Meet Vanja Marinkovic, Europe’s best shooting prospect

Shooters are a never-ending need for NBA teams. You can never have too many when you’re looking for potential ways to catch up in the race with the Warriors. Heading into the 2018 NBA Draft, teams are sure to be looking for players who can provide an outside threat and potentially handle the ball for stretches.

Vanja Marinkovic, a 6-foot-6 Serbian guard from Partizan Belgrade, is likely to be on draft radars this June for just that reason. Marinkovic is a player who could have some value as a long-term development piece for someone in the NBA thanks to his shooting profile. While he doesn’t have the clout of Luka Doncic or Dzanan Musa, he’s been quietly posting solid performances in the Adriatic League this year. He’s the R.C. Cola of Balkan scoring guards in this draft class, and is worth keeping an eye on when draft-and-stash evaluation season hits full force in February and March.

This week, those quiet performances turned into something a little louder, as he posted a Eurocup personal best with 18 points, three rebounds, and two assists in Partizan’s 96-80 loss to Alba Berlin. The loss ended up being a decent encapsulation of my scouting on Marinkovic so far, so we will use that to highlight many of his strengths and weaknesses.

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Offensively, Marinkovic commonly plays as a secondary creator in the Partizan offense, playing off of either former G-League guard Patrick Miller or Nigel Williams-Goss, a draft-and-stash by the Utah Jazz. This highlights his scoring strengths, as do the numbers. His 19.1 points per 40 minutes is on par with what Musa has produced this year, and he’s doing that on 48/40/80 shooting splits. He offers a nice profile shooting the ball, and has some creation ability, providing potential for more in his skill set.

Marinkovic’s best skill at this point is catch-and-shoot, where his form is solid and he’s comfortable shooting on the move and under pressure. He isn’t always consistent with his release point, but the arc is consistent and he has a compact two-motion release.

Partizan runs a fair amount of flare screens and actions that free Marinkovic off ball, and he seems to have developed a nice awareness for moving off-ball. Along with some mechanics changes, that has helped him improve his shooting percentages over the last two years. After shooting 27.6 percent from 3 on 134 attempts in 2015-16, he has been a 41 percent shooter on 271 attempts since the beginning of 2016-17. This is a legitimate strength for him now, and the biggest tool he’ll use to get to the NBA.

Marinkovic needs to prove that he’s more than an off-ball shooter though. Results have been a mixed bag this year. He’s shown some potential for growth, but there isn’t much concrete skill here. Whereas Doncic is obviously incredible technically, and Musa has his finishing and length to sell, Marinkovic doesn’t have the same cache of polished skills yet.

Passing is an area where Marinkovic has shown flashes, but hasn’t consistently produced yet. He has good court vision and feel, and he is strong in the open court, taking advantage of fast break chances by drawing attention and kicking to teammates. Please ignore former Cavalier Samardo Samuels blowing the finish.

However, this hasn’t been a big part of his offensive repertoire to date. He has just a 7.7 percent assist rate, and has never been above ten percent. He projects as more of an accessory passer, only really having value in transition and moving the ball in an offensive set.

Marinkovic also has shown some potential as a pick-and-roll ball-handler. He can get to the rim pretty consistently at this level, and he’s fairly quick, allowing him to beat defenders off the dribble. He doesn’t have the strength yet to put his body into defenders and draw contact, but he can get opponents off balance with subtle head fakes.

Marinkovic doesn’t finish in this example, and he has average touch around the rim combined with minimal power and vertical pop. That’s concerning moving forward, but his ability to get there could lend to further development as a ball-handler on side pick-and-rolls or secondary actions.

The one red flag that shows with Marinkovic on the offensive end is his handle, which is fairly loose. While he’s shown to be a useful initiator on the break, in the halfcourt, he struggles to contain his dribble and can be turnover prone at times. In the game against Alba, he had one particular instance where he ran off a high screen, and lost the handle with minimal pressure. The ball just got away from him.

This also affects him with shooting pull-ups. His jumper release is far less consistent than off the catch, and a lot of that happens on the gather. This wide dribble he takes before pulling up from three here is a likely culprit for his uncharacteristic fadeaway on an otherwise open shot.

If Marinkovic is going to be an NBA player, he needs to be able to tighten this up. His value as an offensive weapon comes from the potential that he can drift between on-ball and off-ball roles as a secondary option on offense. If that dribble and pull-up threat doesn’t improve, it’s unlikely he can perform the former, because the chances he develops the strength to compensate through finishing are low given his frame.

Defensively, there’s not much to take away from Marinkovic’s performances this year. He was not a very promising defensive prospect last year, and Partizan’s shift from defense-first grind-it-out team to all-tempo offense hasn’t done him many favors. An important thing to keep in mind before we dive in is that this team has systemic defensive issues that span more than just Marinkovic — the coaching situation here is poor, and Marinkovic has admitted that himself, roughly saying in this interview, “Defense? We don’t play it.”

So when you see things like, say, this transition look where Marinkovic is simply lost between two threats on the line, know that there’s no coaching effort to try to correct it.

That said, Marinkovic doesn’t have a high ceiling here. He has just a 6-foot-7 wingspan, and struggles to contain penetration. He has high hips and doesn’t sink down into a stance, and he doesn’t offer much in terms of jumping passing lanes or fighting through screens.

He does a decent job when switched onto bigs, which happened frequently in matchups with Luke Sikma on Tuesday. He also will make occasional solid plays, recognizing off-ball actions and generally establishing good position when engaged. There’s hope that you can hide him up a position, having him defend threes or small-ball fours.

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This possession from the Alba game is a good encapsulation of his defense this season. He has decent positioning, but mixes in spurts of bad decisions and poor handling of contact, and looks very uncomfortable defending on ball.

Marinkovic is not ready for the NBA yet, and probably isn’t a first round prospect. He is too much of a mixed bag at this point beyond his shooting, and his suboptimal team situation doesn’t help his case by magnifying his defensive issues. However, he brings an NBA-level skill with his shooting profile. A 41-percent outside shooter with good passing instincts and awareness is a valuable commodity. If he continues to develop between now and the end of the season, he is a player who will find his way onto draft boards.