Jalen Smith keeps winning in spot as back-up five (Patreon)

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By: Caitlin Cooper I @C2_Cooper  

It was like watching one of those Planet Earth montages that depicts the miracle of living things. In a single possession, multiple players for the Pacers demonstrated an area of rapid growth all at once, as if time-lapsed flowers were suddenly shooting up from the hardwood beneath them. Andrew Nembhard triggered the offense with his signature skip-step hesitation, allowing him to play with a change of pace, before quickly swinging the ball to Jalen Smith for a hand-off with Buddy Hield. When the defense switched that action, Smith dove to the block against the smaller defender, with Bennedict Mathurin feeding the post from the wing. Once the opposition sent help to protect against the mismatch, Smith played inside-out, locating the open player on the arc, as the secondary assist for the extra pass from Nembhard to Nesmith. In the end, Nesmith used a shot fake to get all the way to the rim, only after all five players had touched the ball.

To put that sequence into context: Nembhard wasn't the back-up point guard last season, Hield wasn't playing with the bench, Nesmith averaged the fewest dribbles per touch of any non-big on the roster, Mathurin would typically only move the ball as a last resort, and Smith, according to Second Spectrum, logged exactly six passes out of the post, with most occurring as a result of getting stonewalled -- not as a function of being doubled. To be fair, some of the urgency from Utah, as far as immediately sending help against the mismatch, might've been residual from how Myles Turner started the game, scoring nine points in the first seven minutes as a product of going to work around the rim in the absence of Walker Kessler, but Smith's advents in this contest went beyond just that possession, while also going beyond just this contest.

He's only attempted 46 shots in his role as a reserve, but Smith's effective field-goal percentage of 80.4 percent on low volume currently ranks second among all players, and he isn't just feasting on putbacks and dunks. He's also gone 8-of-12 from three, which accounts for a quarter of his shot distribution. That's quite the turnaround from last season, when he posted the worst conversion rate on catch-and-shoot threes (27.7 percent) among the 169 players with at least 150 attempts. 

There will likely be some regression to the mean. Remember, after knocking down 46.4 percent of his threes over his first seven games after being traded from Phoenix, he shot 32.7 percent the rest of the way and then saw an steeper decline last season (28.2%), when he started out the year masquerading as a starting power forward. In fact, this was the scene at the end of last November.

It looks like zone, but it isn't zone. During Indiana's seven-game, west coast road trip, a whole string of opponents started cross-matching their centers onto Smith and switching against Turner, with the opposing five-man sinking into the paint. Put simply, teams were willing to let Smith beat them in order to disrupt the flow of the offense, which is why Aaron Nesmith was soon after inserted into the starting lineup as a makeshift four.

For now, though, with Smith coming in hot from three, there's been more of a reaction to him as a shooter. Just look at what happened against the Hornets. Some of the credit here goes to Tyrese Haliburton's eye manipulation (i.e. jump passes are good now!), but there were two possessions where the weak-side defender actually fully rotated to Smith out of the pick-and-pop. When Buddy Hield is the next nearest player to the action, this is basically a cheat code. 

Not every team is going to be that overeager, and Smith isn't going to lead the league in three-point percentage forever (most likely), but at least he's been more resolute. Last season, when he would see a stunt from the weak-side, he had a tendency to buffer when making shoot-or-drive decisions, appearing hesitant to let the ball fly.

Meanwhile, he's found other ways to leave his stamp on the game that aren't only limited to whether he pulls the trigger from deep. The player whose nickname is Stix isn't so stick-like anymore. He's noticeably stronger, and he's actually using that strength, not just possessing it. 

For example, look at how he transforms into a brick wall, sprinting into a seal screen for Bruce Brown under the basket, before yanking his arms away from the masses and immediately positioning himself to play clean-up around the rim for Bennedict Mathurin. 

"It was more of an experimental thing," Smith said at Media Day, when discussing the added muscle. "(We) just wanted to see how much my body could handle and if I could still put out the same performance at that weight."

By that standard, it seems like the "experiment" may have even exceeded his expectations, because he hasn't been putting out the same performance; he's added to his frame while also adding to his game -- testing his limits while playing with more force. With Utah playing five-out, he was switching out on ball-screens at the five. That much isn't different than when he first came over to the Pacers. With so much roster turnover, the team pivoted primarily to switching at the end of that season as the easier scheme to implement off-the-cuff. Of course, the double-edged sword of switching is that when the big switches out, they are oftentimes no longer in the vicinity of the basket to protect the rim or rebound. That is, unless they purpose themselves to be in that vicinity, even if it means leaving their rebounding area, like so.

Once he pursued the glass, he wasn't just advancing the ball with outlet passes, either. He got frisky in this game, bringing the ball up himself in fast-break situations or when the point guard was being pressured. With Haliburton as the engine of the team's transition attack, Smith doesn't have much reason to bloom as a grab-and-go big (i.e. he has more utility catching advance passes as a rim runner); however, when he's out there with the bench, he showed that he could stay under control and immediately flow into a hand-off or deliver a pass without barreling into a charge, which could be useful every now and again against full-court pests.

Of course, what he does in transition as a defender is clearly a lot more important that what he does sporadically as a ball-handler. Here, rather than bringing the ball up the floor, he stops the ball, using a cross-over step to stay in front of Collison Sexton on the initial push before leveling off the live-wire guard yet again on the re-attack.

Smith isn't always that mobile. If the screener sprints, he likely won't arrive with them at the point of the screen, as was the case on this possession when Nick Richards generated separation, catching Smith on his heels before LaMelo Ball went a step further in splitting through the coverage.

Additionally, despite his overall improvements, Smith can also still have some trouble hanging onto and squeezing difficult passes. And yet, he finished with 16 points, 11 rebounds, and two steals as one of six double-figure scorers in the win over Utah, in which Haliburton and Hield combined to shoot 3-of-18 from deep. Smith didn't make a three in that particular game, but his play with the second unit and Mathurin mixed in further demonstrated why he won the back-up center spot when at times last season it didn't seem as though there would be any winners -- let alone a clear and obvious one. He won't keep hitting fadeaway jump-shots out of the post like he did against the Spurs, and his individual defense, not unlike that of the team as a whole, still has some holes, but he's doing things he hasn't done before that make it seem as though what led to him no longer be the starter last season won't prevent him from remaining as the back-up this season. 

And that says a lot. Daniel Theis, at age 31, may not fit the timeline of the team, but he's a reliable big who entered the season healthy fresh off of winning a gold medal, and Smith earned playing in front of him. Likewise, he's also edged out the center who the Pacers drafted, potentially pricing himself out of his player option when Isaiah Jackson is already under contract for next season. 

To that point, whether Smith will continue to be the back-up center a year from now remains to be seen. In the present, though, with the goal for the Pacers being to win games, he's anchoring a lineup that banded together to do just that, shooting up metaphorically like time-lapsed flowers, in a way that's very much deserving of figurative flowers -- especially on a night that saw Haliburton never fully take hold as a scorer against what was some exaggerated perimeter coverage, requiring the rapid bursts of growth from others that so rarely carried the day last season, much less flourished in his stead.