An underlying problem that’s spanned the entire season has been how opposing defenses have defended Josh Giddey.
The 21-year-old has been forced to play more off-ball as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams have emerged as OKC’s lead ball-handlers. This has caused the Thunder to be more creative with how they can utilize Giddey considering he profiles as a primary ball-handler.
The outside shooting has always been a struggle for the third-year guard. He’s a 30.4% 3-point shooter on 3.3 attempts for his career. These types of numbers allow teams to sag off of Giddey, essentially forcing OKC to play with a man disadvantage in half-court sets.
This was painfully visible in the Thunder’s 35-point loss to the Dallas Mavericks on Saturday. The Mavericks elected to completely ignore Giddey and let him shoot as many corner 3-pointers as he wanted, which resulted in a 3-of-9 performance from deep with several bad misses highlighted by Dallas’ mic’d rims.
The sag-off strategy continues to pay off for opposing teams. Giddey is shooting 49-of-140 (35%) on wide-open shots where the nearest defender was six-plus feet away from him.
From the corners, Giddey is shooting 22-of-62 (35.5%) from 3 this season. A pretty low percentage that teams will live with.
According to Cleaning The Glass, Giddey is ranked in the 35th percentile among forwards for corner 3-point shooting and 30th percentile in 3-point shooting.
Expect the Thunder to be defended in a similar style in the playoffs. Teams will harp onto OKC’s biggest weaknesses to exploit matchup problems and right now that’s headlined by Giddey.
When asked about how opposing defenses have defended Giddey, Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault said on Sunday that they continue to encourage him to take the open shots.
“If he gets played like that, he’s gonna get five wide-open shots… Regardless of how else he plays. Getting them in the corner is a good thing for any player,” Daigneault said. “Whether it’s a higher-percentage shot, which it is for most guys. I think having a diversity of attacks is important so that you’re not relying solely on one thing and the opponent is only having to account for one thing.
“So using him as a screener, which we got to a little bit yesterday, to rolling is one way to do that. Using him as a cutter was another way to get a baseline cut last night, offensive rebounding out of that spot.
“It’s important I think the more activity he can play with, the better off he’ll be. Even playing like that, he’s going to find five open shots… It’s a conversation that’s been ongoing. As a team, it’s not something we shy away from. It’s obviously something teams have deployed against us. We have to continue to figure out the best way to improve through it.”
The Thunder have had success despite this for the majority of the season, but the occasional loss usually brings this lingering problem to the forefront of people’s minds. It’s been a rough season for Giddey as he awkwardly tries to fit into a new role among the starters.
It hasn’t been pretty as he’s averaged career lows across the board, including a career-low 25 minutes per game, which includes him being benched during several clutch situations.
The Thunder will quickly need to figure out the best ways to scheme out how opposing teams guard Giddey if they’re hoping for a deep playoff run. What happened against the Mavericks will only hurt OKC if it carries over to the postseason.
