NBA Players Already Teasing Huge Leaps This Season – Bleacher Report

Early-season optimism is rampant throughout most of the NBA right now. Each team’s schedule is fewer than seven games old, a small sampling that by nature overaccentuates the good and the bad.
Join me in indulging the best of the ridiculously good, won’t you?
This isn’t meant to be an exercise in overreaction. Knee-jerkiness remains unavoidable this time of year, but the goal is to spotlight breakouts and leaps that profile as sustainable beyond the lightning-in-a-bottle efficiency prone to striking out of the gate.
In the spirit of “It’s Early, But Who The Eff Cares?!,” this collection of emergences, arrivals, continuations and reinventions will aim to be as comprehensive as possible. And that means separating leaps into tiers!
Our categories will be as follows:
Players will be slotted into the tier that best suits them. Second- and third-year leaps will be prioritized below every other type. Rookies are ineligible for what should be obvious reasons, as are players averaging less than 20 minutes per game.
Let’s celebrate some early-season fireworks.

Just a few weeks away from his 20th birthday(!), Jalen Duren is swatting and rebounding and finishing everything in sight. It is truly a sight to behold—progression that outstrips even the rosiest expectations.
Duren’s connection with Cade Cunningham is both empirical and ethereal. The 6’10” big man has the open-floor gait of Giannis Antetokounmpo but a ballerina’s fleet of foot.
His passing might actually be the most impressive development. He can survey the floor from standstills and make quick decisions, ball in hand, on the move. He has also mastered the art of providing vertical spacing without actual spacing around. Imagine what he’ll do if and when that changes.
Gaga stat lines are now the norm for Duren. He’s averaging over 15 points, 13 rebounds, three assists and two swats per game while downing more than 68 percent of his twos. You may react accordingly: by believing the Pistons have found their second primary building block.

The best player for the Portland Trail Blazers so far is not Scoot Henderson or Jerami Grant. It is not Anfernee Simons, who appeared in only one game before undergoing thumb surgery. It certainly isn’t Deandre Ayton.
It’s Shaedon Sharpe.
Bonkers-but-convincing shot-making from the perimeter buoys his 20-plus points per game. Sharpe is downing 37.5 percent of his pull-up treys and knocking down almost 42 percent of his above-the-break triples overall.
This is just the beginning. Sharpe will finish more efficiently around the rim. His passing is basic but better. He has thrown a couple nifty dimes in the pocket and on post entries. If he ever starts deferring more consistently on drives, it’ll be, as the kids his age say, scary hours.

Quick! Hurry up and read this before Mark Williams snatches it from mid-air and turns it into a transition opportunity for the Charlotte Hornets.
Swings between highs and lows remain ingrained into the Mark Williams Experience. But his meld of dexterity, speed and IQ is omnipresent.
Williams is wrecking lives around the rim, swallowing passes whole and, for the most part, avoiding foul trouble on defense. He is running the floor, making tough catches and displaying touch and coordination at the hoop on offense. There is more room for his passing to blossom, and he may yet get to expand his shooting range.
Charlotte nabbed itself a good one.

Supercharging Scottie Barnes’ usage has not culminated in the prettiest offense, but the Toronto Raptors are gleaning valuable information about the depths of his game. And as it turns out, his armory is well-stocked.
Barnes is clearing 20 points and five assists per game while canning 55 percent of his twos and, most critically, almost 43 percent of his threes. He is more at home using his body to create separation when going downhill and with his back to the basket. Though he could stand to embrace more contact and abandon some fadeaways below the free-throw line, he’s hitting enough of his runners and turnarounds to count them as a weapon.
The turnovers can get ugly—and profuse. That’s part of the offensive-hub learning curve. He is more equipped to pass out of double-teams and better at surveying the floor with his back to the basket.
This version of Barnes is someone around whom the Raptors can build.

League Pass geeks have been clamoring for Alperen Şengün to get a more prominent offensive role since approximately the dawn of time.
Their wishes have finally been granted.
After averaging 47.8 frontcourt touches per 36 minutes last year, Şengün is at 53.2 this season. His overall usage is only up a tick, but that says more about his commitment to deference than anything. And he’s still managed to ratchet his scoring up to a team-high 19-plus points per game.
The Houston Rockets have not parlayed more Şengün into winning at higher clip. But he keeps the ball moving, is a more aggressive finisher and is hitting his threes.
There are outlines of a system here. They’ll mutate into a full-fledged blueprint once the Rockets around Şengün start moving faster and more frequently when he catches the ball.

