Giannis Antetokounmpo, Aaron Gordon, and the dynamics of potential

Josh Smith is currently without an NBA contract. At this moment in time, he is mostly known for buffoonish three-point shooting, inconsistent defensive effort, and what often looks like the purposeful disengagement from basketball games and their basic elements. Things like, you know, boxing out an opponent, passing the ball to a teammate, moving your body from one end of the court to the other with some sense of urgency. That Smith has come to be perceived as a useless basketball player is somewhat remarkable, considering how good he was at his not-so-distant peak.

Although, I suppose, it all becomes less confusing when you consider the space between how good he was and how good he could have been.

As a draft prospect, Josh Smith’s most striking attribute was potential. He was an elite athlete, not just in the run and jump sense, but with size and strength to match. Drafted directly out of high school in 2004, he was listed as a small forward, probably because that was the position his body seemed made for. There was really nothing in his unformed and developing game that dictated a position, he was just a mass of raw basketball material waiting to be shaped.

It turns out that shape was of a rangy power forward, a terror in transition, a delightfully skilled passer from the elbows, and a defender capable of adapting to nearly any challenge. He continued to dabble in the world of wings and other perimeter players but those dalliances produced disaster as often as meaningful production. After five consecutive playoff appearances, Smith’s career unraveled when he left the Atlanta Hawks. Nearly a decade removed from his rookie season, he was asked to dip back into that well of potential and remake himself as something new.

*****

The young basketball player defined by limitless potential is the rarest of NBA treasures, not limitless potential as in the sense of an unimaginably high ceiling, but those players with the malleable physical traits to be worked into any form on a basketball court. Josh Smith was a striking example, but he was neither the first nor the last. Over the past few seasons, Aaron Gordon and Giannis Antetokounmpo may be the best exemplars of this player type. Both were selected high in the draft and both represented, more than anything else, intangible possibility.

At the chrysalis stage in which he was drafted, Giannis could have theoretically played any position. Center and point guard required a little stretch of the imagination but the second half of last season proved just how expansive his realm of plausibility really is. As the door to the playoffs closed, definitively, on the Bucks, the ball and the offense was handed to Giannis. The result was a blossoming — Giannis as a ball-dominating, high-usage freight train. A bigger, taller, slightly more placid Russell Westbrook.

Playing point guard allowed Giannis to lean into his strengths — using his speed and length to find openings at the basket or to see open teammates over the top of the defense. More time with the ball in his hands meant less time with him floating around the perimeter, his non-threatening outside shot working to pinch the spacing and driving lanes for his teammates.

As adaptations go, this was an incredibly productive one for the Bucks — both Giannis and the team’s offense were much better off. Still, it was a developmental sacrifice. Since he entered the league, it has been assumed that a consistent outside shot is what stands between Giannis and the peak of his potential. Although he was not as productive or efficient, all the time he spent playing on the wing or trying on the idea of being a small ball power forward was an opportunity to address his weaknesses.

After the All-Star break last season, when his point guard experiment began in earnest, Giannis attempted just 24 catch-and-shoot three-pointers, and just 48 catch-and-shoot jumpers overall, in 28 games and over more than a thousand minutes. He had largely eschewed outside jumpers since the season began but this was the pattern taken to its extreme, and represented precious few opportunities to meaningfully work on the biggest weakness in his game.

Talent takes the shape the of its container.

Each player’s contributions on the court are the product of their individual skills and the team context, what they can do and the things that are asked of them. This is especially true for a player’s developmental trajectory. Who a young player is paired with, the jobs they are asked to do on the court, the way those elements change (or don’t) over time, all guide the growth of a player.

In making Giannis a point guard, the Milwaukee Bucks are placing his talent in a defined container, one that may provide structure and support in some areas but which will inevitably constrain him in others. It will begin to shape his talent into something more than an amorphous blob of potential. Which, I suppose, really is the goal here.

*****

This summer, new Orlando Magic head coach Frank Vogel announced that he was planning on starting Aaron Gordon at small forward. To this point in his career, Gordon has played about two-thirds of his minutes as a power forward, a position from which he has been much more productive. At either position, Gordon is an above-average athlete with more than enough speed, size, and explosive leaping-ability to hold his own.

The line of demarcation is skill.

As a power forward, Gordon can leverage his athletic tools to attack in the mid-post, to crash the offensive glass, and to beat bigger, slower players up the floor in transition. On the wing, he is an inconsistent shooter with underwhelming dribbling skills and underdeveloped court vision. Like Giannis, one position allows him to lean into his strengths, the other puts him in the grating situation of addressing his weaknesses, perhaps at the expense of team efficiency.

Vogel has said that he would like to use Gordon the way he used Paul George; it’s a tantalizing proposition — George’s production in the larger, bouncier Gordon package. It also wipes away several other hypothetical alternatives — Gordon as the second-coming of Blake Griffin, Gordon as the next generation of Dwight Howard, Gordon as the evolutionary Amare Stoudemire — and, frankly, begs credulity.

Gordon might be the next Paul George, but he almost certainly won’t be ready to play that part well this season. Given Orlando’s logjam in the frontcourt, this may be the best option for balancing the goals of fielding a competitive team and creating developmental opportunities for Gordon. Whether it’s the best long-term solution for Gordon and Orlando, we’ll never really know. Once the choice is made and a plan is implemented, the range of infinite possibilities immediately begins to shrink. All that’s left is the finite reality and the exclusively hypothetical alternatives.

While players like Josh Smith, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Aaron Gordon may arrive in the NBA with an aura of infinite possibility, they simply can not exist in the state forever. Their talent will be molded, intentionally and unintentionally, and they will inevitably become basketball players of one sort or another. What they become will always be less than what they could have been, because they could have been anything.