Every draft pick is a matter of perspective.
The trap, such as it is, with most June selections is watching what they did prior to being drafted and only considering whether they will be able to do those same things in the league.
When you see Jaimie Jaquez Jr. driving into the paint, shoulders first as he clears space, for one of his favorite moves – the reverse spin jumper – it’s easy to conjure up the image of Jimmy Butler, all footwork and physicality in the face of athleticism most wouldn’t have called projectible. It’s also easy to remind yourself how incredibly rare Butler’s skillset it, how few players in the history of the league have been able to find success with his blend of guile and strength. A bullied guard at the collegiate level suddenly, on a random January night, becomes a 6-foot-8 tank with quick feet who won’t give up an inch.
There’s the style Jaquez Jr., a 6-foot-7 wing, played at UCLA, his usage rate climbing to 24 and 28 in his junior and senior years as he was relied upon to manufacture offense, both out of wing isolations and in the post, where the left block was his comfort zone. That’s where he most resembles Butler, who he says is one of his favorite players, and he was efficient enough in true-shooting 54 percent across both seasons with a positive assist-to-turnover ratio. Players who play at their own pace in a crowd tend to find ways to translate that pace to the next level.
“A lot of people tell me, as you grow in the levels in the game it always gets faster,” Jaquez Jr. said. “The way I’ve always looked at it, as it gets faster you have to get slower. I always try to be under control.”
Then there’s the style he’ll be asked to play in Miami next to veterans and established high-usage offensive players like Butler, Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro – the style that involves far less dribbling and far more quick, reactive decision making.
“I know that I’m going to have to play defense and I’m going to have to play hard,” Jaquez Jr. said of the role he expects. “I just have to be able to hit shots. That’s probably going to be my role at the start, being a rookie.
“It’s kind of just restarting and doing whatever I can to get on the floor. To me that’s playing defense and knocking down open shots.”
Good news is, he can do both. While Jaquez Jr. certainly has his possessions where he pulls the ball out, or receives a catch in the post, and surveys the floor before methodically breaking a defender down with a series of bumps, nudges and fakes, if you extract those from his film catalogue, you find a player willing to do just about anything. You take the ball out of the hands of some players and they take the possession off, standing on the wing or in the corner as others run the show. Jaquez Jr. is not that kind of player, only limiting his motion when necessary to space the floor. He sets screens at all angles, freeing up teammates and forcing switches, and it’s not hard to pick up on his sense of time and space in the halfcourt. He may not have run any handoffs, which will surely change at some point down the road, but within an Erik Spoelstra offense that thrives on running multiple actions with pace and tempo, picking at every misstep forced out of a defense, there’s no reason he can’t squeeze a few dunks and layups out of an environment looking for every relief bucket it can find. In all of college basketball, Jaquez Jr. was tied for No. 17 with 94 possessions logged as cuts, per Synergy Sports.
“I think he’s a player that can do things without the ball,” HEAT Assistant General Manager Adam Simon said. “That’s one of his best attributes, his versatility. You can put him in a lot of different spots. His IQ and understanding of the game is going to be a great weapon for Spo and how they can put him in all different lineups for sure.”
There is a reason players like Butler, or Max Strus or Duncan Robinson, can spring free in the paint in the third quarter of a tight postseason game. With Butler, defenses are so worried about giving him a deep catch, or conceding a mismatch with a switch, that he can use the aggressiveness to his advantage, going this way as a defender overplays him that way. With Strus and Robinson, defenses are so freaked out by their shooting that the second a player attempts to cheat over the top of a screen they’re jogging down an unencumbered lane.
Some opportunities you earn out of pure cleverness and timing. It’s practically guaranteed that at some point in his rookie year Herro or Butler will be running an empty side pick-and-roll on the left side, and as the ball gets downhill Jaquez Jr. will execute a perfect slot cut as the defense is looking the other way. But against good defenses, the kind of defenses that stay locked in on all the low hanging fruit, he’ll have to earn the respect which allows you to truly manipulate split-second opportunities.
To one degree or another, it’s sink or shoot.
It’s always so reductive to boil things down to shooting, but that’s the league as it is today. Unless you have one or two exceptional non-shooting skills that’ll keep you on the floor and compensate for defenses playing off of you on the perimeter, you have to shoot. One year ago, Caleb Martin wasn’t able to make shots as Boston put a roaming Robert Williams on him and his minutes dwindled as the Eastern Conference Finals went on. The second time around, he torched Williams and any other defender the Celtics tried, almost winning Conference Finals MVP in the process. Shooting makes all the difference.
