OKC Thunder prospect series: Examining Darius Garland’s complicated season

Feel for the game

How Garland’s feel for the game develops is really what it all comes down to for him. He has the talent, athleticism, and mindset to be a primary option, but for it to work for the team and for himself, he needs to figure out how to make his teammates better and play within the flow of the game. Frankly, that’s the biggest thing between him being a bona fide lead guard and being a fun yet a flawed secondary option.

On the surface, a lot of his problems are actually quite common for point guards his age – shoddy decision-making and taking risky passes aren’t anything new – but he lacks some of the basic skills required to lead an NBA offense. Most of the time, he seemed to have already decided what he was going to do before he did it. You could see it in plays like this one where he draws a hedge out of the pick-and-roll but he’s stuck reading the weakside help defender so he doesn’t see the screener who’s wide-open on the wing and he ends up throwing a wild alley-oop:

Like a lot of what he did in college, this kind of thing won’t fly against smarter and more athletic defenses in the NBA. And him making this decision represents a deeper issue in his game: his passing IQ is well behind where it should be. As Cole Zwicker pointed out in his brilliant breakdown of Garland’s passing (which everyone should read)

"“In reality right now Garland (along with White and other guards in this class like Carsen Edwards) probably don’t even meet the foundational passing attribute and decision-making thresholds to have a lot of optimism to build on long-term.”"

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Garland can make some truly special passes at times when the reads are fairly basic but once the coverages start getting more complex, his decision-making really breaks down.

In that same article, Zwicker singles out a play in which Garland faces a soft trap out of the pick-and-roll, gets caught holding the ball on the wing, misses three easy passing opportunities, and elects to throw a risky skip pass way later than he should have and turns the ball over.

These aren’t just the common mistakes of young point guards; they’re the kinds of mistakes that will kill NBA offenses and take years to remove from Garland’s game.

The fact that he’s still a relatively basic passer who relies on quick, simple reads limits a lot of what he can do as a ball-handler, and in turn, a lot of his potential. He’s sold himself in this process as a primary playmaker in the vein of Kemba Walker or Damian Lillard, yet his decision-making and passing are so far behind where they should be, it’s hard to believe that he can get there.

This isn’t to say that he never will – as I keep saying, every young guard goes through some version of this exact same thing, albeit to lesser degrees – but he’ll need to radically change his game in order to do so.