Snatch is perhaps the purest representation of the Guy Ritchie aesthetic. Full of sharp wit and sharper knives, quick cuts and quicker-to-violence characters, Snatch walks a winding road with you. At the end — spoilers here — a pooch eats a diamond, and Jason Statham and his hapless partner end up as the nominal owners of the independent dog. Presumably, Statham and company are responsible dog owners and, seeing his first bowel movement, pick it up. Then they find something very special encased within the turd.
The Toronto Raptors, if they’re responsible employers, would realize that encased within the thus-far turd of their 2022-23 season is also a hidden diamond: Gary Trent jr. It was his heroics that pushed the Raptors over the Phoenix Suns, putting a very loud, 35-point topper on what had to that point been a quiet improvement throughout the year.
Trent has spent nearly every second on the court of his five-season career putting the ball in the basket — and doing little else. In my research into Buddy Hield for FiveThirtyEight, I found Trent’s name near the top for players whose 3-point attempts outweigh their non-scoring box score stats combined. He attempted 1.1 more triples than he averaged rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks last year; this season, the gap is up to 1.5. For Trent, 2022-23 has been an exercise in how the chucker got his spots.
And yet, Trent has never been more impactful.
He’s slowly in the process of tweaking his value outside of scoring, sure. He’s throwing a higher frequency of passes when handling in the pick and roll, for example. Part of the reason Trent’s assists are down this year is because the team’s shooting has fallen off a cliff even compared to the modest output of last year. (The current mark of 32.8 percent, for example, is slightly worse than Pascal Siakam’s current rate of 33.3 percent.) But ultimately Trent is throwing fewer passes than he did last year and recording fewer potential assists. He has never been more of a gunner. Trent is averaging the third-lowest pass-per-minute marks in the association among players totaling at least a modest mark of 800 minutes.
But that gunning is working better than ever. Trent had some weaknesses to his game in past seasons. Mostly, in fact, every area other than shooting the basketball. And shooting is important! But you’re going to be very limited if that’s all you offer. Trent has layered a number of counters on top of the jumper to ensure he’s as well-rounded a one-dimensional player as he can be.
Trent’s game is still built from the 3-point line in. And despite a slightly down year as a shooter, he’s still one of the league’s better snipers. His pull-up shooting is in a big funk, but he has a long enough history of success there — basically the entire rest of his career — that it ought to come around. But he remains over 40 percent on catch-and-shoot triples on one of the larger diets in the league, there. Against the Suns, he hit five four big bombs, more than a third of Toronto’s total.
But when he’s forced off the line, Trent has much more to offer this season than ever before. He’s taking fewer long 2-pointers than he did last season, which is the least efficient area of the floor, even for Trent. (He’s also shooting a career low on long twos, which makes it all the more valuable that he’s taking fewer.)
And Trent is mostly replacing those long twos with 2-pointers closer in towards the rim. He’ll catch behind the arc, be driven inside by a wild closeout, and rather than pull up immediately take one or two extra dribbles. All the better because even if he doesn’t end up shooting, he forces more commitment from the defense and asks them to rotate over further distances, creating larger and more advantages for the offensive possessions. But when he does shoot from that short midrange, he’s been an absolute killer.
Trent is shooting 58 percent from that 5-14 foot range on the floor, which is the third-best mark in the league at his frequency or above, behind only Nikola Jokic and Kevin Durant. That’s, uhh, kind of crazy. It’s on a tough diet of shots, too. Jokic and Durant both have advantages in that they’re similarly gigantic and long and at that range, all they need to do is extend their arms to the heavens and trust their touch to guide the ball home from there. Pascal Siakam and Scottie Barnes are in similar boats, and both are also exceptional from the short midrange, if not to the same extent as Trent this season.
He’s added a number of different shots to his toolkit when he gets to the free throw line and inside. First and foremost, he’s gotten impressive at quick-release floaters and push shots. He doesn’t jump high, and he’s not strong enough to bump defenders off their spots before he launches, so he has to get the ball in the air as quickly as possible. He has a bunch of possible release points, and he can get his floater into the net through contact, twisting his lower body, basically doing anything: if he’s going with one hand from eight feet out, it’s a good shot.
