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>The miraculous makeover of defender Tyus Jones
>
>Aside from the obvious fact that the Wolves keep hammering out
>victories, a primary reason why the team is in such a
>collectively happy space recently is because Tyus Jones is
>spreading his infectious pluck and generosity alongside the
>starters more frequently. To say that he has stepped in for
>the injured Teague without a hitch actually understates his
>value.
>
>Although he has always been a savant as a floor general, with
>a noticeably acute sense of pace, rhythm, space and angles in
>the half-court offense, Tyus was flat-out physically
>overmatched when he came into the league as a scrawny teenager
>in the autumn of 2015. There simply wasn’t enough sinew to
>prevent him from being exploited during any on-ball defense he
>was compelled to execute out on the perimeter, and,
>inevitably, into the paint.
>
>I don’t watch the college or high school game, and thus was
>only aware by hearsay of his heroic stints at Duke and Apple
>Valley. But I vividly remember being charmed by his poise and
>ingenuity against daunting physical odds during his rookie
>season, and dismissive of any chance of him becoming a
>starting caliber point guard due to his sinew-deficient
>defense.
>
>Whether or not Tyus can be a functional starter at the point
>for an NBA playoff team is a viable debate, I suppose, but my
>original estimates of his ceiling and his floor as a player
>were such gross miscalculations that I’m inclined to give
>him the benefit of most any doubt.
>
>Those doubts, by the way, are diminishing by the minute. Tyus
>has some eye-popping statistics on his side. Right now, on
>paper, he is at worst an invaluable role player, and trending
>toward the fringes of stardom.
>
>Tyus utilizes the principles of billiards and judo to surmount
>the defensive mismatches of yore. He deploys his extraordinary
>court vision and dedicated hoop scholarship to assess the
>angles, obstacles and parameters within his zone of coverage
>and rotational responsibility, and then uses the momentum of
>his opponent’s physical and mental activity against him to
>get steals and stops, and to minimize instances where a player
>can back him down with crab-dribbles or arm-barred
>straight-line penetration toward the hoop.
>
>In on-ball defense, his quick feet scrabble to cut down the
>angle and position himself to draw the charge; or he’ll
>dance laterally just enough to create open space for a forward
>lunge that produces a poke-check steal or deflection. On the
>pick-and-roll, he exercises his typically superb judgment on
>when to go over or under the pick, when to exaggerate contact
>and goad the screen-foul, and how to give and accept help on
>the trap or the switch. In transition or otherwise caught in
>space, he turns an apparent weakness into a virtue as well as
>anyone in the NBA, performing like a football free safety with
>a nose for interceptions (via immediate aggression, or lulling
>then pouncing) or simply discouraging the most predictably
>injurious option an opponent could inflict on his team.
>
>This is how a player who did not look like he belonged on an
>NBA court at the defensive end less than three years ago
>transformed himself into a defensive weapon — flawed,
>certainly, in certain circumstances, but lethal to opposing
>offenses in others.
>
>About those eye-popping numbers: Jones currently ranks 190th
>in the NBA in minutes played and yet is 23rd in steals and
>26th in deflections. Only Paul George of OKC has more
>deflections per minute-played than Tyus. Nobody has more
>steals per minute-played.
>
>So, he’s just a puny jitterbug smart enough to know that
>reckless gambling is his best stratagem, eh? Nope.
>
>There is a section on the NBA.com stats page entitled
>“defensive dashboard,” that compares the shooting
>percentage of an opponent a player is defending to the normal
>shooting percentage under those circumstances. Under this
>metric, negative numbers are good, because they represent how
>less accurate a typical shooter is when defended by the
>defender being measured.
>
>Tyus has more than proven his mettle defending “off the
>ball” via his steals and deflections. The defensive
>dashboard is a solid, but not definitive, rating of on-ball
>defensive prowess.
>
>When it comes to an overall rating on the dashboard, Tyus
>ranks second on the team among all defenders on the roster.
>Taj Gibson is first, allowing a field goal percentage that is
>minus-2.1 percentage points below the norm. Tyus is next at
>minus-0.3, just ahead of Jimmy Butler at minus-0.2.
>
>If you imagine that is a horribly flawed formula, well, the
>rest of team sort of corresponds to the eye test. After
>Gibson, Jones and Butler is Towns at plus 1.0 percentage
>points allowed compared to a typical defender under the
>circumstances, then Andrew Wiggins at plus-1.7, Gorgui Dieng
>at plus-2.9, Teague at plus-4.7, and on up to Jamal Crawford
>at plus-7.8, Bazzy Muhammad at plus-11.6 and Aaron Brooks at
>16.5.
>
>Part of Tyus’s gaudy number comes from his ability to defend
>against three-pointers, which in reality is more capricious
>than, say, a post-up. Opponents shoot a whopping 12 points
>less accurately from deep than they do versus a normal
>defender (or under typical circumstances, take your pick on
>the description of the mean).
