Jabari Smith: Playbook for the Pros

How does the team that ends up with Jabari Smith best maximize his skills in the NBA?

We often talk about draft prospects in terms of their skills and the evaluation we see before us. Can they use both hands? How do they shoot it? Are they athletic enough to blow by someone one-on-one? More nuanced discussion can follow, including what position they’ll play in the NBA and how their usage might change.

Typically, draft analyst conversation stops there. We don’t talk enough about how to create an environment to best use each player’s skills in the NBA. At the top of the draft, with elite prospects, a franchise drafts them with the intention of building around them as a pillar for the future. But what does that look like?

Auburn forward Jabari Smith is one of the best shooting prospects we’ve seen in years at 6’10”. He’s decently athletic, and while we’ve written plenty about him already (from the worries about his scoring off the bounce to the separation of his transition and half-court play), we wanted to come back and hit on the positive side of such a unique prospect. If Smith is at his best in the NBA, what has the team he plays for done to enable him to get there?

Playbook, actions and spots on the floor are a big portion of figuring that out. In what we’ve seen from Smith — a shooting forward with some mismatch inside-outside abilities and a limited first step — we thought that Kevin Love’s time with the Minnesota Timberwolves would be a great place to look.

Back when Love was in Minnesota, he was much more post-bound and playing on the blocks most of the game. Late in his Timberwolves tenure, he began to diversify and heavily increase his 3-point volume. While the talent-stunted Wolves needed to rely on Love to create offense, they would use several portions of their playbook to move him around the floor.

Some of the most potent, which apply well to Jabari Smith, had him catching the ball on the move or adding counters to places he wanted to score one-on-one. We look at those spots as great launching points for Smith to be utilized in the NBA as a way of masking where he’s weak and emphasizing where he’s best.