(Photo by Andrew Lahodynskyj/Getty Images)
This week, Brandon Ingram crossed the 10,000-point mark in the league and is leading the Toronto Raptors to second place in the East with a surprising 13-5 record, with a primary weapon that’s almost a dirty word in the modern NBA: the mid-range jumper. There’s no getting around this fact: He’s an old-school scorer. Ingram is averaging 21.6 points on 48.5 percent from 2, but only 29.6 percent from 3. That tells you most of what you need to know about him – a scorer who doesn’t excel from beyond the arc, a rare profile in today’s NBA. The green areas and red areas in his shot chart don’t lie.
The advanced numbers back up the unusual nature of his scoring profile. He ranks 5th in the league in field-goal attempts inside 17 feet (4.8 per game) and 8th in long 2-point jumpers (1.7 per game). In terms of Toronto’s playbook, Ingram gets the standard scorer’s diet you see around the league – some spot-ups, some pick-and-roll as the ball-handler, some ball screens as the screener, some handoffs.
But at the end of the day, Ingram is an isolation player. Even though he ranks only 32nd in the league in shots from an isolation situation per Synergy, a big chunk of his possessions end up as one-on-one plays, usually after a few between-the-legs dribbles. Here’s one example: an Immanuel Quickley-Jakob Poeltl ball screen flows into a handoff to Ingram, who takes a few dribbles and pulls up from deep - but not from 3. In the advanced box score, it goes down as a handoff, but in reality, it’s an isolation, through and through.
In the pace-and-space era, where most NBA teams play 5-out or 4-out-1-in, most of the actions for players in Ingram’s mold come in the flow of the offense. One thing you rarely see anymore is a scorer like that running off screens around the mid-post, simply because a screener stationed at the block is perceived as a spacing killer. If Ingram had played in the 1990s or the early 2000s, in an era where his limited 3-point shooting would barely have been noticed, he almost certainly would have been getting a lot more designed actions to free him for mid-range jumpers off screens. Classic shooter sets like turnout or floppy (where the shooter chooses whether to come off a double screen on one side or a single screen on the other) were staples of this era’s offenses.
Take, for instance, a player who resembles him a bit: Rip Hamilton, a key piece of the Detroit Pistons’ 2004 title team. In this clip, he starts at the free-throw line, gets a decoy flare screen, and then comes off a turnout screen designed to free a shooter, puts the ball on the floor, and finishes with a pull-up around the free-throw line - a play like that used to be a pillar of every team’s playbook.
Look how different the spacing was back then compared to today – players stationed at the mid-post on both sides, no weak-side corner filled once Hamilton receives the ball. It’s crowded. LeBron James said on his podcast with JJ Redick that when he came into the league, almost every set was some version of floppy. Today, with Redick coaching him, it’s doubtful there is even a single pure floppy set in the Lakers’ playbook.
Toronto, though, actually does have one – in ATO situations. Ingram ranks 3rd in the league in shots off non-ball screens, averaging 2.4 per game. Ahead of him are Lauri Markkanen of the Utah Jazz, whose volume there comes mostly from flare screens and back screens, with 5.1, and Steph Curry with 3.6 for Golden State, probably the only team in the league that still incorporates turnout actions into its flow offense and not just out of timeouts.
In Toronto’s case, Darko Rajaković goes back to the old floppy/turnout concept, specifically in ATOs. Look how different the spacing is now compared to those Pistons from about 20 years ago: the set starts 5-out, with all five players spaced on the perimeter. Scottie Barnes comes to set a pindown screen for Ingram, but Cleveland Cavaliers’ Lonzo Ball top-locks him, so Ingram exits to a screen on the low block on the opposite side, with Sandro Mamukelashvili moving out of the corner to set that screen.
Like in a floppy, Ingram chooses the side with two optional screeners, but instead of a second screen from Grady Dick, Dick clears the wing and moves to the opposite side. Ingram takes advantage of the fact that Ball trails the screen, curls hard toward the rim, catches on the move, and finishes with a single dribble and a step-back pull-up around the free-throw line. It’s a possession almost identical to Hamilton’s.
In the fourth quarter of the win over the Cavaliers, Toronto again comes out of a timeout in a floppy look. This time, Nae’Quan Tomlin is guarding Ingram, and instead of trailing, he is shooting the gap - going over the screen to take away the curl. And again, Ingram defaults to who he is: an isolation scorer. His screener, Poeltl, flips to the other block, then comes back once Ingram’s dribble dies. Ingram hits the big man, gets the ball right back, and with just over a second left on the shot clock, rises off the dribble for a long 2, of course. Swish.
Ingram finished the winning effort Vs the Cavs with 37 points, shooting an unusual 5-11 from beyond the arc. Set plays are nice, but individual shot-making matters more. And Brandon Ingram has plenty of it.