Joe Harris can shoot, even if he doesn’t do much else
By Jeff Siegel
After two unremarkable years in Cleveland to open his career, it appears as though Joe Harris has found a home in Brooklyn playing in Kenny Atkinson’s run-and-gun offense.
Harris is the prototypical shooter off the bench that doesn’t do almost anything else, but that’s not a knock on him — there’s always a place for guys like that in the league. When he’s knocking down his shots, as he has been the past year and change for the Nets, it helps to open up the offense for everybody involved and keep the defense spread out even if he never touches the ball.
While Harris’ true shooting percentage of 55.8 last season was nothing more than solid, that catch-all efficiency metric was heavily burdened by his poor shooting on 2-pointers. This season, he’s curtailed the 2s slightly and pushed up his attempts from beyond the arc while still hitting 39.5 percent of those long-range shots.
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That added efficiency has moved him from a simply average shooter to one of the league’s elites. His 61.1 true shooting percentage through nine games would have placed him above a number of knockdown shooters last season such as Joe Ingles, Bradley Beal, Allen Crabbe and J.J. Redick. Harris’ production off the bench has been a boon for his lineups, which are putting up a staggering 111.2 points per 100 possessions in his 188 minutes on the floor this season.
The Nets put him in position to succeed by not giving him responsibilities that are outside his skill set. Unless catching and shooting, he rarely has the ball in his hands — they ran about 1.5 pick-and-rolls per game for him last season and just over one handoff. They’ll run him off screens at times, but the vast majority of his value is as a standstill, catch-and-shoot bomber. Brooklyn doesn’t need him to be more as they have other playmakers on the team who can shoulder that responsibility, from point guards D’Angelo Russell and Spencer Dinwiddie to wings Caris LeVert and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson.
It doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody that Harris struggles on the other end of the floor. He’s 6-foot-6 with a neutral wingspan and slow feet, though the Nets have gotten away with playing him up a position defensively, where his strength plays more of a role and his lack of lateral quickness doesn’t hurt him as much. Of course, that comes with its own tradeoffs, as his 6-foot-6 wingspan doesn’t allow him to contest the shots of players three or four inches taller than him.
Harris is not a particularly good rebounder, either, but his lineups have consistently out-rebounded opponents over the past two seasons in Brooklyn. He does get out in transition when the opportunity presents itself, as the Nets do as a whole. As expected, he’s not the greatest finisher on the break, but even poor finishing in transition is usually better than the average halfcourt possession for Brooklyn.
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Harris represents yet another minimum contract win for the Nets, who look to have two rotation-level players in Harris and Dinwiddie rostered at the minimum for at least this season. Harris will be a free agent at the end of this season and might look to cash in on his high-level shooting, but there would be some speculation as to how he would fare outside Atkinson’s ecosystem. While a team with playoff aspirations may find his defensive weaknesses to be untenable, he shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a home next summer, whether in Brooklyn or elsewhere.