Galvanized Pipe

Try, for a moment, to imagine the trepidation of Cavs fans (or just read through the twitter replies) when the #WojBomb detonated.  The Cleveland Cavaliers, fragile, rudderless, running out of time, prepared a jersey and a locker for J.R. Smith.   J.R. Smith?!  With Smith’s reputation, it was almost inconceivable that Cavs GM David Griffin would risk further dysfunction on a team that needed to get righted quickly.  The season was not yet completely unsalvageable, and Smith, for all his documented transgressions and the deafening chorus on his inability to be coached, could be considered one of the few role players in the NBA that could win a game by himself.  Still, it was like calling for a Hail Mary on 3rd and 8 with a minute and three timeouts remaining.

New York is sending J.R. Smith to Cleveland, league sources tell Yahoo Sports.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 6, 2015

Here is one of my favorite scouting reports on J.R. Smith, courtesy of John Hollinger, who through the years seemed to revel in explaining the dichotomy of the mercurial sixth man:

Years from now, scholars will study the career of J.R. Smith and, despite the advanced intelligence of their machines, will still be unable to figure him out. There is simply no way to explain a player who, within the same season, hit at least five 3-pointers in a game 11 times, shot 9-for-36 in a five-game stretch, got benched, and finished the year by scoring 22 PPG on 48.1 percent shooting over his final 10 games. And that’s not even the full story.

(God I miss Hollinger the writer) Had the Cavs continued to underwhelm, the acquisition of Smith would have been met with “what were you thinking” type howling that may have broken the psyche of the Front Office.  Much to the surprise of all humanity, the J.R Smith trade has worked out so well that pundits and talking heads have been struggling to ascertain how, exactly, this came to be.  Maybe Smith realized this was his last chance to make good on his deep well of talent, maybe LeBron really has ascended to shaman-like status as a teammate whisperer, maybe Cleveland’s relative nightclub scarcity or the release of Mario Kart WiiU limited the impetuous Smith to the gym or the couch.  The possibilities are endless. I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, but J.R. Smith was absolutely vital to the 2015 Cavaliers establishing an identity and realizing their greatness.  Don’t take my word for it, here’s David Blatt:

I really can’t comment on anything in the past, but I can tell you one thing: J.R. Smith has been a dream for us, as a team and for me personally. I love the guy. I love coaching him. He comes to work every single day. He’s a great teammate. He’s playing both ends of the court for us consistently. He’s one of the main reasons for our turnaround, together with Iman, who simply started later because of the injury. Those guys, honestly, they’ve been a godsend. They really have. They turned the team around.

“I love coaching him.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For a while it seemed as though J.R. simply suppressed his negative qualities, while occasionally transcending to video-game-like explosions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyFiW-KtZD8#t=3m57s

But it was more than that.  The fans noticed it first.  J.R. was flying all over the court, fighting through screens, closing out on shooters, boxing out, and doing all the little things it takes to be a plus defender.  I remember watching a game on Fox Sports Ohio about a month into the Smith era when Austin Carr embarked upon a solid minutes-long monologue to praise J.R.’s commitment to defense.  He was exasperated, publicly admitted what we all privately felt, “Fred, I had no idea this guy could D-up like this.”  Now, with every Cavalier game on national TV, the world has wondered out loud “where was this J.R. Smith in New York?!”

We don’t know.  I’ve implied at times that Smith is mostly the same player, he’s just benefitting from a winning environment (recall Boris “man boobs” Diaw floundering on a 7-win Bobcats team before practically doubling his FG% after a mid-season trade back to San Antonio). In the regular season, this theory was viable, but it no longer accounts for what we’ve witnessed in the playoffs.  This is a different player.

“Get him here and I’ll take care of it.” – LeBron

In the regular season, J.R.’s commitment to defense was palpable.  This, the guy that John Hollinger reported: “Has zero interest in defending.”  We witnessed J.R.’s activity and energy, but how effective was he?

First, we can peer into the Cavs’ Defensive Rating.  The Cavs posted a 103.1 when Smith was on the court and a 103.1 when Smith was off the court during the regular season.  These 103.1 marks are an indication that 1.) The Cavs were at least serviceable on defense post January-shakeup, and 2.) That J.R. probably wasn’t a defensive stalwart by any means.  In the playoffs? The Cavs are 99.2 when Smith is off the court and 97.9 when he’s on it.  In the playoffs, the Cavs have been a very good defensive team, and J.R. Smith is a part of that, although it’s hard to separate the effect he is imbuing versus his teammates.  For that, we turn to the SAP analytical defense dashboards for J.R. Smith on NBA.com.  The values shown are an aggregate of shots against which Smith defended.

