BOSTON — Royce O’Neale has had a lot of open shots lately and it’s not necessarily by design.
Sporadically throughout the season, but consistently over the last two games, opposing teams have been electing to leave O’Neale open on the perimeter while they help out in the paint against Rudy Gobert or double up against other Utah Jazz players.
It’s not because O’Neale is a bad shooter, which is often the case when teams will choose to leave someone open on the 3-point line. He’s shooting a career best 40.2% from distance this season. Instead, it looks as if teams are just choosing to cover some of the more high-offense-producing players on the Jazz, the league’s best 3-point shooting team.
“Royce is shooting a really good percentage and we want him to keep taking them. He’s taken big shots during important times of the game, he’s come out making shots. We believe in him.” — Jazz coach Quin Snyder
“For a lot of teams when you choose between Mike (Conley), Donovan (Mitchell), Bojan (Bogdanovic), it’s no disrespect to Royce,” Quin Snyder said after Wednesday’s win over the New York Knicks. “Royce is shooting a really good percentage and we want him to keep taking them. He’s taken big shots during important times of the game, he’s come out making shots. We believe in him.”
The belief and confidence in O’Neale is important and will prove even more necessary if some of the more potent defensive teams in the league decide to follow suit with the last two teams to face the Jazz — the Cleveland Cavaliers and New York Knicks.
While the scheme of leaving O’Neale open did not work for Cleveland — he heated up and ended up going 4 of 6 from deep — it did work out for the Knicks.
Perhaps because it’s a play they like running, or because he had a good night against the Cavaliers, or maybe because they wanted to test out whether or not the Knicks were going to leave him open, the Jazz ran a play to get O’Neale the first shot of the game on Wednesday and O’Neale buried the 3.
He went 0 of 6 from 3-point range after that.
And, nearly all of his 3-point looks throughout the game were completely unguarded.
Even though the Knicks’ choice to shift away from O’Neale seemed to work, it still didn’t get them a win as the Jazz won their third straight game. But it does leave the window open for more teams to utilize the same tactic in the future.
Probably the most obvious reason for choosing to leave O’Neale open rather than one of the other able Jazz shooters is because of the high-usage players on the Jazz, he takes the fewest 3-pointers at just 3.2 attempts per game. That feels like a pretty manageable thing for an opposing team to allow, though O’Neale’s teammates don’t think that’s a very advisable approach.
“Pick your poison,” Mitchell said on Wednesday night. “He goes out there and knocks it down and makes our lives easier. If you want to go out there and shift off of him, he’s going to make the right play and knock down the shots confidently so it works out to our advantage.”
In different words and little more succinctly, Gobert echoed what Mitchell said.
“What’s the percentage, 40, 42? We like that,” Gobert said. “We hope he shoots that shot. It’s cash.”
For some of the more adaptable and quicker-thinking teams in the league, it could be a defensive approach they employ early on to test out whether or not O’Neale has it going that night, then they can move away from it if he starts to get hot.
It’s clearly not something that’s going to work out every night against an above-average shooter. But, it does put the pressure on the Jazz and O’Neale.
For O’Neale, who is always just as excited, if not more so, when he tallies an assist, it makes no difference to him whether or not teams are going to leave him open.
“Just keep shooting the ball,” he said with a smile. “If they want to leave me open, they can leave me open; if they want to close out, I’ll make plays for everybody else. I don’t really care.”