The Kristaps Porzingis Paradox
Photo Credit: Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
The Unicorn.
Remember when that nickname, bestowed upon Latvian then-super prospect Kristaps Porzingis, carried so much weight? After all, back then we had never seen a player like him- so tall, with perimeter skills and a jumpshot, especially at his age. His length and toughness on defense made talent evaluators giddy about his potential as a bouncy, active, shot-blocking menace. The formula for a two-way terror like we’d never seen was there from the start.
His first season with the New York Knicks, which saw him finish second in Rookie of the Year voting (directly ahead of Nikola Jokic and Devin Booker, by the way), only added to the hype, and by Year 3 he was selected to his first All-Star game. But a torn ACL cut that season short and kept him out of the next one, and a falling-out with the Knicks’ front office led to a trade to — and subsequent max contract from — the Dallas Mavericks.
Hopes were high. But after a promising first season as Luka Doncic’s co-star was cut short by a pandemic and torn meniscus in the Orlando bubble, Porzingis’ fit on the Mavs came into question. His playstyle clashed with what Dallas wanted to do on both ends, and his flaws started to become more and more glaring. The springy, active defender that spiked shots at the rim and deterred countless others never returned after multiple leg surgeries, replaced by a pick-and-roll sieve whose immobility made him a target on every possession, and his lack of core strength or willingness to weaponize his size in the post led to too many inefficient jumpers, so his preferred method of on-ball creation was left behind in Dallas’ offense.
By the end of their 2020-21 first-round playoff exit at the hands of the Los Angeles Clippers, whose switching scheme Porzingis was completely unable to crack, averaging 13 points per game and being relegated to a spot-up shooter by series’ end, it was clear the Mavs had to move on. Opportunity struck at last years’ trade deadline, when they shipped him to the Washington Wizards, who identified Porzingis as the latest star to chase in their annual quest for the 8-seed. The Unicorn now has a beard, a new backcourt co-star in Bradley Beal — and the opportunity to feature heavily on a team.
Only, he isn’t The Unicorn anymore. Since Porzingis was drafted, the skill level among big men in the NBA drastically increased, and now the archetype Porzingis once had scouts salivating over him — high-level shooting at that size — is all across the NBA; Dallas got their Porzingis replacement, Christian Wood, for only a late first round pick. That skillset doesn’t warrant a max contract on its own. Unfortunately for Porzingis, his other most extraordinary skill as a prospect — his rim protection — left him years ago, the largest casualty of repeated lower body injuries.
But even if Kristaps Porzingis isn’t The Unicorn anymore, he is most certainly a unicorn; that is, unlike any other player in the NBA. His completely unique and paradoxical game is just as likely to leave your head scratching as your jaw on the floor. He’ll bomb back-to-back 30-footers, only to fail posting up a guard a foot shorter than him on the next play. He can shoot over everyone on the floor against small lineups, but can’t — or won’t — punish them on the glass, often hardly trying. The ways in which his intersection of frame and skillset both empower and limit him are equally apparent, and they show on nearly every possession.
What happens when you build a team around that kind of player? Teams take after their stars; your system on both ends has to accommodate them. The Wizards are finding that out now, and head coach Wes Unseld Jr. has a lot on his plate. This is an examination of who Kristaps Porzingis has become as a player in all of its confusing, confounding, contrary glory, and the ways in which he has shaped his new team.
Any conversation about Porzingis’ game has to start with his jump shot. It’s what defined him as a prospect and has been the most prevalent skill he’s displayed in the NBA. It separated him then, and it still separates him now; how many guys 7 feet tall can do this, let alone 7’3”?
