Gabe Vincent: An Upcoming Shift in Shot Distribution
When looking across the board at Miami’s evolving young role players, it seems as if a door is opening up right in front of them heading into the new season.
For Max Strus, the starting job is still ready to be taken if he continues to shoot the ball at the level he has. For Caleb Martin, there’s a massive hole at his position with PJ Tucker heading out the door. For Omer Yurtseven, he will get his first true opportunity to earn the back-up big man position for good, as Dewayne Dedmon slows down.
Yet for Gabe Vincent, there really hasn’t been that door opener right in front of his eyes. The role for him has been clear all off-season: the back-up point guard next to either Tyler Herro or Victor Oladipo off the bench.
Now I must throw in the fact that there’s a good shot he will start many games in this regular season, since the expectation is that Kyle Lowry won’t be pushing extra hard for that 82 game mark. And with that said, the team will be confident in those specific games that Vincent slides in.
Looking at this team’s past playoff run, Vincent was at the forefront of the offense as the starting point guard in 8 of their 18 games. They went 7-1 in those games.
In a recent interview with Brett Siegel of Fan Nation, Vincent was asked about his goals heading into this season, which he pretty much mirrored my current feeling on his upcoming role. “I want to increase my efficiency,” Vincent said.
The initial interpretation of that is a cliche statement in this league. Who wouldn’t want to make that jump into higher percentages when talking about their abilities as a scorer? But the reason I want to address this is that efficiency is his primary outlet to overall improvements.
When evaluating this Heat team on paper, they basically swapped PJ Tucker for Victor Oladipo when discussing regular season availabilities. What does that mean? Well those two players don’t have the same shot chart by any means. That’s a major swing in shot attempts, while simultaneously hoping for that same jump from Bam Adebayo, and even Tyler Herro.
The point is that role players like Vincent won’t have the luxury to simply “increase shot attempts.” The role they play is to counteract the primary scorers around them, while taking advantage of the smaller dose of shots given to them.
So that leads us into our next topic. Efficiency isn’t the only way to make that jump. A shift in his personal shot profile could do the trick as well.
21% of Gabe Vincent’s field goals came from less than 10 feet from the basket last season. For a player that saw a ton of pick and rolls, you would think that number would be higher when initially diving into the stats.
That ability to increase his scoring value around the basket not only helps his efficiency levels, but it allows him to obtain a much smoother shot diet when spacing out to the perimeter.
When looking into more of the specifics of his drive, I think it’s safe to say that his inside scoring will have to be branched out broader than just pick and rolls. With Tyler Herro, Victor Oladipo, Jimmy Butler, and Kyle Lowry also preparing for a heavy PnR showing, the off-ball stuff for Vincent may have to revert back to his early years.
The reason there is such confident in that is because he’s a natural off-ball player. He just became this solid ball-handler and on-ball guard in a short span, since at this time last year, the discussion was if he could become a good enough on-ball creator for this group.
Getting back to the basics, an off-ball role is more than just catching and shooting. As it pertains to this stuff as an attacker, it’s more about relying on quick bursts off the catch than the usual methodical pick and roll.
He’s physical enough to absorb contact when driving, which makes Miami comfortable with one-on-one match-ups. But once that weak-side help begins to tail over, what is the counter? He has the strong finishing. He has the pull-up, which I will get to later. So that slight in-between game is the rounded out element.
This is something many of the Heat’s guards are searching to pick-up, but for Vincent, it may be the most realistic with the role they’re preparing him for.
Speaking of that off-ball role, he got plenty of reps with it while playing heavy minutes next to Tyler Herro and even Kyle Lowry. Instead of being the creator, he can be the capitalizer.
Waiting patiently on that weak-side wing as the PnR begins, Lowry surveys Vincent’s defender just enough as he slides down to the nail, as seen in the first clip above. Lowry hits Vincent, as he pulls decisively with the defender closing out.
After shooting under 30% on spot-up threes in his sophomore season, that shot up to 39% this past year. As I noted about a year ago in training camp, Vincent was going through a mechanical adjustment on his jumper, which led to that brief period of a shooting drop-off.
Other than his shooting numbers being on the rise, it feels like the space he will have will simultaneously be increasing. As I stated earlier about the creators on the roster, the expectation is that Oladipo’s rim pressure will allow the half-court offense to operate at a much higher level for drive-and-kicks.
Vincent will have the opportunity to really earn his stay yet again in this similar, yet slightly different, role for the new year. But let me address one last part of his game: just because I believe he gets more openings off the ball, doesn’t mean his PnR stature is disappearing by any means.
Vincent will still have the ball in his hands a ton, since simply they trust him in these spots. Much like any of Miami’s guards in recent memory, they just love the sight of drop coverage forming right in front of them.
Vincent fits that mold perfectly.
He began reading PnR coverages at an extremely high level during the back-half of the regular season, as he just waiting for his defender to drop over or under that screen. He maximized his range so he could pull it immediately when the defender went under, but more often than not, that defender was chasing him over.
2-on-1’s are then created, and Vincent can try to find his sweet spot with that mid-range pull-up that just so happens to be the drop coverage not-so-secret formula.
He shot 43% on those middy pull-ups throughout the season, but what showed to be even more impressive was that he shot 46% in the post-season on the same number of attempts. During a period where coaching and coverages begin to tighten against certain player’s strengths, that was a very intriguing development.
Like I said earlier, he won’t be expecting a major jump in shot attempts this year by any means, since it just isn’t realistic at this stage. But what he can do is expand his shot profile into the areas he feels most comfortable. Possibly a slight decline in pull-up 3’s occur, which then pad his rim attempts.
The point is that his shot distribution will begin to spread, and it’s for the best.
His defensive abilities on the other hand deserve their own piece just to hit on all of the stuff he provides from fighting through screens to the 2-2-1 press to sizing up on switches. We know what we’re getting on that end of the floor which makes it not as fun to discuss, while the scoring elements are just beginning to scratch the surface.
Training camp will tell us a lot, but as for the way Erik Spoelstra and the coaching staff view him, it seems to be they believe he can be plugged in almost anywhere within this system.
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