always been to afford him multiple feet of space to fire up jumpers. On pick-and-rolls, defenders went "underneath" screens—meaning they stepped behind pickers instead of fighting to bust through them and chase Wall from behind—and dared him to shoot.
The NBA scouting report mirrored that of his previous basketball days, but the athletes he stacked up against were better. Even though Wall was still faster than most, the margin for error shrank considerably. His darts to the rim were far less effective because defenders were now capable of squaring him up.
All they had to do was retreat, use the requisite space to size up Wall's drives and slide their feet.
Or let him shoot.
Just look at how Mo Williams, then of the Los Angeles Clippers, guards him on this pick-and-roll back in 2010-2011, Wall's rookie year:
Going under pick-and-rolls is one thing; giving a player eight feet of room to shoot is a sign of complete disrespect.
Wall was simply unable to punish opponents for this overt and all-out rim protection. He only shot 36.2 percent as the pick-and-roll ball-handler that year, according to Synergy Sports (subscription required), and 31 percent on dribble pull-ups when he received a screen.
That put him in the 23rd and 16th percentiles, respectively, in the league.
Not only did this style of defense take away from his scoring in the paint, it limited his distribution opportunities to teammates. His inability to slice deep into the teeth of the defense meant defenders weren't leaving shooters.
He could only generate 0.996 points per possession for others, which once again placed him in the lower rungs of the league at the 32nd percentile.
Since those difficult early years, things have slowly changed.
Wall is now an average pick-and-roll scorer at 39.6 percent from the field. His 36.7 percent shooting on dribble jumpers off the pick-and-roll is still an area of struggle, but it's up 5 percent from his rookie year.
His 1.001 points per possession as a pick-and-roll distributor is also better, but only slightly and still in the middle of the league.
The numbers correspond with what we've seen from Wall on the court: He's better, but there's still a ways to go.
Still, even slight improvements in his jump shot have already had significant effects. Wall admitted as much to Kyle Weidie of the Wizards blog Truth About It last season:
"I still got to keep working on improving. But it makes it tough to guard me. I think I get into the paint a lot easier, it gets my teammates a lot of open shots, and it makes the help rotation try to get in more.
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Wall doesn't ever need to become an elite shooter. He's clearly not wired that way, and trying to limit his on-ball creativity by mechanizing his pick-and-roll reads—shoot if the defense goes under, drive if it goes over—will hurt him in the long run.
All he needs is the threat of a jump shot to use his world-class speed.
The rest is about tempo control. Wall's top gear outclasses that of most other players, but understanding how to create angles for its use in spite of conservative, rim-oriented defensive schemes is where he can take his game to the next level.
Some teams will continue to disrespect his jumper, and he'll have to combat it more effectively.
As we can see in the play below against Lou Williams and the Atlanta Hawks from this past season, Wall is beginning to understand the nuances of this type of pick-and-roll navigation.
When he brings the ball up the right side of the floor, he sees Marcin Gortat strolling in for a "drag" screen—a pick-and-roll in which the big takes a horizontal angle toward the ball-handler in a semi-transition situation.
Previously in the game, Atlanta had been going under all screens and Wall was firing up jumpers in response. Here, Williams tips his hand early and starts to slip under a beat before the pick is set.
To keep him honest, Wall crosses over to reject the screen, forcing Williams to scramble and recover. Wall, however, knows he's going nowhere: Mike Muscala, the Atlanta big guarding Gortat, is in the way should he go baseline.
This move, therefore, is to set up Williams.
Gortat then turns and screens again, a common tactic in pick-and-roll play. Williams, not wanting to get caught overplaying Wall again, gets jammed up in Gortat. He doesn't want Wall to quickly shift direction and blow by, so he's less decisive in his movements.
When Wall uses the screen on the second go, Williams cannot react quickly enough.
With Muscala dropped off so far—he's anticipating Williams' sagging route to guard the paint—Wall is able to penetrate and draw contact.
These are the tricks of the NBA's best point guards.
Every player, to some degree, lacks a skill or athletic advantage. The great players mask these flaws by leveraging their particular strengths. Wall's defect is his jump shot, but he's improved it enough to warrant middling respect.
That should be enough for his speed to take over because it worries defenders to no end. Any misstep in the wrong direction leaves them vulnerable, even if they're compensating by ceding heaps of space.
The result is on-ball defenders who are twitchy, overly sensitive and responsive even to the slightest movements so as to avoid losing ground. Therefore, changes of pace via hesitation dribbles or crossovers followed by bursts of speed in the opposite direction become especially deadly.
Simply playing at 100 miles per hour is too predictable.
Wall will learn to harness his overwhelming quickness with time. If he does completely figure it out, the defense will be at his mercy, and not the other way around.
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