Porzingis is shooting just under 38% from distance on the year, and an absurd 52% on wide open shots (where the nearest defender is 6+ feet away), per the NBA’s tracking data. If defenders leave him open, he makes them pay. There have been games this season starting with Porzingis’ man firmly in a drop, only to be forced out on him by the end of the first quarter. There is value in that gravity. Opponents guarding Porzingis with their centers are forced into a lose-lose situation: help off of him and sacrifice an open 3, or stay close and surrender shots at the rim:
That kind of spacing from a big man would help any team, but it really helps the Wizards. Per Cleaning the Glass, Washington not only ranks 27th in 3-point shooting frequency, but they also have exactly one player in their rotation who takes more 3s than average for his position: Kristaps Porzingis. That last fact alone makes his offensive presence invaluable to the Wiz. Early on in the season, the numbers show it: The Wizards’ offensive rating (points scored per 100 possessions) this season has been 22.4 points better with KP on the floor than off — good for the 98th(!!) percentile — per CTG.
Of course, there’s some noise to that data; Washington has played only 7 games, and their bench has been abysmal to start the year which has inflated this stat for all 5 starters. The point, though, remains: Porzingis adds a dimension to Washington’s offense that no other Wizard can.
And that’s where things start to get weird.
Conventional wisdom states that the best way to maximize your sweet-shooting big man is to run him in pick-and-pop actions to put maximum strain on the defense. When you add Beal, a ferocious rim attacker with ball skills, into the mix, you create the formula for a deadly two-man duo. But as is so often the case with Porzingis, the formula and the actual product aren’t quite the same. This is the first of Kristaps Porzingis’ contradictions: he provides necessary shooting, but no way to leverage it. In this instance, there is one major culprit: he is a terrible screener.
On some level, it makes sense. For how tall he is, KP has never been particularly large within his frame, and that lack of core strength can really hurt screeners. But size is size, and it’s almost comical to watch him try — and fail — to put any pressure on a defense with his picks; a lot of the time, it’s as if he isn’t even there.
This creates a truly bizarre offensive dynamic for the Wizards. Porzingis’ very presence behind the arc demands attention, which can open things up for driving guards, but his inability to leverage that pressure any further in screening actions caps the impact his shooting can have on the offense. Altogether, it creates an offense that functionally works, but leaves a lot on the table:
To me, this play embodies the openings and limitations KP’s pick-and-pop game provides. Nikola Vucevic is pulled away from the rim, exposing it for Beal to attack and score. But he sets a terrible screen, leaving Alex Caruso completely unaffected and able to stick with Beal for his entire drive. Because of this, all 3 other Bulls (who are already helping off of their assignments), don’t need to fully commit and close off Beal’s driving lane, quelling any shot at a drive & kick ball movement sequence, the most sustainable way to generate halfcourt offense in the NBA. Even if you replaced all 3 other Wizards with league-average or above shooters, that fact doesn’t change.
Inside the 3-point line, Porzingis’ screening may as well be nonexistent:
Aside from a tiny amount of contact, the pressure he puts on either defender is minimal. Jarrett Allen doesn’t even flinch.
The most important thing a screener can do for an offense is put a defense into motion. Porzingis’ utter inability to do that for the Wizards hamstrings not only the endemic value he provides, but the offense as a whole. They still need him, though; if they played a really good screener who isn’t a shooting threat (like, for example, their backup center, Daniel Gafford), any hypothetical increase in the offense’s ability to put a defense into rotation is completely offset by their roster-wide lack of shooting. The easiest fix is for Porzingis to simply become a better screener. But for now, the Wiz are stuck with what they have: a really talented individual player whose value is irreplaceable, but whose contribution with that value — or lack thereof — to the team’s offensive process places a ceiling on them as a whole.
I mentioned earlier that Washington ranks 27th in 3-point shooting frequency, and now would be a good time to mention that they also rank second in the league in midrange shooting frequency, per CTG. And while Porzingis is the exception to the former on the Wizards, he is an avid contributor to the latter.
Porzingis’ midrange bag is deep, and he can get to it in a variety of ways. He can pump-and-go from beyond the arc, only to pull up with ease from the free throw line. The Wizards have run him off of pindowns from the corners, letting him shoot off of movement or catch in the middle of the floor to drive with a head of steam; if met with help at the rim, he can just shoot over it:
Porzingis’ favorite midrange shot — and shot in general — is the post fadeaway. He can get to it off of the drive, but usually likes to set up shop near the elbows before catching and firing well over the hands of anyone who tries to contest:
These shots are difficult, beautiful, and a really good way to create a shot over another big — you can’t contest what you can’t reach. But this shot is supposed to be a weapon in a big man’s arsenal, meant for when they can’t back down their defender enough to get a quality post shot. And as we’ve established, nothing is quite as it’s supposed to be when it comes to Kristaps Porzingis.
