In last week’s post about Rudy Gobert crashing what we might consider the core of the future Utah Jazz, I mentioned in passing the center’s passing. He has started to show some impressive court vision and what his coach calls “obvious unselfishness.”
On both a per-minute and per-possession basis, he leads all of Utah’s rotation bigs1, and the fact that he’s out-assisting Trevor Booker and Enes Kanter is meaningful, since it’s their minutes he seems to be threatening to cut into.
More importantly, it’s the types of assists and good vision he’s showing that get people excited, both within Utah’s fan base and among national guys2 keeping tabs on the Jazz.
In last week’s post, I promised that I’d put together all of Gobert’s now 42 assists on the season for your viewing pleasure. And I keep my promises.
As I put this together, I realized there are really three types of assists that account for most of The Giving Tree’s3 generosity, plus a catch-all category at the end:
Enjoy!
And if you don’t think coach Quin Snyder is deliberate about having his young guys master one thing before moving onto another, check out this graph that shows how Rudy’s assists are distributed across those categories. Early on, he did one thing really well on the passing front: the hand-off + pick. The regular pocket passes and kick-outs have only started to make up a large portion of his passing over the course of the last 15 games. He’s developing into a versatile passer on the fly, which is impressive.
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