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3 specific areas Jalen Green must improve to fit with Devin Booker in Suns backcourt

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Jalen Green is key for the Phoenix Suns, so here are three areas he must improve to maximize his fit next to Devin Booker in the backcourt

Everyone knows that Devin Booker is the straw that stirs the Phoenix Suns‘ drink. Now that the Kevin Durant trade has returned him to the role of “undisputed No. 1 option” on offense, Book will be the driving force behind the Suns’ successes and failures this season. But no one is more important among Booker’s teammates than Jalen Green, and how he fits next to the face of the franchise will ultimately determine this group’s offensive punch.

Defensively, it’s hard to envision the Devin Booker-Jalen Green backcourt getting many stops, but at least they’re insulated with defensive-minded, long, athletic wings and bigs. But with so many young players and shooters with spotty track records, and with so few creators outside of Book, Green and Collin Gillespie, the Suns need their new arrival from Houston to have the best season of his career in order to make this backcourt pairing work.

Green is coming off a season where he averaged a team-high 21.0 points and 3.4 assists per game for a Houston Rockets squad that earned the 2-seed in the Western Conference. It’s unfair to categorize him as a bad player when he started all 82 games for a team that good, and last year he joined Anthony Edwards, Luka Doncic, Blake Griffin, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade as the only players in the last 25 years to reach career totals of 6,000 points, 1,300 rebounds and 1,000 assists through their first four NBA seasons.

Jalen Green is only 23 years old, and after admitting that it hurt being traded from his NBA home in Houston, he’s hungry to prove what he can do in Phoenix.

“Yeah, for sure,” Green said. “I mean, the hunger’s already there. I’ve made it to the playoffs already as it is. I may not have performed how I should have performed, but at the end of the day, the goal is to be in the playoffs every year. And I’ve got a taste of it now, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t have the goal to get back.”

The Suns will be hard-pressed to do so in the first year of their retool. But Green believes there are a lot of similarities between this young, athletic, defensive-minded team and the young, athletic, defensive-minded team he just left.

“[Booker]’s ready to do what we gotta do this year and he understands the situation we in right now,” Green said. “People don’t expect us to do anything. People don’t expect us to come out the West at all. So I think the situation we in is just like last year. They didn’t expect Houston to do none of that last year, so, what’s the difference?”

So how can Jalen Green and the Suns take the league by surprise? Here are three specific areas where he’ll need to improve in order to maximize his fit next to Booker.

1. Pair good decisions with downhill mentality

The point guard question is once again a dominant Suns storyline entering the new season, but as advantageous as it is to get Devin Booker off the ball, it shouldn’t even be a question: Point Book is the far better option.

Arizona Sports’ John Gambadoro reported the Suns view Jalen Green as their point guard, which means one of two things:

They rightly understand that Book will get worn down if he has to bring the ball up the court and will entrust that responsibility to the younger, more dynamic Green in order to help the Suns get into their sets quicker before then allowing Booker to be the primary creator in the half-court, meaning that Green will only be the “point guard” in name, or

They are badly mischaracterizing Jalen Green and what he’s actually good at.

In terms of “point guard” skills, it really isn’t a contest.

Jalen Green

If that graphic in’t enough, Booker was among the top-five primary ball-handlers in O-LEBRON last year, while Green had the worst assist percentage among all players who averaged at least 17 field goal attempts per game. Context is important, but for anyone wondering if Fred VanVleet’s presence was the reason Green didn’t get to facilitate as much, he was still third on the Rockets in assists during the stretches where VanVleet was out, and some of his advanced assist numbers didn’t improve in any meaningful way.

These facts and figures aren’t meant to cast Green in a negative light, but it’s not even remotely close in terms of which player is the better playmaker. People still complaining about “Point Book” aren’t paying attention to how he puts his teammates in advantageous positions, how much attention he draws with the ball in his hands, or how elite he is as an all-around playmaker, not just a scoring 2-guard or a passing point guard. Secondary assists and 3-point assists are great measures of all that, and Book led the league in both categories.

The difference for the upcoming season is Booker no longer has highly efficient scorers like Kevin Durant or Bradley Beal to capitalize on the advantages he creates. Book, who was double-teamed fifth-most in the NBA last year, posted the third-highest assist percentage among those top 10 players. Unfortunately, he also posted the lowest shot percentage by far, and that can’t be the case again now that KD and Beal have been replaced with Green, Dillon Brooks and a bunch of rookies and second-year players.

So with teams likely to double up on Booker, and with the Suns needing to find ways to make sure Booker doesn’t have to do everything on offense, they’ll need to put the ball in Jalen Green’s hands from time to time. His touches should come secondary to Booker’s in the half-court, but when they’re trying to get Booker off the ball or when Book’s off the floor, Green has to be a walking paint touch who can still make good decisions in those circumstances.