Trent doesn’t need a straight line drive against a rotating defense, either. He’s got some craft to get to his floater, including snaking a pick and roll to create space. This isn’t something most players can just make up on the fly; this move shows intentional work, hours in the gym, turning a former weak area of the court into a weapon for Trent.
And if Trent does get all the way to the rim, he’s been more efficient there than ever before, too. He’s up to 66 percent from within four feet of the rim, the best mark of his career. (On an admittedly low volume; the area really seems to be in firm only-if-I’m-really-open territory.) Similar to his floater, the emphasis is simply to get the ball on the backboard before defenders can get to it. He favours scoop layups and other such attempts of trickery rather than either using physicality to clear space or athleticism to claim it. If Trent can’t create space, he’s solid at using what little he has without overcomplicating things. If defenders don’t rotate to stop him, he’s more than capable of using open space to get layups on the rim.
All told, Trent’s proficiency inside the arc more than makes up for his drop in pull-up 3-point shooting. At 40 percent (which Trent has never reached and is really just a Steph Curry mark) on pullup triples, players score 12 points on 10 shots. Trent is hitting approximately 60 percent from both the short midrange and the rim, which is an identical 12 points on a sampling of 10 attempts.
Trent’s points per shot is the highest it’s been since his sophomore season and is now above average for a combo guard. Keep in mind that most players take only the shots that are most advantageous: open jumpers or simple drives. That Trent’s efficiency is above average while inhaling shots like 2000s Anthony Kiedis on the road is all the more impressive.
And on top of the efficiency on field goal attempts, Trent is also doing more to create the best shots in basketball: free throws. The percentage of his shots on which he drew fouls had been poor for his entire career, but he almost doubled that rate to 10.4 percent this season, again well above average for his position. Because he’s so quick at getting the ball towards the rim, perhaps defenders are chasing unblockable shots and causing extra contact that way; most of his free throws are coming on jumpers. I’m not seeing increased physicality from Trent or other means to explain the free throws. It’s opaque, but the most likely explanation is that he’s been decisive and made quick decisions, and that’s yielded all sorts of extra benefits.
When, then, if Trent is putting forward the best season of his career — and Pascal Siakam has become a surefire, no-doubt superstar — why are the Raptors not better than they are? That’s a complex question, and worthy of its own answers (such as here or here), but at the least this piece should discuss Trent’s role there.
Trent, as presently skilled and employed, is a ceiling-raiser. His scoring is an uppercut to be employed alongside some of Toronto’s best offensive lineups. But despite the shooting woes, Toronto’s scoring has not been the issue so far this season. It is currently the 16th-best offense in the league, equal to the rank of 16th last season, and scoring slightly more efficiently on a points-per-possession basis. Rather, the defensive collapse has been the most important problem. And there Trent is merely survivable at best, rather than a problem solver.
He’s been phenomenal for the Raptors, even if his being so hasn’t made the Raptors phenomenal. Whether he could offer more to another team is a real question the Raptors should be considering at the moment.
Trent, of course, has a player option next season for approximately $18.8 million. Given his improvement as a scorer, there’s virtually no scenario in which Trent opts into that deal. And Toronto, to put it lightly, has not achieved what it would have hoped to this point in the season. It’s increasingly looking like changes need to be made, and Trent is both contextually and financially a likely candidate to suffer those changes.
What do you do when you find a diamond inside a turd? You sell it, of course. Now Trent is a human being, infinitely more valuable than a hunk of carbon, and the Raptors are in a different context entirely than Statham. The comparison is unfair to both parties. But the Raptors keep taking one step forward and two steps back. Against the Suns, Trent made sure they’re on the better half of that dance at the moment. But if things remain on the current path, it’s fair to wonder whether Trent is becoming the best version of himself solely to help another team come the trade deadline.