Calling Cam Thomas a “microwave scorer” is officially an insult.
Will he flirt with averaging 30 points per game for the entire season? Probably not. And does he need to do more as a passer? Absolutely. But there is a rhyme and reason to the way he’s playing, an actual process that transcends “chucker” labels.
Thomas is showcasing poise and patience in the lane, reading the defense in ways he wasn’t before. His success is perhaps uncomfortably mid-range heavy, but he’s exploring different levels of that middle, varying the depths and speeds at which he travels off the catch and on ball screens.
Defenses are responding in kind: with overreactions. Thomas already has a couple of free-throw-line parades under his belt and has been opportunistic at the rim—all without nailing threes at an especially high clip or, more importantly, operating in modes that hijack the Brooklyn Nets offense.

A fractured left wrist derailed a midseason breakout by Naz Reid last year. He responded by signing a bargain-bin extension and then picking up right where he left off.
Every element he brought to the table last season is intact. He’s swishing above-the-break threes. His floor game isn’t ultra-prominent inside the Minnesota Timberwolves’ offensive hierarchy, but it’s more than break-in-case of emergency. He’s shooting over 65 percent on drives in the early going and has yet to not score on a post-up.
Anthony Edwards when talking about Naz Reid tonight said: "For some reason, it seems like when he posts up he's scoring every time now. I don't know if it's because he's been in the weight room but I'm liking it. I'm loving it, actually. "<br><br>Looked up Reid's post ups on Synergy,… <a href="https://t.co/5swRUQxusD">pic.twitter.com/5swRUQxusD</a>
Reid’s defense has impressed. Generally low-stakes assignments allow him to pitch in everywhere. He’s not always in position on the glass, but he disrupts plays around the rim and does an admirable job covering up for Karl-Anthony Towns in their tandem minutes.
Speaking of which: Reid has thoroughly outplayed KAT to start the year. Awkward discussions will need to be had if this keeps up.

By pivoting to Point Jeremy Sochan, the San Antonio Spurs have diluted the burden Devin Vassell ferries as a facilitator. That’s freed him up to focus on his scoring portfolio, which officially looks nasty.
Some of Vassell’s efficiency marks don’t look so hot. He’s burying under 34 percent of his triples, including a sub-23-percent clip on pull-up treys. But he continues to experiment with more difficult, and very valuable, off-the-dribble self-creation.
Vassell’s 54.5 percent shooting on pull-up twos is lethal. While he has not juiced up his rim pressure in the conventional sense, he isn’t picking up his dribble as early or shying away from contact—finer-print evolution that has fueled some gritty finishes and more frequent trips to the charity stripe.
This is all to say: Between Vassell and Victor Wembanyama, the Spurs appear to have their one-two punch of the future.

Jalen Williams (sort of) party crashed a Rookie of the Year discussion last season that Paolo Banchero initially had sewn up. He has taken that high baseline and built upon it.
Look beyond the shooting splits. His efficiency inside and outside the arc is down, but the context of his role has changed. The Oklahoma City Thunder are leaning on him to run entire units—added responsibility that could complicate his development.
It hasn’t.
J-Dub still gets to the rim in droves despite drawing even more attention. He can suffer from tunnel vision, and his finishing has suffered amid more rival focus. That’s fine. He is finding ways to inject more directionality and variance into his handles. Continuing to shoot 50-plus-percent inside the arc when noticeably more of those attempts go unassisted compared to last year is also a big friggin’ deal.
All the while, J-Dub is dabbling in across-the-spectrum defensive assignments: bigs, combo wings, small guards, off-ball movers and shakers, the whole shebang. As his three-point clip stabilizes and he gets more comfortable facilitating out of his downhill assaults, Oklahoma City will become even more of an immediate threat.

