Canadian Roundup: The NBA’s Return

In the first edition of the Canadian Roundup of the 2022-2023 NBA season, we take a look into Jamal Murray and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s upcoming campaigns.

Patience with Jamal Murray

The most exciting storyline for Canadians in the NBA, by far, will be Jamal Murray’s return to action. After being sidelined for 500+ days, Canada Basketball fans will finally be able to watch Murray on an NBA floor once again.

I do think it is important to have tempered expectations for Murray’s regular season. According to head coach Michael Malone, Jamal Murray is going to start the regular season on a minutes restriction. With the Nuggets being extra cautious, I would not expect Murray to have a career year, at least not in the regular season. And given his history of slow starts to the season, I would definitely not be worried or surprised if it takes a while before Murray ramps up to the player we recognize. The focus from all parties should be on easing Murray back into rhythm and keeping him healthy for the deep playoff run the Denver Nuggets are hoping for. And as we all know, Murray turns into a whole new player when the playoffs roll around.

When we last saw Murray, he had blossomed into a dynamic offensive player. The ball-on-a-string handle, body control on off the dribble jumpers, slippery off ball movement and array of passes in his toolbox were all indicators of Murray’s mastery on the offensive end. In fact, he had become quite good at manipulating and bending defenses to his liking, and then exploiting the opponent’s defensive mistakes by scoring or finding an open teammate. One of my favourite sequences from Jamal Murray’s bubble performance was this assist to Millsap. He occupies all 5 Lakers defenders at various points on the play, goes through several reads, throws in a couple fakes for good measure all before dumping it off for the uncontested dunk.

I will be most interested in monitoring how the ACL injury in his left knee has affected Murray’s movement, burst and explosiveness, if it has at all. I’m not a kinesiologist or an expert in sports science so I don’t really know what to expect but it will be something to watch. Pre torn ACL, Murray was pretty comfortable exploding off of either leg when it came to step backs and side step jumpers. This step back from the bubble was pretty violent and abrupt as he slams his left foot into the ground to explode backwards.

That same explosiveness on step backs also came in handy for Murray’s burst. Flowing from the pause of a hesitation to the explosive drive is pretty spectacular, especially when he’s able to beat Kawhi Leonard in a foot race to the rim

When you slow the move down, you can really see how incredible that previous play was from Murray. On the hesitation, Murray drops his left foot back and lifts his right in an exaggerated motion. Once he plants the left foot on the ground, he is going to explode towards the rim. Interestingly when he goes to explode, his right foot is completely off the ground! All of Murray’s body weight was on the ball of his left foot when he explodes. Just incredible burst in his left leg as a whole system.

Murray could also explode upwards with his left leg. It’s a little hard to tell from the broadcast angle, but Murray takes his last dribble a little before the highest hash mark, gathers and explodes off of his left for the incredible finesse finish. By the way credit to Evin Gualberto for cutting up the last few clips in this video. His YouTube channel is full of these specific skill-concentrated highlights.

And it’s not just the explosiveness with the left leg that might be affected, it could also be how much Murray can use his left leg for deceleration. I do recall this next sequence against Kawhi Leonard (once again) looking pretty awkward.

The angle his knee is bending at combined with all of his weight on that awkwardly bent leg and the lean of his upper body makes for a grimacing picture. Now with that ACL injury, I will definitely be tracking how frequently he tries these strenuous deceleration moves this season and how effective the moves are in creating separation.

Meanwhile here is Murray attempting a sidestep three going to his right in his first preseason game back from the injury. The move resulted in a bucket, but there was very little separation created after planting his left foot and stepping to the side.

The above clip is not too much of a concern yet for me though. It was his first NBA action in well over a year and it was a preseason game. Also, after digging a little into some of his sidesteps before the ACL injury, the separation created is also not anything to write home about.

SGA’s 1st All Star Birth?

Andrew Wiggins’s All-Star appearance last year was a monumental one for Canada. It marked the first time in a decade a Canadian was named to an All-Star team, and he was only the 3rd Canadian to achieve the honour (joining Steve Nash and Jamaal Magloire). This year, the most obvious candidate to be added to the list is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

Shai’s summer with the national team solidified himself as an excellent primary shot creator in the FIBA game. He puts so much pressure on opposing defenses with his relentless drives and he’s developed into quite the tough shot maker from all over the court as well. He can be the offensive engine for Canada as the World Cup rolls around, something that has been missing on the SMNT for quite a while.

Diving into some numbers from last season, according to SIS Hoops and their “Advantages Created” metric, SGA ranks 3rd in the league, behind only Luka Doncic and Trae Young! SIS, a cutting edge sports analytics company, considers an advantage created to be “any time an offense is in position to generate a shot with sufficiently high expected value” and they leverage “internal data on shot and play type expected values and […] team of highly-trained scouts” to calculate the metric. It certainly confirms the eye test that in both the NBA and in FIBA, Shai is a talented offensive creator.

Despite being such a dynamic creator, OKC has been making a concerted effort to get Shai more involved in the offense off the ball. Not only does this make sense from a roster construction stand point (gives some more on ball opportunities to Josh Giddey to leverage his creative passing vision) for the Thunder, but I also think it will help Shai, especially his efficiency. And improving his efficiency should only strengthen his All-Star case this year. Last season, SGA saw both his FG% and 3P% dip to career lows of 45.3% and 30.0% respectively. A major factor in his poor shooting year was the degree of difficulty of Shai’s shot attempts. As he’s gotten more on-ball creation responsibility, Shai’s pull up FGA per game have steadily risen while his efficiency with those shots have decreased each year.

These types of heavily contested, late in the shot clock attempts were killer for Shai’s shooting efficiency last year.

Conversely, getting Shai to be a part of these actions off the ball as a screener/cutter more often can open up some easier shots for him, which he’s proven he can convert. This sequence was from OKC’s second game of the year and it resulted in a catch and shoot 3 for Shai.

For his career Shai has been great at catch and shoot 3s and getting more of these shots per game should be a direct result of playing more off the ball. To me, this is low hanging fruit that Shai can grab onto right at the start of the season and push his scoring and shooting efficiency numbers upwards.

By all accounts, Shai is totally on board with moving a little more off the ball as well.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is already among the league’s upper echelon of players. It’s time he gets some recognition for it and puts up a well-deserved All-Star campaign.

This NBA season is going to be fantastic, especially with all the Canadian talent and storylines to watch. Cheers for the journey ahead!