The early weeks of the NBA season are always the most obscuring. Young players can come in and look like full-blown stars only to disappear after a few games, coaches can seem to be on their way out right before they make a small tweak and get everything going, and stars can look like shells of themselves just to work themselves back into shape and carry their teams again. Trying to take anything that happens during that time with more than a grain of salt is a dicey proposition.
De’Aaron Fox’s breakout, however, seems to be anything but fleeting — almost every step he’s taken between Year 1 and Year 2 feels more or less sustainable.
I will admit, however, the degree to which Fox has looked better after a mere four months is kind of staggering. After posting a fine 1.8 assist-to-turnover ratio last season, he has lifted it all the way up to a sterling 2.38 so far this year while taking on a significantly larger role in the offense. His shooting is basically the same thing — although he’s taking two more shot attempts per game than last year, he’s hitting them 8.4 percent more this year. Becoming even slightly more efficient while using the ball more almost never happens, let alone the way Fox has. The best part is almost all of that improvement seems real.
His growth this year seems to be largely catalyzed by him naturally learning the ins-and-outs of the position. Unless something unforeseen happens, he’s probably not going to revert back to his old habits. Whereas last year he often fell into the trap of trying to do way too much with the ball and got burned by defenses, this year he seems to be letting the game come to him and making the simple reads.
It’s not often that you find young point guards, especially ones that fit Fox’s profile, that consistently make the right decisions and let the game come to them — and that should be super promising to Kings fans everywhere. Making the easy passes and learning how to not force things to happen may seem pretty easy, but it usually takes years for guards to learn. The most promising aspect of his growth, however, might be the leaps he’s made as a scorer from Year One to Year Two, especially around the rim.
He’s always been an above-average finisher but he’s taken it up to considerable new levels this year, raising his percentages up by 11.2 (!!) and making a case for one of the best finisher in the league. That number could end up dropping a little bit, but the things he’s added to his game to get there are almost certainly going to stay. He’s easily one of the more creative finishers around the NBA, consistently able to hit floaters from awkward angles and drain shots around the rim he probably shouldn’t be able to. Just watch how he knifes his way into the lane before stopping on a dime and hitting a wild teardrop over Rudy Gobert:
Or how he dives into the paint and makes a circus shot over Dewayne Dedmon:
The reason he can get such an edge on his defenders is arguably the fact that he’s becoming a threat to pull-up anywhere inside of 18 feet. He’s shooting 43 percent from the mid-range this year, up from 35 percent last season, and is good enough off the dribble from that range to be a threat. Obviously, getting a lot of points from the mid-range isn’t the best thing in the world but the threat of Fox draining a shot from out there is creating a lot of gravity for him off the dribble. Fox is already one of the fastest guys in the league, so forcing defenses to step up a little bit more when he’s working his way into the paint gives him just enough space to explode to the rim and make things happen.
For a small guard who can’t shoot from the perimeter, being able to wreak havoc from 15 feet out is absolutely crucial. If he can continue to consistently hit shots like that around the rim and put so much pressure on defenses, especially in the pick-and-roll, it’s going to open up the rest of the game for him and the Kings. Even if his efficiency tails off a little bit as the year goes along, he’s undoubtedly established himself as the point guard of the future in Sacramento.
Fox may never be a good shooter — or potentially an average one — but the advantage that his athleticism provides can almost entirely make up for it. There are probably only around three guys who can really keep up with him when he gets out into the open court, and wow, does he know it. Partially due to new rules, and partially because it’s just a young team, Fox is quickly becoming the motor behind the Kings’ hyper-fastbreak attack and everyone is excelling.
The Kings are playing with an insane 108.1 pace whenever he’s in, which would lead the NBA by a decent margin if extrapolated out for a full year. When you play like that for so much of every single game, you’re going to be able to wear teams out and steal games by merely outlasting them. It only gets harder for the competition when the leader of that attack is faster than anyone else on the court at any given time. That seems to be the Kings’ strategy this year — no one in the league has the speed to keep up with Fox in transition, let alone for a full game, so why not let him loose and try to wear the competition down?
That therein might be Fox’s most important asset for the Kings. Sacramento is clearly making a big effort this year to get out in transition — they’re second in the league in pace so far — and Fox is arguably the key to that attack. He has the special dexterity around the rim and elite open-court speed to be an absolute terror in the open floor and so far that’s exactly what he’s been. Look at this finish against the Milwaukee Bucks, where he turns on the jets, takes contact, and still manages to hit a ridiculous layup:
Or this play, where instead of trying to just blow by everyone, he slows it down a little bit and pushes the ball ahead to a streaking Iman Shumpert who hits a transition three:
No one really has an answer for him yet. Having a player who can be such a dimension-altering presence, no matter where it is, is obviously going to make you a lot more dynamic. There’s a reason the team scores 16.8 more points per 100 possessions when Fox is in the game versus when he’s out, which represents the third biggest differential among regular rotation players on the team. It’s no coincidence that the team essentially collapses when he needs to sit — and that makes sense. Fox is essentially the engine of their offense as one of the only guys on the team who can consistently create his own shots and bend the defense in any meaningful way.
It feels almost wrong to say — kind of like “Roger Goodell is doing a good job” — but it feels like the Sacramento Kings are using Fox the way he should be used. They’re giving him the freedom to orchestrate the offense in the half-court and letting him turn on the jets in transition — both of which are things that any organization in the league should do with young lottery guards. But we are talking about the Kings here.
How his game fits within the context of the team they seem to be establishing and the inherent limitations that his skill-set presents are questions that the team will need to figure out the answers to, but for now he’s a beacon of hope. And for an organization sorely missing it, that’s just fine.