Bright spots are hard to come by for the Memphis Grizzlies as they navigate a worst-case-scenario opening to the season. Fortunately, though, they have Desmond Bane.
This is another instance in which it doesn’t make sense to harp on efficiency downticks. In the absence of Ja Morant, who is serving a 25-game suspension for conduct detrimental to the league, Bane has become the engine through which the Grizzlies operate. It is admittedly a role for which he’s not perfectly suited. Memphis has the league’s worst offense and averages under 103 points per 100 possessions with him on the floor (12th percentile).
Little of this is on Bane, though. He’s working not only without Morant, but also sans Steven Adams, Brandon Clarke and nearly any semblance of proven wing depth. The circumstances are not conducive to a non-star’s success in any way, shape or form.
But Bane is hovering around 25 points and four assists per game without seeing his shooting splits take a nosedive. Though his three-point clip has ducked below 35 percent, he’s up against bonkers volume and greater degrees of difficulty. More of his buckets are going unassisted than ever, and he’s garnering more aggressive coverage as a first-line initiator and driver.
Somehow, someway, Bane has managed to jack up his efficiency inside the arc, splashing in almost 59 percent of his twos while subsisting on heavier doses of tough jump shots. And while his playmaking isn’t floor-general material, he’s quick to find trailers and getting better live-dribble kicks to the corners.
What he’s doing now may not be enough to keep Memphis afloat relative to available resources, but it is a star turn.

Cade Cunningham is spitting out a star turn that’s bound to create division among NBA intelligentsia. Is what he’s doing now really that impressive as a No. 1 pick? When he’s so unreliable (and, frankly, awful) at the rim? And when he’s committing turnovers in spades, so many of which are the result of indecision or outright bad decisions after picking up his dribble?
The answer is a wholehearted, resounding, emphatic yes.
Few can do what Cunningham is currently doing amid such a stark spacing deficit. There is a Shai Gilgeous-Alexander-esque tact and control to how he works inside the half-court.
Defenses sometimes succeed in speeding him up and coaxing him into gaffes. For the most part, though, he is unflappable so long as he keeps his dribble, changing cadence and direction, his head on a swivel, his eyes peering into the future and oftentimes guiding opponents away from his ultimate intent.
Cunningham’s scoring package is unfinished but already serviceable. He’s offsetting crappy finishing at the rim with more polished touch from floater range and, most notably, lethal accuracy on threes. He (probably) won’t sit galaxies above 40 percent from deep until the end of time, but the improved efficiency matches the eye test. Cunningham is quicker to fire off the catch, unfazed by the temptation to dribble out of wide-open opportunities.
Knocking down more contested treys and, improving his takeoff angles around the bucket remain swing developments. As is, though, Cunningham has shown real growth on superstar usage. Get bogged down by the efficiency (52.5 true shooting) at your own peril.

“What if the Philadelphia 76ers suddenly expedited James Harden trade talks to ensure Tyrese Maxey could keep cooking?!” reads like a galaxy-braining premise on the surface. But it’s actually quite reasonable logic, even in the face of differing on-the-record explanations.
Because Tyrese Maxey has been that good.
The soon-to-be 23-year-old is averaging over 30 points and six assists per game while finding nylon on more than 55 percent of his three-point attempts. There’s no way these numbers represent a new normal, but his capacity to thrive in a featured-option role marks a developmental turn that changes everything for the Sixers.
Maxey isn’t getting to the basket nearly as often and has struggled to finish off drives among the trees. His off-the-dribble jumper is hardly lights-out, either. But he’s making headway as a more deliberate playmaker.
His comfort changing directions on-ball and chemistry with Joel Embiid appears to be at an all-time high. He is learning to downshift coming around screens and leaving his feet as a decoy to open up lanes and jumpers for others. Philly’s offense is right around league average in the minutes he’s playing without Embiid—no small feat under the circumstances.
Nudging Maxey back down the pecking order to make room for Harden would have been a real bummer. The Sixers might be worse off in the near term, but their bigger picture is better served by giving Maxey the license he has now—agency that he has more than earned, and that has him on a faster track to stardom.
Unless otherwise noted, stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference, Stathead or Cleaning the Glass and accurate entering games on Thursday, Nov. 2. Salary information via Spotrac.
Dan Favale covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@danfavale), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, co-hosted by Bleacher Report’s Grant Hughes.

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