>
>But even defending shots taken less than six feet from the
>hoop, Tyus leads all the Wolves backcourt personnel at
>plus-5.4 percent above accuracy, followed by Butler at
>plus-9.2, Teague at plus-12.0 and Marcus Georges-Hunt at
>plus-12.6. (Towns is a team-best minus-3.5 points on what
>amounts to accuracy of shots in the paint, followed by Dieng
>at minus-2.6 and Gibson and minus-0.5.)
>
>Bottom line, by the numbers, Tyus has been an elite disrupter
>of passes and a better than average on-ball defender thus far
>this season.
>
>Mr. Synergy
>
>So much for the supposed flaws in Tyus’ game; let’s get to
>the virtues. When running the offense, he is a pass-first
>point guard who nevertheless takes extraordinary care of the
>ball.
>
>There are just two players on the entire Wolves roster that
>commit fewer turnovers per minute than Tyus. One is Shabazz
>Muhammad, who almost always shoots, thus technically reducing
>the option of a turnover (although an unrebounded missed shot
>obviously ends the possession too). The other is Georges-Hunt,
>who barely touches the ball, making the turnover factor moot.
>
>By contrast, Tyus is second only to Teague in assists
>generated per minute, meaning his chances of committing a
>turnover are very high. Consequently, among regular rotation
>players in the entire NBA, Tyus is second to Spencer Dinwiddie
>of Brooklyn in assist-to-turnover ratio.
>
>Here’s where the eyes really begin to pop on Tyus’s stats.
>After 38 games of the season as an NBA point guard, he is the
>only player with twice as many steals as turnovers. The only
>folks even close are active wing players who almost never
>initiate the offense, like Thad Young of Indiana, Kentavious
>Caldwell-Pope of the Lakers, Trevor Ariza of Houston and Otto
>Porter of Washington.
>
>Or, put another way, for every turnover Tyus commits, he
>forces his opponents to commit more than twice as many.
>
>Tyus might commit even fewer miscues if he regularly played
>with the starters, who have more group continuity and talent
>than the reserves (somewhat mitigated by opposing the talented
>starters on the other team). In his six games filling in for
>Teague at different interims this season, his assist to
>turnover ratio is 9-to-1 at 36-to-4. (His steals per turnover
>ratio as a starter is 22-to-4!)
>
>This is not meant as a plea to play Tyus over Teague when the
>latter gets healthy. There are arguments on behalf of Teague
>that don’t even include the inconvenient fact that he is
>getting $19 million per year for the next three seasons, while
>Tyus pulls down less than $4 million total over the next two
>years. But for now, suffice to say that when Tyus plays with
>the other four starters thus far this season, the results are
>magnificent.
>
>Let’s just take the month of December, because it has the
>handy benefit of producing exactly 48 minutes of the
>starters-plus Tyus together, which is the length of a typical
>NBA game. During December, that quintet had an offensive
>rating (points scored per 100 possessions) of 132.4 and a
>defensive rating (points allowed per 100 possessions) of
>90.7.
>
>Given that 100 possessions is a rough estimate of a typical
>NBA game pace and the minutes are 48, you could accurately say
>that when Tyus played with the other starters during the month
>of December, the Wolves beat their opponents by an average of
>132 to 91 per game.
>
>Jimmy Butler, the alpha in the locker room, has a stall right
>next to Tyus and clearly treasures the chance to nurture him
>with encouraging words. After Monday night’s wire-to-wire
>win over the Lakers, when Tyus was a game-best plus-23 in
>27:12 minutes of action (meaning the Wolves were minus-5 in
>the 20:48 Tyus didn’t play), Butler again waxed, beginning
>with exaggerated praise that has become something of a running
>joke between Butler, Tyus and the media.
>
>“He’s the most outstanding player as I’ve said over and
>over again,” Butler cracked. Then, more seriously, “Tyus
>is huge. Everybody loves playing with him, because he is so
>unselfish, to a fault sometimes. He knows all the plays from
>every position. He is competing. And he wants to win. That’s
>all you can ask for out of a teammate.”
>
>Butler also repeated something Tyus himself has noted. “We
>always tell him, if you’re open, shoot. Be aggressive.”
>Given that his true shooting percentage has climbed from 45 to
>52.3 up to its current 58.7 in his three NBA seasons, it is
>sound advice.
>
>But one suspects that Tyus’ point total will be the last
>thing he feeds. He used to be a feel-good story because he was
>an undersized kid from the neighborhood. Now he’s a
>feel-good story because he makes everyone associated with the
>Wolves franchise feel good.
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I wanna go to where the martyrs went
the brown figures on the walls of my apart-a-ment...
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