“We are two people who are gonna accept the double-team and be able to play off each other,” Green said. “So when you look at something like that, it’s like, we’re two people who know how to score the basketball. We’re two people who know how to attack the defense, and everyone’s gonna set up around us. So when we’re doing something like that, you gotta pick who you want to score tonight. And me and him both is gonna be a deadly scoring duo no matter what the situation is.”

We covered some of this in our in-depth Jalen Green breakdown, but it bears repeating: Green is lightning-quick with the ball in his hands, and his ability to generate paint touches with that type of downhill mentality will be crucial not only for Book, but for the Suns as a whole.

“Well, I think we’ll be really fast!” general manager Brian Gregory said. “You know what I mean? The game is played at a faster pace, and the ability to attack and get downhill is something he does exceptionally well.”

In fairness, this is another area where Jalen Green still needs improvement. Booker was actually a far more frequent driver, and he was a much more impactful facilitator on those drives:

Jalen Green

We already covered Green’s struggles with finishing at the rim, but he coupled that problem with occasional tunnel vision. Green may have ranked 14th in the league in total drives — a byproduct of playing all 82 games — but he was only 66th in assists on those drives, compared to 10th in turnovers. Among the top 50 players in drives last year, he ranked 48th in assist frequency.

Jalen Green is only 23, so there’s plenty of time for improvement. Houston didn’t have the best spacing, which doesn’t help a player who likes to get downhill. But the Suns don’t exactly have a plethora of proven shooters anymore either, and Green had a bad habit of dribbling into trouble, just trying to make something happen:

Granted, there were flashes of brilliance that the Suns must be clinging to if they’re envisioning Green as their “point guard.” Get him a dynamic touch heading downhill off a dribble handoff and let him dish once he attracts the help defense, and that’s one way he can either set up Mark Williams, Khaman Maluach, Oso Ighodaro, Nick Richards, Ryan Dunn or Rasheer Fleming for easy dump-offs, or create open kick-outs for shooters like Booker, Dillon Brooks, Grayson Allen or Royce O’Neale.

Dive further into the clip and watch how Green’s dynamic ball-handling can create some highlight dimes. He’s fond of one-handed zip passes in the pocket, and he likes to use that behind-the-back dribble or low-pushing crossover to split pick-and-roll defenders in the blink of an eye!

One can see the vision here, where Green is attacking confidently, quickly and with poise, hitting the open man after drawing the help defense.

Unfortunately, there were plenty of times where that downhill mentality came at a price. Whenever he felt the pressure of a double-team or a blitz out of the pick-and-roll, those one-handed zip passes got picked off, his decision-making grew a lot more suspect, and his jump passes got him in trouble.

Wade further into the clip and you’ll notice Green’s speed occasionally came at the cost of his handle, especially when he failed to thread the needle with a pocket pass or split the two pick-and-roll defenders with a live dribble:

Simply put, Booker is the far better facilitator and double-team operator. But he can’t run the show for all 48 minutes, and although Green won’t see as many double-teams next to Booker as he saw as the primary scoring option in Houston, he has to be cooler under pressure while also pairing his downhill aggression with better decision-making.

Green understands the value of getting to the rim, and he also knows it’s about adding the next layers onto that part of his game.

“I take a lot of pride in it,” Green said of getting downhill. “We take it to the rim, we can still add a lot more to the game, we can add the middy, we can add the 3, and I feel like I can get my 3 off at any point. So I gotta add the in-between game now.”

2. Cut down on inefficiency

The Suns are publicly high on Jalen Green and the type of scorer he could become.

“Jalen is an explosive scorer who has already shown impressive productivity across the board throughout his young career,” Brian Gregory said in a statement. “His athleticism and natural ability are off the charts. Jalen has already proven his commitment to putting in the work that excellence requires, and we believe that his approach to the game will allow him to further unlock his incredible upside here in Phoenix.”

Even if this is all just executive talk, there’s little question that Phoenix needs Green to relieve some of the scoring burden on Booker. When Green’s hot, he’s more than capable of doing so. Through four NBA seasons, he’s established himself as a career 20 points per game scorer. He’s recorded 30-plus points 51 times, and in his first playoff series, he put up a 38-point masterclass on 13-of-25 shooting in Game 2.

Unfortunately, he shot a combined 19-for-61 in the other six games of that series, and that’s sort of been the tale of his career from an efficiency standpoint: The highs are incredibly high, but the lows need to be much fewer and further between. After all, Green has shot 42.2 percent from the field for his career, and his 35.4 percent shooting from 3 last year was a career best.

