Devonte’ Graham is hitting shots and winning games for the Hornets. What did we all miss about this former second-round pick?
I’d love to be able to generalize Devonte’ Graham, to look at the leap he’s taken from his first to his second season and derive some sort of timeless wisdom about the developmental trajectory of similar players. Something like, “accolades like Big-12 Player of the Year and First Team All-American still mean something.” Or maybe, “you can’t keep a good outside shooter down.” Or even, “no, YOU’RE the 23-year-old rookie and second-round pick with a low ceiling, jerk.”
Graham was, inarguably, a sensational college player. In addition to the individual awards he added to his mantle, he was a career 40-percent 3-point shooter on over 700 attempts during his four years at Kansas. Graham won over 80 percent of the games he played, helped lead the Jayhawks to the Final Four and averaged 17.3 points, 7.2 assists, 4.0 rebounds and 1.6 steals per game as a senior.
He fell to the second-round because of questions about his size on defense (Graham was listed at just 6-foot-2 and 186 pounds), his limitations as a finisher (he made just 43 percent of his shots at the rim), and whether he’d be useful as a creator in the NBA where his quickness and passing ability would fall into a more average range than they against Kansas’ opponents. The Hornets traded future second-round picks to nab him on draft night and given the organization’s apparent successful-veteran-college-player kink it seemed like a move likely to fade into oblivion.
Graham certainly did nothing to change that assessment as a rookie, bouncing between the G League and the Hornets, finishing last season having made just 28.1 percent of his 3s and 34.3 percent of his shots overall, in just under 700 minutes. He looked like a middling prospect who had been pegged correctly — a willing but undersized defender who had spent his career playing a primary creator role that he wasn’t quite good enough to pull off at the next level. If his 3-point shot didn’t start falling and turn him into Patty Mills, he was going to be out of the league fairly quickly.
Those 3-pointers are falling now though. In seven games, Graham has already played about a third of the minutes he did last season. He’s made 46.7 percent of his 3-pointers, including 15-of-28 off the dribble (Damian Lillard and James Harden are the only players who have made more pull-up 3s this season). The ability to reliably knock down pull-up jumpers from beyond the arc is the skeleton key that unlocks the primary creator’s toolbox. He’s still fumbling with the other tools inside — shooting under 40 percent on drives with nearly as many turnovers (6) as assists (8).
It’s possible that if those 3-pointers weren’t going down at such an absurd rate, everything else about Graham’s hot start would look a little different. Right now he’s doing all the things Malik Monk was supposed to do and putting together a compelling case that Terry Rozier was nothing more than a frivolous $58 million dollar impulse buy. But he’s also not really turned into a different player. He’s still a willing but undersized defender who probably doesn’t have the diversity of skill to be a primary creator, 35 points and 15 free throw attempts against Indiana last night notwithstanding.
So, I guess, if there are any rules of thumb to be generalized here, it’s that the entire universe seems a little brighter when the shots are going in.