On paper, Jaquez Jr. did not hit elite shooting levels. Apart from shooting 39.4 percent from three his sophomore year, he generally hovered around 30 percent, taking just under three a game. At those percentages, defenders aren’t going to play you.
There are, of course, layers to this. Encouraging layers.
Jaquez Jr.’s effective field-goal percentage on jumpers off the dribble last year, shots he’ll likely take fewer of at the professional level, was 38.1. On catch-and-shoot jumpers, that percentage jumped all the way up to 51.6. Yes, there’s a built-in efficiency boost with those splits since you typically take more threes off the catch, but we’re not done here. On his guarded catch-and-shoot threes, as logged by Synergy, Jaquez Jr. shot 25 percent. On his unguarded catch-and-shoot threes, shots that are more likely to come his way off Miami’s lead engines, he was up to 41.7 percent.
In other words, if you take the star-level shot-creation out of his game, Jaquez Jr. was more efficient with role-player shots than the basic numbers might initially indicate.
“As his usage, or his responsibilities to be a bigger scorer [grew], it might’ve brought down his shooting,” Simon said. “The need for him to do more might have brought down his numbers. But it seems like he’s going to be able to improve as a three-point shooting.”
Miami’s development team has proven, time and again, that nobody is a finished product whether they are 19, 22 – like Jaquez Jr. – 27 or 32. There’s clearly room for shooting growth here. Even if it takes some time at NBA range, it can come all the same. And once it does, with defenses respecting him just as they did in college, the pump-and-go game, where all that downhill patience, pace and footwork, will be ready to thrive.
Being a 3-and-D player – we’ll conservatively slot Jaquez Jr. into that role for now unless something really pops in Summer League, and down the road his Butler-esque mid-range game might again take efficient form – does involve holding up on the defensive end. Like most young players, Jaquez Jr. will get called up for switches by some of the best offensive players in the world. How well and how swiftly he navigates that style of play will likely determine both his early-career rotation minutes and, later on, viability in the playoffs, but he does have the size to defend multiple positions and the strength to absorb hits from the more punishing matchups.
The intelligence is there in spades, though. Miami’s defense is as much as schemes, and being able to toggle seamlessly between them, as it is about individual defenders. Even in a mismatch, few players – really just Adebayo – are ever left on an island. There’s no reason Jaquez Jr. won’t be able to play the gaps as a help defender or push his attacker into help when he’s targeted. As a weakside player, his instincts for picking off passes and loose dribbles – he averaged 2.8 steals per 100 possessions last season, whereas Butler topped out at 2.4 his senior year at Marquette – might someday approach elite. That knack for deflections should eventually fit right in with a team that uses more zone principles, or more zone outright, than most other franchises. Spoelstra’s aim is always an aggressive, attacking defense and Jaquez Jr. has the tools to be an aggressive, attacking defender.
As far as all the other intangibles, we can always go off what we read and by all accounts the desire to compete, to play in the grit and grime and much, is there. Miami’s draft personnel has more than earned benefit of the doubt in this area. They know how to find players with high degrees of give-a-****. We’ll assume they found another until proven otherwise.
When they say a player is a winner, as Simon did on draft night, there’s no reason not to believe them.
None of this is a perfect science. There aren’t any beakers or vials and tubes, just film, numbers and interviews. So much of Jaquez Jr.’s projection relies on him improving as a shooter and using his feel for the game to carry him on the defensive end where he’ll sometimes be out-quicked and out-stronged. Without those two areas, he’ll likely struggled. But all the components are there, and all the in-between items – pace, patience, timing, footwork, a sense of how to best use his body to get where he needs to go – are already in place. And sometimes those in-between items, the high-hanging fruit that separates role players who can playing in a Conference Finals game or not, are the hard part.
For now, with the No. 18 pick fresh as it is, perspective is what matters.
You can choose to look at Jaquez Jr. as the player he was at UCLA and think he might struggle to play the same way in the NBA. There’s merit to that argument, as it is for many four-year college scorers.
But you can also choose to look at the player Jaquez Jr. was in the margins, when he wasn’t being a star. That’s the player he’ll be at the next level, and that player has all the tools, of hands and feet but also hearts and minds, he’ll need.
There’s room for growth, and that growth is necessary. It always is, and it doesn’t always come. But once again, with a front office and coaching staff aligned on what they value, the vision is clear. In June, that’s the only perspective that matters.