Agbaji’s Expanding Game

Agbaji attacking like this seemed unfathomable eight or nine months ago, but he has pushed his game to new places. (Francisco Kjolseth, The Salt Lake Tribune)

When Ochai Agbaji arrived at Kansas University in 2018, nobody had any clue he would become a Jayhawk legend. He was ranked as the 337th best prospect in the nation at the time he committed to KU, and hadn’t even been a consistent starter on his AAU team. The Jayhawks’ plan was to grab the local product and let him develop in practice during a redshirt year.

But then a funny thing happened: Agbaji got better. He started to show enough in practice that the coaches sensed he was ready. When injuries piled up in January 2019 (including, ironically, the wrist injury to eventual Jazz teammate Udoka Azubuike), KU’s Bill Self decided to lift Agbaji’s redshirt status and let the 18-year-old play. Four years later, he’d leave Kansas as a consensus All-American first team selection, the best player on an NCAA championship team, and a lottery selection in the NBA Draft.

Interestingly enough, his first pro season followed a similar pattern. While the Jazz didn’t literally redshirt him early in the 2022-23 season, he saw far more G League action by New Year’s (288 minutes) than he had logged for the big boy club (127). But just like four years earlier, Agbaji was quietly doing his work in the background, and a door was about to crack open.

In fact, Agbaji’s first season is basically a case study on steady progress and role experimentation. The first challenge for Utah’s coaching staff was to get him confident enough to play and impact games. But once that happened, they heaped more and more on the youngster’s plate to see what he could do with different types of opportunities, all the way through to summer league.

Now, he’s embarking on year two. But to truly understand the last 12 months of Agbaji’s basketball growth, it helps to zoom out a little and think of his rookie season in phases.

Phase 1: Don’t #&@% up

It sounds odd to say that the Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA Final Four was flying under the radar, but Agbaji really did.

The analysis of last summer’s Jazz-Cavs trade was so focused on draft assets that even eventual All-Star Lauri Markkanen was a bit of an afterthought in the coverage. Collin Sexton was the first incoming player listed in most national and local stories, but the real focus was on the three unprotected draft picks coming Utah’s way in the deal. So much so that Agbaji was a bit lost in the shuffle. He was also arriving to a team flush with guards, so despite his impressive senior season, he was rather inconspicuous heading into the season.

That remained the case when the actual basketball started. He played here and there — five games with 12+ minutes before Christmas — but he was timid about actually participating in the offense. He spent most possessions simply parked in the corner, and if the ball landed in his hands, he’d most often get rid of it right away. Through February 11, just after the Jazz remodeled their guard rotation in part to create more opportunities for Agbaji, his usage rate was a team-low¹ 10.6%.

Over the same span of the season, the average Agbaji “touch” lasted 1.43 seconds, per the NBA’s tracking cameras. That’s ridiculously low for a guard, and the only players who had the ball in their hands less on a per-touch basis were lob catching centers Walker Kessler and Azubuike. Simply put, Agbaji appeared to not want the basketball.

But little by little, even during those low-usage weeks in January and early February, something was starting to shift that would become the basis to pull the rookie guard out of his timidity:

He started to make shots.

Phase 2: Stationary shooter

At some point the Jazz got Agbaji — who was still pretty shy in overall terms — to trust himself to take open spot-up jumpers. After a rough start, the marked improvement in shooting outcomes that started in the new year became the foundation for everything that was to follow.

Agbaji catch-and-shoot 3s

That 43% mark from the middle part of the season was the result of a bunch of behind-the-scenes work, but it enabled Abgaji to start playing less afraid. Being able to can open jumpers off the catch gave him a way to participate in the offense, something for the coaches to build on.

And to be honest, he was never a completely stationary shooter, because he’s always been good at instinctually gliding to the pass so he can catch it right in his shooting pocket, even in college. It’s a simple thing, but it’s the kind of instinct that show you that the instincts and inner radar of a movement shooter are there. 

So why did his percentage drop again after that big jump? Probably some good old-fashioned variance, but the Jazz were also feeding him a very different type of shot diet by the spring. A lot of dribble handoffs and simple flare screens technically get logged as catch-and-shoot attempts, but the reality is that there are more difficult shots than a stationary dude waiting with his feet set: 

Watch how he’s in motion the whole time (including when he catches) but how he adjusts his body to shoot on balance. Again, these are more advanced than an *actual* catch-and-shoot, and not every stationary shooter has this in the arsenal.

All that was a precursor to what was coming next: the Jazz were about to experiment with the rookie guard as a movement shooter.

Phase 3: Unleashing movement

“Movement shooter” is a very different NBA role than just setting your feet in the corner and waiting for the pass. Not every player is equipped, but the Jazz were less worried about competitive outcomes by the final 20 games anyway, so they decided to see what Agbaji could do as a shooter and scorer on the move.

It started with simple stuff, like running him off of pindowns or having him relocate away from the help defender.

Then came more complex, layered actions designed to free Agbaji. This is like the type of stuff teams have run for Danny Green for years, or what the Jazz used to run for Kyle Korver.

He fakes the backpick, so the defender has to make sure he’s not going to give up a dunk. But while the defender is frozen making that evaluation, Agbaji goes in motion again, darting behind a flare screen and catching and shooting on the move.

Again, not all guys who are catch-and-shoot threats can make that type of shot. The Jazz decided to see if it was something Agbaji could feasibly develop, and the results — from a first-year player who just a month or two earlier had appeared hesitant to touch the ball — was impressive.

So soon, they were scripting crazy, multiple-decoy actions like this to get him looks.

