Shooting is a point guard’s best friend, and with the selection of Jamal Murray, Juan Hernangomez and Malik Beasley, Emmanuel Mudiay must be pretty happy.
At least, Nuggets head coach Michael Malone thinks he should be.
“Emmanuel Mudiay will only become a better point guard and player as he has more and more shooting around him,” Malone said while speaking with Gil Whiteley and Adam Mares on Mile High Sports Radio. “That will allow him more room to operate.”
In today’s day and age, “spacing” has become one of the most popular terms in basketball. The Warriors, the Spurs, the Cavs, they all space the floor with outside shooting before attacking the rim and capitalizing on a thin defense, and it works. Unless a team is working with a unique set of talents at the four and five, the days of two big men clogging up the paint are all but gone.
Last year, Mudiay was on a team that shot 33.8 percent from three, good for fifth worst in the NBA, and it showed. Despite elite size and athleticism, Mudiay was average at best when driving to the rim. And while part of that falls on his shoulders (he did improve as the season wore on), a large factor in the equation was the congestion inside the paint; opposing defenses simply didn’t feel as if they had to guard the three-point line as staunchly as they would with other teams.
And it wasn’t that Mudiay was afraid. According to NBA.com, he averaged 7.6 drives a game, more than any other rookie guard in 2015-16. The issue, though, is that he converted on just 37.6 percent of those drives, which is really bad. Of the 23 guards that averaged more drives per game than Mudiay, only one, Tony Wroten, had a lower field goal percentage (31.4%). In fact, no other guard was lower than 43.8 percent (Tyreke Evans) and most were at or near 50 percent.
All this makes it easy to see why the Nuggets prioritized shooting in this year’s draft, and Malone thinks it will end up making a seismic difference. He even went so far as to bring LeBron James into the conversation.
“When I coached in Cleveland with LeBron James for five years, LeBron was a great player regardless of who’s around him, but when he has shooting on the floor, that gave him more room to attack and more driving lanes to attack, and he became even a greater player,” Malone said. “We hope the same for Emmanuel. Emannual has the size, the strength to get by people. But now, obviously, if we have great shooters on the floor — not just one or two, but a bunch — that’ll make his job that much easier, give him more room to create and attack of the dribble, and we’ll be a lot harder to guard because of that.”
And Mudiay’s driving will become even more potent as his own three-point shot improves.
Coming into the draft, Mudiay’s biggest fault was his shooting, and it showed itself through the first five months of the season, as he shot 27 percent from behind the arc. In the final two months, though, Mudiay made dramatic improvements to his shot, releasing with better rhythm and in better situations, and he finished shooting 38 percent from three in March and April.
“The last two months of the year … in March and April, he was a plus-35 percent three-point shooter,” Malone said. “So just to see his development from the beginning of the season to the end of the season, and the progress that he made in his jump shot. And that came about from working with our coaches, getting in the gym and getting a lot, a lot of reps up, where he got so much more confident in his shot.”
In those final two months, Mudiay averaged 16.5 points, 4.9 assists and 3.8 rebounds a game, looking a lot like the point guard most analysts pegged as the likely Rookie of the Year winner before the start of the season. With the improvements he made mid-season, along with the addition of elite shooters on the outside, Mudiay is primed for a true breakout season next year.
For more conversation with Michael Malone, Gil Whitely and Adam Mares, listen to the podcast below …
Catch the Gil Whiteley every weekday from 11a-1p on Mile High Sports AM 1340 | FM 104.7 or stream live any time for the best local coverage of Colorado sports from Denver’s biggest sports talk lineup.