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Can Cole Swider get a move on with the Pacers?
🕑 Added 2024-08-06 12:30:02 +0000 UTCOn how the 25-year-old sharpshooter stacks up and compares as a movement shooter
By: Caitlin Cooper I @C2_Cooper
Turns out, despite technically having 15 players on standard contracts, the Pacers weren't quite done making roster moves. According to The Athletic's Shams Charania, sharpshooter Cole Swider has agreed to a one-year, non-guaranteed contract with the Pacers. Given that Kendall Brown is currently on a non-guaranteed contract, this seems to indicate that Swider will be in competition for the team's final roster spot, along with unsigned draft pick Enrique Freeman, restricted free agent Oscar Tshiebwe, who was on a two-way deal last season, and whoever the team signs to Exhibit-10 deals, which (without further specifics) could potentially include Swider along with Josiah-Jordan James and Keisei Tominaga. In that event, Swider would come to camp, battle for a spot, and receive a bonus with a chance to eventually be converted to a two-way contract if he's cut and joins the Mad Ants, assuming the Pacers obtained his G League rights.
According to the Miami Herald's Barry Jackson, the Heat didn't pursue Swider with a standard deal and knew he wanted a standard deal, which would suggest this is, in fact, a standard deal.
Either way, there's potential for Swider, who has impressed with his long-range marksmanship, to stick with the Pacers in some capacity, which means there's reason to evaluate whether his top strength meshes with the strengths of the team.
As such, here's a look at how Swider stacks up to the rest of the roster, with the chart below charting stationary catch-and-shoot effective field goal percentage against movement effective field goal percentage for all of the Pacers who attempted at least 50 catch-and-shoot threes last season, including the playoffs, courtesy of Second Spectrum.
It's important to note that these are strictly catch-and-shoot threes -- which means no self-created attempts, following even one-dribble are included. Furthermore, "standstill" is tracked as a shot that occurs with a stationary player shooting the ball directly after receiving a pass, whereas "movement" includes those when the player is either moving toward his outside hand and shooting directly after receiving the pass or relocating without necessarily moving left or right. That said, a few things stand out.
Notably, Tyrese Haliburton was the best movement shooter of the bunch, posting an effective field-goal percentage of 73.8 percent on the second-highest volume of attempts (65), trailing only Aaron Nesmith (121). Otherwise, Andrew Nembhard was the only other player joining Haliburton at or over 65 percent, and Nembhard did so on incredibly low volume, tallying only 30 attempts -- which was the fewest among the players listed. After Buddy Hield was traded, that's partially why, in addition to recovering from injury, seeing more aggressive coverages, and getting acquainted with Pascal Siakam, Haliburton's responsibilities changed. As the best movement shooter in the starting lineup, he was running off screens, setting screens, and sliding along the arc more often while concurrently manipulating the pick-and-roll as the ball-handler less often.
Granted, as was demonstrated throughout the playoffs, there's certainly value in the fact that Nembhard can run offense when Haliburton gets face-guarded, and Nembhard made progress as a shooter just as Haliburton made progress as a screener, but the team could still arguably use a dynamic movement shooter, post-Buddy, who can provide Haliburton with some relief -- both from plugging into those actions as well as with regard to potentially generating separation for him on the perimeter against switches with blur/ghost screens. In theory, that's what role Doug McDermott would've played, but not all movement shooters are created equal. In 28 combined regular-season and postseason games, McDermott hoisted more movement threes (36) than Mathurin (34) and Nembhard (30); and yet, he posted the worst effective field-goal percentage among the entire group of players, at just 37.5 percent. To be fair, that's still a very small sample size, and he missed a stretch of 10 games due to a strained right calf, but there was still reason to think that he wasn't going to accentuate the team's best player, or his immediate back-up, regardless.
During the 2020-21 season, when Doug McDermott last played for the Indiana Pacers, he only recorded 19.8 percent of his usage coming off screens moving to his left, which includes curling for twos. Back then, the overwhelming majority of McDermott's plays started with him in the left corner, either feathering the brakes around staggered pindowns or rising and firing out of hand-offs as part of the wavelength he shared with lefty big man and fulcrum Domantas Sabonis, who would naturally create space for McDermott with contact by dribbling to that spot on the floor with his strong hand. Put simply, they complemented each other's comfort zones and finished the season as the No. 1 assist combo on the Pacers.