That’s like a JJ Redick-level amount of off-ball movement to generate a shot. Redick might be the ultimate movement shooter of the past several years, with the Lob City-era Clips running a ton of “floppy” sets or fake screens involving the sharpshooter because of how much it loosened up the floor for others. The Jazz unleash something similar here: first he’s the flare guy in a horns setup, then he cuts away from a fake screen, heads to the paint and ultimately veers behind another flare screen… and nobody’s within 20 feet of him on the catch.

Eventually, all that movement also helped him figure out how to exploit gaps on the inside, too. Being in constant motion teaches you where the seams are and when guys are likely to fall asleep while they read the core action. Agbaji started to get super opportunistic about attacking once he had that figured out.

Because he has good body control, he never really looks off balance, even when he’s lunging toward the hoop on a backcut. Once he had enough of those types of reads go well, he started to trust himself to improvise a little once he caught the basketball on a cut:

We’re way past the catch-and-shoot specialist ilk of Bruce Bowen or Shane Battier there. Frankly, even Redick wasn’t pirouetting into the lane off the catch all too often. That’s the look of a player whose success at mastering movement as a shooter just started to open up the court for him. 

Put that all together — the spatial understanding, the sneakiness, the body control and the balanced shot through movement — and you start to see a guy who’s getting a sense for how to just go eat.

OK, that’s just fun. It’s also a completely different player than the one we saw tentatively standing in the corner last fall.

When people talk about how Agbaji’s final quarter of the season was impressive, this is what they mean. It wasn’t just that he was getting the ball more or shooting better; it’s that the Jazz were unleashing him in a new and different way, and he was responding with a really encouraging combination of skill and physical attributes.

A movement shooter is an extremely valuable NBA commodity.

Phase 4: It’s July, let’s get weird

Then the summer came, and the next logical thing to try was just putting the ball in his hands in the first place.

There’s a popular sentiment that second-year NBA players should dominate in Summer League play. And frankly, that’s probably true in cases where a young fella shows up and is essentially asked to do the same things they did over an 82-game rookie season, but now against lesser competition. In that situation, there should be a comfort level that allows second- year guys to look pretty dominant.

The Jazz could have done that with Agbaji, but they chose instead to continue the experimentation that made the latter part of his rookie season so interesting. Across Agbaji’s five Summer League outings, you saw far more of this type of stuff, with Agbaji simply creating off the bounce:

The results were mixed, as they probably should be when someone is trying something entirely new. His shooting splits across three games in Salt Lake and two more in Las Vegas were 39-39-60. But the message here is that it’s not all that worrisome: Agbaji was fully in the lab for those games. It’s a credit to him and the Jazz that they decided to be growth-minded about his summer role instead of simply letting him show up and stay safely inside his comfort zone.

So… what is Agbaji?

In a profile on Agbaji from last summer, The Athletic told a story I love about how he learned to avoid being complacent. Between his junior and senior seasons, as he contemplated entering the 2021 draft, Agbaji hired trainer Phil Beckner, the same skills coach who has worked with Damian Lillard for years. Two weeks after the (then) Blazers superstar had dropped 55 on the Nuggets in a playoff game, Agbaji got to be present while Beckner peppered Dame with feedback about his tactics and form. One of the game’s great modern scorers was still obsessed with how he could get a little bit better.

The experience stuck with Agbaji. Maybe that’s why he didn’t get satisfied when his corner spot-ups came around, or when he started to score on the move more, or why he didn’t show up to summer camp hoping to simply remain comfortable.

“It just put a lot of things in perspective as far as never being complacent,” Agbaji said of watching Lillard continue to hone his craft.

So he’s not a finished product. It feels like every couple of months in his pro career, we’ve seen a slightly different version of Agbaji. Maybe some of the on-ball stuff from summer league was pure experimentation, but even just the movement shooting element we saw during the season (if it holds up) already blows by the Bowen/Battier archetype. Another popular comp is Green, who had his movement shooting ability fully weaponized by five different teams, three of which won a ring with Green in the fold. Of the Green-Redick-Korver trio, Green had the most functional athleticism in his prime, but Agbaji has some unique tools even among this grouping.

“He hauls ass in transition, and he can stop on a dime and be on balance,” Self said in that Athletic piece. “He’s a very graceful player. He’s athletic obviously, but he’s almost added an element of a balance and gracefulness to his game.”

(Of course, we haven’t even addressed his defensive mobility and instincts, another set of attributes that separate him from the Korvers and Redicks if he gets even, say, 70% of the way to his defensive ceiling.)

Another name that surfaced after summer league as an Agbaji comp was Norm Powell, a catch-and-shoot guy who is also capable of scoring with the ball in his hands. Powell topped out as a 19-ppg scorer, and he’s been a consistently efficient possession user (.592 TS%) and a plus defender. He’s not quite the movement shooter that the other three are/were, but maybe there’s a blend in there that makes sense for the Kansas product.

None of these names we’re comparing him to are franchise players or untouchable assets, yet we’ve heard the Jazz are pretty insistent on keeping him out of any trade negotiations. That makes tons of sense; there’s no reason to rush to put a ceiling on him at 23 years old. He’s a player archetype that every team could use, and he’s still clearly evolving.

Phase 5: ???

The Jazz still have an abundance of ball handling guards, so it’s not likely that Agbaji goes deeper down the rabbit hole of managin possessions, at least in the short term.

But we’ll start to see soon what Will Hardy has in store for him next. Already in the preseason, we’ve seen Utah run him off screens and challenge him to keep growing as a movement shooter.

Whatever’s next for Agbaji, it feels safe to say that he and the Jazz will keep exploring new ways for him to impact games.