Sure enough, J.R. was a plus defender during his regular season stint with the Cavaliers.  In the above chart, DFG% is the Field Goal percentage of the player Smith was covering.  The E[FG%] was the typical (or expected value) field goal percentage for that same player (including all the times Smith wasn’t guarding him).  The Diff is self-explanatory, with a negative number meaning the player that Smith was checking shot the ball so many percentage points worse than normal.  With an overall regular season Diff of -2.2, J.R. was dragging opponent’s field goal percentage down by a couple of percentage points.  (For comparison’s sake, Kyrie Irving’s regular season overall Diff was +2.9.)  But look at those playoff Diffs!  Negative 8.3 overall and negative 12.1 on perimeter shots!  And remember, this difference is between the actual and the expected value of the player that Smith is guarding, not simply the on-court/off-court difference of Smith which could be deceivingly deflated, due to the quality of playoff opponent. (If we want to ignore that Atlanta was a very good outside shooting team before running into the Cavs.)  J.R. Smith has been severely hampering his opponents (relative to their non-J.R. Smith encounters) on the perimeter on defense.  Who saw that coming?

“I felt like for me, we were getting a great piece not only on the floor, but off the floor as well because I knew him before he even got to this point.” -LeBron

And what about J.R.’s offensive game?  Let’s revisit Hollinger’s scouting report: “Ultimate streak scorer; no conscience in shot selection.”  Sounds about right.  So what do you do with a guy like that?  You bring him off the bench, turn over the reins on offense, and hope for a spark. You expect to see about the same approach: dribble-heavy iso, lots of flashy crossovers, some egregious step-backs, and a shooter undeterred by misses.  Shooters shoot.  Here’s J.R. back in January:

Worse come to worse … my motto is, ‘When in doubt, shoot the ball.’  So when in doubt, I’m going to shoot it, and hopefully that don’t catch nobody off guard.

You just hope they go in.  He’s a spark, an X-factor.  We come up with this 3rd set of titles to describe a player like Smith.  The other two classifications are: star and role player.  The X-factor, when he’s firing on all cylinders, can be the best player on the court.  When he’s sputtering, he can hurt you more than a role player, who knows his limitations and plays within himself.

Unlike the above sentiments would lead you to believe, J.R. Smith has had, throughout the playoffs, an X-factor’s ceiling with a role player’s approach.  This is not very common, and it’s the first time in Smith’s playoff history that he’s done anything like this.

He’s logged 358 playoff minutes this season, that’s his second most, nestled between the 2008-2009 Nuggets’ playoff run (435 min) and the Knicks’ playoff campaign of two years ago (351 min).  With those as comparables, here is how today’s J.R. Smith has changed.

J.R. played very well in the 2009 playoffs, and has struggled since.  This season he’s been even better, and his approach has been pitch perfect.  With Kevin Love out and Kyrie Irving limited, someone needed to replace the deadly outside shooting that had become a defining characteristic of the Cavs’ offense.  As you can see, J.R. is setting a playoff career high in percentage of his shots that are assisted (denoted as %Ast), 3-point field goal percentage, effective field goal percentage, and, maybe most importantly, he’s been clutch as hell.   Just look at that, when the score is within five points, J.R. Smith is shooting 21/43 from the 3-point line.  This accounts for a full third of his shot attempts: 3-pointers (mostly assisted) with the score tight. Even in his superb 2009 playoff campaign, only a quarter of J.R.’s shots were taken with a tight score, and only half of those were assisted (more pull-ups and step-backs), as opposed to these playoffs where 72% of shots in this “clutch” situation are assisted.  For comparison’s sake, 2013 NBA Finals Champion, Ray Allen, had an eFG% of 55% (a full 11 percentage points less than Smith) when the score was within five points and 71% of those shots were similarly assisted.

Clutch Shots, Clutch Fashion, Clutch Gene

J.R. Smith is also setting per-minute, playoff career highs in: steals, rebounds, and turnovers (lack of).  He’s dribbling less, isolating less, driving less, but his activity is not down.  He’s embraced his role as a 3-point sniper, and limited the shot attempts that built his “no conscience in shot selection” reputation, while expanding the breadth of his defensive approach.

It’s not like J.R. Smith has completely suppressed his irrational swag in favor of textbook, team-oriented mechanics, (the quote above is only a week old) and I mean this in a good way. There are only a few “role players” in the NBA capable of making these shots.  These are the shots of an X-factor going full tilt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb0SJFfOdF4#t=36s

It’s not a stretch to say that J.R. Smith saved the Cavs’ season with his 4th quarter barrage in Game 4.  Prior to these difficult, contested, irrational-confidence bombs, the Cavs had managed a meager four points in over nine minutes.  A seven-point deficit with 10 and a half minutes remaining seems a lot more insurmountable when you’re averaging just a point every 2:20.

No, Earl the Third is still J.R. He’s just playing smarter, harder, and using his supreme talents as a shooter to elevate a LeBron/Kyrie-centric offense. He’s largely resisted the urge to showcase the dribble-heavy escapades of his pre-Cleveland days, without losing an ounce of pipe-laying swag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoqNwcRRDZ4

One of my favorite moments of the playoffs was J.R.’s decision to blow by Kyle Korver to dish an alley-oop to TT, in lieu of a very-much-earned heat check.  Kyle Korver was defending the scouting report.  J.R. Smith is re-writing his scouting report.

 Acknowledgements:

The hilarious title picture is courtesy of Justin Rowan of FearTheSword.

All stats were taken from basketball-reference.com and NBA.com.