This education under fire is just what Devonte Graham needs, as loss to Nuggets showed
Thursday wasn’t Devonte Graham’s best game this season, nor his most entertaining one.
I’d argue it was his smartest one.
He scored 24 points off 15 shots from the field. He got to the foul line five times. He totaled seven assists. He was the best player on a Charlotte Hornets team that pushed the Denver Nuggets throughout a 114-112 loss.
Graham had a spectacular first two months this season, climaxed by a 40-point game in Brooklyn on Dec. 11 in which he made seven 3-pointers.
From that game on, it was apparent opposing teams were intent on keeping him from beating them outside the 3-point line. Graham constantly hears, “Run him off! Run him off!” from defenders, as in push him inside 3-point range, away from his sweet spot.
Graham reached 200 3s made Thursday, one of just four players in Hornets history to do so in a single season. However, it’s everything else he did — the 16-foot driving floater he made to end the first quarter, or the stutter-step drive to draw a shooting foul from Denver’s Jamal Murray, or the various pocket passes to center Cody Zeller — that defined his improvement.
Graham was in desperate need of a Plan B. This is standard experience for an emerging NBA star: Defenses absorb the nature of your strength and dissect it. You either evolve or hit your pro limitations.
“If there are two people on me, then that means somebody else is open,” Graham said. “So I’ve got to do my job and find whoever that is, whether it’s skipping it or finding the big in the pocket. A lot of times those guys — (Cody Zeller or Willy Hernangomez) — will be open. Just let them make the plays from there.”
Respect
In the NBA, respect is paid when teams worry about you first. Hornets veteran Nic Batum said what Graham is experiencing reminds him of what Damian Lillard felt as a Portland Trail Blazers rookie.
That was the 2012-13 season, Batum’s fifth in Portland. Lillard had such immediate impact as a rookie (averaging 19 points and 6 1/2 assists) that teams went to extremes to contain him. That taught Lillard to be more diverse, as it eventually should for Graham.
“He has all the stuff — he’s already great at those pocket passes,” Batum said. “He just needs to figure how to use them.”
Move/counter-move
Graham has played the eighth-most minutes in the NBA this season, 2,097 and counting. Grueling as averaging 35 minutes has been, it’s a fantastic learning experience for a second-season player who mostly watched as a rookie behind point guards Kemba Walker and Tony Parker.
“I’ve got to find another way to be aggressive and score,” Graham said of the move/counter-move progression between him and defenses. “Just make them respect that I will shoot the mid(-range jump shot) or I will shoot the floater.
“A lot of teams were just baiting me earlier in the year to go in and shoot that floater. Now, I’m just trying to be more comfortable doing it.”
That determination from opponents to slow down Graham isn’t just what Hornets coach James Borrego expected, it’s what he welcomed: An education under fire to make Graham a more complete NBA player.
“It can be frustrating for a young guy not to get your (preferred) shot off so much,” Borrego said. “But he’s playing the way we need him to, no matter what defenses are throwing at him.”