Too often, KP will settle on a smaller defender, relying entirely on the fadeaway as his form of offense posting up. Possessions like this should never happen, but they do:
KP, with nearly a foot of height on Jaden Ivey, should be mashing him into the stanchion, but instead settles for a fadeaway. Even if he had made it, that is a bad shot.
Now, one might ask, why would a 7’3” player not abuse a mismatch that blatant in favor of a lower percentage shot? The answer is simultaneously very simple and utterly absurd: he can’t.
Porzingis, for his whole career, has never been particularly good at backing his man down and getting a shot at the rim, but at this point, it’s almost completely unheard of. Watch him catch the ball where he normally does, and fail to generate any sort of advantage posting up Cade Cunningham, the Pistons’ (positionally tall, but still) point guard:
This creates two separate, but not unrelated, dilemmas. The first is for Porzingis himself. The elbow is his favorite place to set up shop on the floor, but the lack of optionality he has holds him back. Opponents know what shot is coming, so they can react before it even happens. He isn’t a natural passer, and while he will make the occasional eyebrow-raiser, most of his reads are reactionary, which when you’re already playing behind a defense isn’t the most helpful (To be clear, this isn’t a knock on KP per se; most players in the league are reactionary passers). Since he can’t bend defenses with his passing or his driving from the elbow, his go-to move in his favorite spot has become his only move in his favorite spot, a bad place to be as an offensive player.
The second dilemma is for the Wizards, and it’s the same one Dallas — a team whose goals were much closer to winning a championship than Washington’s — decided wasn’t worth trying to solve. If Porzingis isn’t going to make a defense pay with his size, then what’s stopping them from just switching every action he’s in? Or better yet, stashing their poorest defender on him from the start, making life all that much more difficult for the Wizards? For a team who relies on Porzingis’ spacing so much, this hurdle could prove fatal. We have come to the second of Porzingis’ contradictions: that the tallest player on the floor can’t make his size matter.
The Wizards have tried some things to weaponize Porzingis’ size, like the aforementioned play where he catches the ball off of a pindown screen into a drive. He has also explored driving to the rim, and while he’s no Karl-Anthony Towns, his size becomes a great asset once he gets to the rim:
This concept extends beyond his drives. There are times this season when the Wizards have posted up Porzingis at the rim instead of the elbow, both after a switch and not, and let him go to work down low instead of making him try to get there on his own. As would be expected, it’s not easy to stop:
Finding ways for Porzingis to get touches at the rim is important for the Wizards. Per the NBA’s tracking data, 97.1% of KP’s 2-point shots this season have come after 2 dribbles or fewer this season, which gives credence to the idea that Porzingis is going to shoot the ball where he catches it. KP has always been one of the lowest-volume shooters at the rim among big men in the NBA, so it won’t be easy, but it sure would help.
Another possible way for Porzingis to use his size is on the offensive boards. The issue there is, you guessed it, he’s been a terrible offensive rebounder for his entire career. It’s encouraging that he’s had a streak of huge offensive rebounding games early this season, but it’s important to note that they were against two of the worst defensive rebounding teams in the league in Detroit and Boston and a Philadelphia team missing Joel Embiid, and that upon examination of the film, many of them were uncontested. I would keep an eye on that trend as the season continues; this could potentially be the easiest way for KP to leverage his size to his advantage.
For years, the biggest criticism thrown at Kristaps Porzingis was his defense, or lack thereof. He was never a great defensive rebounder, but as his agility and mobility faded away, the other aspects of his defense that stood out faded with them. Interestingly enough, the Wizards have done a pretty good job surrounding him with players that, while maybe not form a great defensive unit, cover up for Porzingis’ shortcomings just enough to get by.
