Shape shift
Shape shift
Positions are often a convenient fiction — just ask NBA playmaker Josh Giddey
Welcome to the 28th edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
If you missed the previous edition, you can read it here:
It’s important not to read too much into highlight compilations of professional athletes on YouTube — but the presence of one comparing you to basketball legend Larry Bird is probably a decent indicator that you’re a compelling player to watch. Ahead of the 2023-24 NBA season tipping off tonight, here are some thoughts on one player who has that privilege: the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Josh Giddey.
Positions are often a convenient fiction — just ask NBA playmaker Josh Giddey
As we’ve already established, if you lined up every current NBA player in height order, San Antonio Spurs rookie Victor Wembanyama would — somehow — manage to stand out at one end.
Somewhere near the middle of that line would be Josh Giddey.
The 6’8” Australian doesn’t quite play like you’d expect someone of that height to, though: he excels at creating opportunities for others with the ball in his hands.
Entering the third year of his career, the developmental path that Giddey follows will significantly impact the trajectory1 of an Oklahoma City Thunder team which was on the cusp of making the playoffs last year — and already has a legitimate NBA superstar in its starting lineup.
He’s also an interesting player through which to think about how we use traditional positional designations to describe free-flowing, dynamic sports like basketball.
In these sports2, issues can arise when there is a distance between a player’s salient attributes — in this case, Giddey’s ball-handling and playmaking — and how that player tends to be deployed by their team.
According to the NBA’s official records, Giddey is classed as a guard.
And if you watched him in action for Australia3 during this year’s FIBA World Cup, you’d probably understand why.
But that’s not how more advanced classification systems treat him. At NBA level last season, both Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass inferred that he was effectively playing as a forward for the Thunder.
The methodology of Cleaning the Glass — a stats site run by former NBA front-office executive Ben Falk — is particularly interesting.
Rather than taking what’s written on the lineup card at face value, Falk attempts to deduce a player’s ‘true’ position by looking at the other athletes they share the floor with:
Despite his skillset, then, Giddey is apparently one of the Thunder’s least ‘guard-like’ players when he’s on the court.
And you can see this disconnect when you compare his offensive statistics to other NBA players who are classed in the same position group.
Per Cleaning the Glass, Giddey’s ‘assist percentage’ — the share of his teammates’ successful field goals he provides the final pass for while he’s on the floor — was higher than any other forward in the league last year at 30%.
Among NBA players who don’t primarily play point guard, only a handful are more productive passers than Giddey — and a considerable number of ‘points’ assist their teammates less frequently than he does too.
He is really difficult to classify within a traditional positional framework — but, of course, we don’t have to think within that framework.
Giddey is a good example of why it’s important — in sports like basketball and football in particular — to think about roles and responsibilities within a team’s attacking and defensive systems, rather than relying on terms which are at once more familiar and more ambiguous4.
In his specific case, it helps us both contextualise his own individual qualities and understand how the Thunder are trying to generate points when they have possession.
In an excellent video for Thinking Basketball yesterday, Mike De La Rosa highlighted “how interchangeable OKC’s group of young ball-handlers is” — and how this allows them to operate a conventional offensive scheme in novel and interesting ways5.
The fact that Giddey is often only one of a number of skilled passers on the court for Oklahoma City means that I’ll be paying closer attention to them6 than many other teams once the 2023-24 regular season begins later today.
As Wembanyama has shown us7 too, making assumptions about players based on how they shape up physically doesn’t get you very far in the modern NBA.
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
Take excellent ESPN analyst Zach Lowe’s word for it: in a preseason column, he highlighted Giddey — “a giant, 6-foot-8 point forward with ingenious passing instincts” who is “one of the most unusual players in the league” — as one of the NBA’s five most intriguing players this year.
FIBA also class him as a guard on their website.
To relate it back to football once more: I wrote about Kevin De Bruyne’s elite attacking production out of Man City’s midfield last season. But De Bruyne was really a midfielder in name only in Pep Guardiola’s system; he often played almost as a second striker, pushing forward in support of Erling Haaland while Guardiola positioned many of his other players much more conservatively. To properly describe De Bruyne’s performance, it’s better to talk about the areas of the pitch he tends to occupy (in the half-spaces just outside and inside the box) and the actions he attempts (high-risk, high-reward passes) than to use a very broad term like ‘midfielder’.
Mike’s brief follow-up thread on X is also worth a look.
I’ll also be trying to track down every single one of their inbounds plays.
It’s worth watching Wembanyama’s preseason highlights and marvelling at how much time a player of his size spends around the perimeter.