In the reverse, the same was oftentimes the case over the last two-and-a-half seasons for Buddy Hield and Tyrese Haliburton. Unlike McDermott, Hield more typically moves to his left as a shooter, which complements Haliburton's right-hand dominance. Think of it this way: If Hield is darting around screens under the basket and sprints to the right side of the floor, he can blur to his left in front of Haliburton, opening a gap for a driving angle, or he can toy with a fake hand-off and put the ball on the deck with his left for one of his lefty reach-outs or a push-shot. By comparison, those same plays didn't often result in shots for McDermott, and the effect isn't the same for Haliburton or McConnell if McDermott comes up out of his preferred left corner to set a screen. After all, just as Haliburton is stronger finishing with his right, McConnell also prefers to attack baseline and Nash under the basket to his right, as well. Tellingly, McDermott ended up moving left on 42.9 percent of his usage coming off screens -- which was his highest frequency in that direction since his 2016-17 season, at 51 percent.
Needless to say, for a player who gets targeted defensively and generally requires help from the defenders behind him to load up in the gaps to try and slow down any driving attacks, McDermott's best skill wasn't the best match for the team -- especially when considering that Ben Sheppard, while not yet proficient as a dynamic (let alone standstill) shooter, tends to move in the same direction as Hield without the same defensive complications as McDermott or Hield.
So, what does this mean for Cole Swider?
By the numbers, he would've joined Haliburton and Nembhard as the the only players to notch an effective field-goal percentage over 60 percent on movement threes, but his volume of shots for the Heat doesn't even qualify him to be on that chart. In total, he only hoisted 15 movement threes and eight stationary threes with Miami, which obviously isn't enough data to draw any conclusions from. In the G League though, he shot 71-of-150 on catch-and-shoot threes overall (47.3%). After hand-tracking those attempts, he went 52-of-100 on standstill threes (52%) and 19-of-50 on movement threes (38 percent), which means over 60 percent came with him stationary on the catch. When looking only at his usage coming off screens, which (again) includes two-point shots as well, he moved to his left on 48.3 percent of his possessions, but he only shot 2-of-10 from three out of those actions. Meanwhile, he also didn't rack up many attempts as the screener, going just 6-of-10 after popping behind the arc or slipping out to the perimeter.
In that regard, this is the money shot when it comes to fitting in with the Pacers, as the bench typically closes quarters with the best movement shooter on the floor approaching to screen for the ball from the right block and leaking out to the left wing in order to open a gap for McConnell to drive into. Plus, the ability to slip when moving in this direction would also allow Haliburton to attack moving downhill with his right.
Likewise, for a team that leads the league in percentage of shots taken as early threes between 22 and 18 seconds on the shot-clock, another critical shot will be his ability to catch-and-shoot at a full sprint in transition, especially if he can evade closeouts with a lateral dribble.
Remember, without straying too far from the overall point of assessing whether Swider will be able to get a move on with the Pacers as a movement shooter, that was an area that affected Nesmith during the playoffs, as he shot just 1-of-7 on one-dribble threes and struggled to regain his rhythm when forced to generate a new attempt. In 17 regular-season games with Miami, Swider didn't fare any better, going just 1-of-6.
Of course, if Swider is competing for the final roster spot, it's probably fair to ask whether he would even play, let alone in minutes with Haliburton. Still, there were spots during the playoffs when McDermott got inserted for no other reason than to counter Milwaukee's zone at the end of a quarter or to play the role of brush screener and potentially be a second option out of the "football" style play designed by Jenny Boucek. Put simply, as a potential end-of-the-rotation player, there could be a role for him in special situations, even if there likely wouldn't be a role for him in all situations. As an archetype, that's where he would have an edge over Kendall Brown, who went 3-of-17 on jump-shots in Vegas after shooting 26.4 percent from three on 4.0 attempts per game in the G League .
As was pointed out in my analysis of the candidates for two-way contracts, the only role players on Finals rosters over the last five seasons who have shot below 30 percent from three while attempting fewer than 4.0 threes per 36 minutes are Maxi Kleber, who was ramping up from injury, and Derrick Jones Jr., who was ignored with aplomb by the Celtics above the break and is now on a different team. Admittedly, the Pacers aren't exactly primed to make a finals run with either Brown or Swider in the lineup, but that's also sort of the point in the long-term. For the most part, Brown's archetype -- as a non-shooting, athletic wing -- doesn't tend to exist deep into the playoffs, as teams are generally more apt to hide weak-links who provide spacing and could be targeted on defense than they are to work around defense-first or defense-only players who get ignored on offense -- especially if the defense isn't extraordinarily special.
Overall, Swider's specialty might not be an exact fit for the specialized needs of the Pacers; however, depending upon how he performs at training camp, he might still give himself a chance to move on with them as his new team, just by virtue of having a singular-defining trait, regardless of the specific way in which, as a shooter, he gets a move on.
Comments
Jord
Swider-man!