The thing is, the Suns desperately need guys who can create shots for themselves and for others. The problem is, although Jalen Green is an elite shot creator, he’s a pretty inefficient shot maker:

Jalen Green

The green numbers are good! Being able to create your own shot in the best basketball league on planet earth is not a skill that many guys possess at this level!

But those red numbers in the “shot quality” and “shot-making” categories from The BBall Index paint the picture of a guy who had to create a lot of shots to keep Houston’s offense afloat…and struggled to actually make them.

From 3-point range, a whopping 392 of Green’s 661 3-point attempts last year were pull-up 3s…and he only shot 31.6 percent on those looks. There were only four players in the entire NBA who took more 3s after seven-plus dribbles than Jalen Green: James Harden, Anthony Edwards, Trae Young and Stephen Curry. Respectfully, Green should be nowhere near that vicinity again this season now that he’s next to Booker.

In fact, he should hopefully get more catch-and-shoot looks, which he made 40.9 percent of the time. That could go a long way in helping Green finally post a 3-point percentage that’s better than league-average.

As for his rim struggles, The BBall Index placed Green’s rim field goal percentage in the league’s 47th percentile. We covered some of his struggles there in our last breakdown, but if Green isn’t an effective playmaker on his drives and he can’t finish around the basket, then his downhill mentality (which already comes with a high turnover rate) becomes closer to an impediment than an asset.

But as Green mentioned himself, developing that in-between game between the rim and the 3-point line is the next step. And this might be the most difficult part, because as we’ve covered before, Green either needs to simply make more shots in the midrange, or stop taking such tough ones altogether.

Shot creation is a certifiable NBA skill, but Green posted the worst midrange field goal percentage among the top 50 players in attempts last season. He was among the worst isolation scorers in the league as well, ranking 50th in points per possession among 52 players who got a minimum of 250 iso plays. All this, despite ranking ninth in the league in midrange field goal attempts.

That’s just an untenable combination. The Rockets needed him to take on that burden. Phoenix will need him to simply be more efficient and capitalize on all the attention that Booker will command. Hopefully the Suns’ confidence in him is something he takes to heart.

“I felt the love off rip, and that’s a good feeling, bro,” Green said. “Especially in this basketball world, confidence is probably 95 percent of the game, and skill and everything comes after that. So just having the confidence behind them and them just feeding me that and just welcoming me with open arms is a good feeling. It only makes me play better and feel more comfortable, you know what I’m saying?”

3. Lean into more cutting

Ideally, Jalen Green feeling comfortable will translate to a more efficient player by capitalizing on more catch-and-shoot looks, cutting down on contested midrange misses and giving him more lanes to attack the basket. But a really easy way to tap into Green’s natural skill-set would be pairing his speed with Jordan Ott’s stated desire for cutting and player movement within the Suns’ offense.

“I mentioned it after the draft, we did not attack the rim very well last year,” Brian Gregory said. “It’s an area we have to get better at. You do it three specific ways: on the drive, on the cut, a big man getting the ball in the post area, which doesn’t happen all that often anymore. And then the effort way you do it is on the offensive glass. I think Jalen on those first two is gonna be really, really good.”

The Rockets liked to run a little bit of misdirection for Green as a cutter, where their guard passed the ball to a playmaking big at the elbow before clearing out to the other side of the court. Meanwhile, the other guys on that side ran some empty action as a distraction, completely clearing out one side of the court for the big to feed Green on a backdoor baseline cut:

Playing Green off the ball is a great way to capitalize on his speed here, and in any non-Booker minutes where Green is on the floor, Oso Ighodaro should be out there too. Green only ranked in the 55th percentile in cuts per 75 possessions last year, so there will have to be a concerted effort from both player and coach to get him more involved on this front, but that connection may already be taking place.

“Coach Ott is amazing,” Green said. “He’s already been sending me film. He’s already been breaking down the offense that we finna run, and just what he means for me. It’s gonna be a relationship that’s gonna be built over the years. So yeah, I know what he wants from me, and I know what he needs me to do, and that’s what we’re gonna do.”

Green believes the Suns understand what he can bring to the table, and the Suns know that Green’s pace is something they can tap into to help relieve the pressure on Booker. Ideally, with more movement, cutting and opportunities for downhill drives, Jalen Green and Devin Booker can become as good a fit as the Suns believe.

“I think there’s a speed factor that’s being played in the NBA right now,” Gregory said. “They’re both great with the ball. I think they can play off each other when they don’t have the ball. I think our style of play, playing at a faster pace with better movement is gonna open up the court for both of them.”