The most important way in which that’s happened is by surrounding him with rebounders. According to Cleaning the Glass, the Wizards have 4 players who rank in the 67th percentile or better for their positions in defensive rebounding, and 3 are starters with KP, who ranks in the 51st percentile among bigs. Included within those 3 are Kyle Kuzma and Deni Avdija, two very good rebounders who both have a higher defensive rebounding percentage than Porzingis himself, ranking in the 90th and 100th percentiles among forwards and wings, respectively. As a result, the Wizards have been a really strong defensive rebounding team around Porzingis (4th in the NBA, per CTG), who himself is not a great defensive rebounder.
As one would expect, the Wizards mostly employ Porzingis in a drop, where he’s certainly looked better than he showed for much of his time in Dallas. Part of that could be due to him having now gone over two years without a major leg injury, but it’s encouraging regardless of the reason.
Isaiah Stewart scores here, but Porzingis is doing all you can realistically ask, handling the drop duties well and guarding multiple actions. Since his defensive shortcomings (especially as a rebounder) can sometimes be attributed to a lack of effort as much as anything else, making plays like that encouraging.
Occasionally, he is asked to step out to the perimeter to defend guards, which you would expect to go bad. And while he often does get driven past by virtue of the footspeed deficit, there has been a consistent effort with which he follows the play through:
Washington’s defense as a team has looked jumbled at times this season, with a lot of miscommunications and lapses across the roster; Porzingis has had his share as well. However, they’ve largely survived the KP minutes defensively, which is a testament to both the players Washington has surrounded him with, and the effort with which he’s put forth so far.
This section is shorter than the others because it’s a good example of how to handle a contradiction like the ones Porzingis’ game is rife with. In surrounding Porzingis with players who mitigate one of his greatest defensive weaknesses, it’s allowed him to focus on raising his level of intensity and effort doing the things the team needs. The third Kristaps Porzingis contradiction — that the player who can almost touch the rim standing up grabs fewer rebounds than both of his frontcourt mates — is weirdly enough, a good one.
Everything about Kristaps Porzingis is a paradox.
At 7’3”, he can probably shoot better than everyone else on the floor at a given time, but couldn’t post up a single one of them if he tried. His offensive dynamism is almost unparalleled in the history of basketball for someone his size, but his inability to screen renders it useless as a primary driver of quality offense. He can’t be stopped when posted up at the rim, but would rather set up at the elbow for a fadeaway jump shot.
Even his former nickname is a paradox. The skills that led to his crowning as The Unicorn have been carbon copied across the league to the point where it’s long since been retired, and yet there is unequivocally no player like him. Everything about him on the court exists in contradiction to something else, and it makes for an absolutely fascinating basketball experience.
Wes Unseld Jr. has to navigate all of that and try to put out a winning product. Revolving the offense more around Porzingis’ strengths while trying to work around his weaknesses will not be an easy task. Every one of his contradictions is connected in some way, as is the way of basketball.
You could start with one area of concern, and wind up talking about 3. What do you do with a player whose best locations to get the ball are either at the rim or behind the line, and he has no consistent way of getting to either with the ball in his hands? Usually, it’s a pick-and-roll/pop, but KP can’t screen, so you aren’t actually generating quality looks most of the time. But parking him in the dunker spot or behind the line all game is a waste of his midrange talents, and he’s your second most important offensive player, and you want him to feel involved. See?
The most amazing thing of all, though, is that through 7 games, it’s worked. In the face of all the contradictions, inefficiencies, and paradoxes that Kristaps Porzingis brings, it’s largely worked. The Wizards have not only survived his minutes defensively, but they’ve found ways to thrive on offense. This roster, in many ways, takes after Porzingis. They both take a ton of midrange jumpers, at the expense of shots at the rim. They hold opponents to good shooting numbers, but foul more than you’d like. They rarely get to the free throw line. On both ends of the floor, and for both better and worse, they assume his paradoxical game. Time will tell if it’s sustainable. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But neither does Kristaps Porzingis, and he’s found a way to make it work.