Are Jalen Green and the Suns running out of time this season? ...Middle East



How much grace are you willing to offer up? That is the question when it comes to a player in Jalen Green’s situation with the Phoenix Suns.

Green has missed significant time due to a right hamstring injury, a muscle that is clearly still nagging at him. You’ll see him fiddling with it occasionally on the floor, even a handful of games past his everyday return.

He missed that significant time, all while a team completely jelled and thrived as a unit. Green missed out on a valuable synchronization period for the Suns, not playing regularly until four months into the season. He is doing so as a high-usage player, and his return came at a time when Phoenix had just lost one of its three high-usage scorers to injury in Dillon Brooks.

All of that could not be more difficult. It’s a process anyone in the league will tell you is tougher than it looks. This isn’t baseball, where you would just slot in a guy to hit fifth and take your individual approach at the plate and individual approach in left field. This isn’t football, where you’ve got your individual guy to block or individual guy to defend. There are vital team dynamics at play in basketball, dynamics that are incredibly challenging to build up. It’s a fragile state that can shatter with any minor or major changes.

So, how much grace are you willing to offer up for Green’s, at times, cataclysmic struggles so far? Is it a few games? A few weeks? The rest of this season? Even beyond that?

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To be clear, he’s coming off two of his better games. But as we’ll get to, you can see the same problems persisting inside those outings, too.

Whatever the Suns want to give in terms of grace, they don’t have time for it. They are in a jam with a battle for the sixth seed on the line all while trying to find a flow with Green before the postseason kicks off.

Brooks breaking his left hand two weeks ago was a major loss for the Suns, but one in theory that they could supplant with the everyday inclusion of Green, who is a similarly productive offensive player. And while Green isn’t a booming playmaker, he’s better there than Brooks, who has historically low assist numbers this year for how high his usage is. A jump in the team’s athleticism was needed as well, which is Green’s biggest asset.

The transition, however, has been far less plug-and-play, and just about all of it can be attributed to Green himself. That sounds harsh. And then you see his numbers and watch the tape.

Green in 16 games this year is shooting 36.9% from the field and 28.1% at 3-point range. Focusing more on the last nine straight games he’s played, Green is at a 35.3 FG% and 24.7 3P% with 19 assists and 23 turnovers.

The game-to-game eye test has been even more damning.

There’s a healthy mix of everything going wrong. On top of the bad choices, Green is missing a lot of open looks. A few times a game, he gets caught with the ball when half the shot clock is already gone. That leads to efficiency becoming worse than it should be.

But he’s not helping himself with most of these jumpers. Green has simply never been a good enough pull-up shooter to warrant any of these attempts.

His pull-up percentages by year in Houston on 2s were 35.9%, 41.0%, 38.4% and 34.4%, per NBA Stats.

For comparison, an elite midrange shooter in Devin Booker over those same four seasons were 48.3%, 51.5%, 51.5% and 51.9%.

Booker has earned any midrange look he wants. Green has not, and yet his decision-making would suggest he has.

On pull-up 3s, Green is at 34.2%, 32.7%, 33.5% and 31.6%. That is consistently poor.

So, take in those numbers and watch these shots, all of which come with a healthy amount left on the shot clock, with every clip coming from a recent stretch when Booker was in for all three games. It’s tough.

Opposing teams will roll out the red carpet for Green to take these.

Even as Green has gotten more games under him on that right hamstring, with his phenomenal agility and speed showing more by the game, he’s not winning his 1-on-1 isolations or 2-on-2 two-man games consistently enough. That leads to bad shots or turnovers.

It’s even been brutal when Green gets to where the Suns want him to go the most.

None of his issues is better reflected than in his knockdown rate around the rim, where he is shooting 55%, one of the worst percentages for a perimeter player, per Cleaning the Glass.

There are a few misses he would normally convert on, but again, the lack of floor vision and instincts really pop here. It’s just far too many takes right into a help defender.

Now, if he starts making more of them, that’s fine. And it’s huge that he’s starting to drive more each game. Green’s rim attempt frequency is at 26%, an average number that would be a career low, so that’s gotta go up.

Here are two excellent finishes through traffic from Sunday’s win.

Now with all those decision-making issues laid out, let’s look at Sunday’s performance. Green shot 8-of-19 for 24 points, two assists and three turnovers. He was 7-of-11 in the first half. That’s a good performance, especially considering it was his best defensive outing of the year, too.

But you can see, even on the makes, that the choices leave more to be desired.

Green did not close the game, with head coach Jordan Ott favoring rookie Rasheer Fleming in a nod to what we’re talking about. You wonder if Phoenix’s offense is in a decent rhythm, like it was against Charlotte with Booker and Collin Gillespie leading the way, Green sitting in clutch time becomes a more common occurrence. How much healthier the Suns get in the next few weeks could impact that even further.

All of these clips, of course, do not include much movement, and that naturally raises Phoenix’s stagnation levels throughout a game.

Green and the Suns have 18 more games across exactly five weeks to figure this out. Green’s obviously just got to shoot the ball better. That will alleviate a good amount of this, as it did on Sunday when he knocked down 4 of 10 attempts from deep.

But the choices have to improve dramatically. Phoenix has good complementary offensive players like Grayson Allen, Oso Ighodaro, Royce O’Neale and Gillespie. Jordan Goodwin has evolved into one, too.

For the exception of Allen, though, all of them rely on ball and player movement to contribute.

You can already see Green’s teammates reacting off the ball. This is not at all said in a way to suggest they are growing frustrated with him, but go back through those videos and you’ll see a few instances of guys either calling for the ball, bracing for it and not getting it, or motioning for another action.

At the 35-second mark of the Charlotte video, Booker makes an outstanding drive-and-kick pass, then calls for a swing-swing pass by Green, doesn’t get it and then waits for the pass as he’s wide open in the corner, a pass he also doesn’t get before the offensive foul occurs.

It’s simply not how the Suns play. And yet, it was working for Brooks in a similar, tunnel-vision style when he was prone to looking off Booker, too. So what’s the difference, beyond Brooks making more shots?

That’s what Ott has to figure out. This is his final exam that the first-time head coach has aced in many regards. None of Ott’s successes have been bigger than his ability to empower everyone on the roster. Giving each player on the team a mix of full confidence and freedom to play their way has brought out the best in over half the roster.

Having that breakthrough with Green before the end of the season, and more importantly before Brooks returns so it reduces complications as the postseason arrives, will swing the season in one direction or the other.

Follow @KellanOlson

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