[2023 NBA Draft/1-4] Amen Thompson, G, Overtime Elite

https://theathletic.com/4695223/2023/07/21/nba-summer-league-takeaways-vecenie/

Thompsons showcase ability to fill gaps

Coming from Overtime Elite, Amen and Ausar Thompson were the two players I was most excited to see in Vegas. I wanted to see how their scoring ability and athleticism would translate to an NBA court with real NBA spacing.

I had Amen in a different tier from Ausar pre-draft, and I would stick with that evaluation after summer league, as I still have some real questions about how Ausar scores in the NBA as a wing. I still don’t totally buy his jumper, as it looked like a bit of a robotic line drive even after some mechanical tweaks that he’s clearly still in the process of working through. His release point was a bit all over the map.

The jumper is going to be a multi-year process for both Thompsons. Ausar is ahead of Amen, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be a player NBA teams have any inclination toward closing out on early in his career. And that’s particularly an issue for Ausar, because his movements just aren’t quite as dynamic on the ball as Amen’s are. He doesn’t quite possess the same level of flexibility, bend or fluidity in his movements that allow Amen to be twitchy and explosive, getting defenders into awkward positions on drives. But, even despite that, I also thought Ausar’s explosiveness looked to be elite. Overall, they translated in a big way.

Amen’s performance was terrific for 31 minutes before an ankle injury held him out after the first game. We’ll start with him. Every single piece of his anticipated elite athleticism translated immediately to an NBA court. His ability to cover ground exceptionally quickly with his first step and long strides was on full display, including a pair of sick inside-hand, left-hand finishes from the right side of the court in semi-transition that, frankly, very few players could even consider. He also threw a few impressive passes, including a beautiful touch head-man pass to Eason and a nasty look-away fastball whip to Smith cutting to the rim.

The most important thing I saw from Thompson, though, was this midrange floater.

Vid

My biggest question about Amen entering the draft was how he would score away from the rim. In today’s NBA, even the most athletic lead guards need to be able to have a combo breaker against defenses that force respect away from the rim. They can struggle to shoot 3s, but they need to have something in the midrange. Russell Westbrook had his little jump stop bank shot. Ja Morant has his floater. De’Aaron Fox has his pull-up from the foul line area and left elbow. Thompson doesn’t quite have anything like this in his arsenal yet. But that floater would seem to at least be the start of something in that respect. If he can iron that out in the next few years, he’ll be an exceptionally difficult problem for defenses to solve because it’ll allow him to change speeds with more suddenness within the in-between area.

I think it’s going to be tough to keep Amen off the floor in Houston because of his explosiveness, passing, willingness to defend and ability to drive transition play. The same can be said for Ausar, for different reasons. Even if he struggles to score early, he just impacts the game in so many different ways. Ausar’s processing ability as an off-ball wing is superb on both ends of the court. He keeps the ball moving on offense with quick reversals. He makes quick hit-ahead passes. But, even if he’s going to attack and drive with the ball, he’s going to try to go forward and collapse defenders before passing as opposed to standing stationary on the perimeter. He’s not dancing with it. He’s moving forward. He crashes the offensive glass and moves without the ball well, too.

More importantly, Ausar flies around on defense. Thompson is going to be a menace early in his career because he’s both an elite athlete at 6-foot-7 with a 7-foot wingspan who can switch one through four and an elite off-ball defender for such a young player. He made Gradey Dick’s life pretty miserable in a game against Toronto with how hard he fought around off-ball screening actions to contest.

Thompson also made a few awesome weakside rotations as the low man at the basket, using his leaping ability and length to contest at the rim and make life tougher for opposing players. His awareness and anticipation defensively is going to be huge for a Detroit team that needs to take a real step in that regard. The Pistons finished 28th in defensive rating last season. Most rookies don’t help their teams defensively, but Ausar is going to be the rare exception.

The other reason the Thompsons are going to be ready to play earlier than you’d think despite the lack of shooting is their attitude and preparation. They are basketball junkies and are invested in this. They don’t just want to be good. They want to devote their lives to the game and do what it takes to be successful. They’re going to do all of the film work and all of the necessary study off the court to put themselves in the best position to succeed. Doing that is not going to be an adjustment for them. They passed their first test at summer league.

 

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id...ve-new-technology-change-nba-shooting-forever

EIGHT VIDEO CAMERAS, each shooting 240 frames per second, surrounded one of the three courts at Overtime Elite's state-of-the-art, 103,000-square-foot facility in Atlanta. Ten of the program's players, including two top-five picks in the recent NBA draft, were going through what looked to be a simple shooting routine: 25 free throws, 25 midrange jumpers, 25 3-pointers from the top of the arc.

This process has occurred twice now, first in January and again in May, as part of a partnership between Overtime Elite, a professional league for 16- to 20-year-olds that serves as an alternative for elite high school, NCAA or the G League Ignite, and Breakaway Data, a startup that has developed a biomechanics shooting lab inspired by Driveline Baseball, a data-driven performance training program that has been revolutionary in that sport.

Breakaway Data, which first worked with quarterbacks before expanding to other positions, had a similar setup in an ancillary gym as part of the NBA's tech summit in connection with the Las Vegas summer league.

Its cameras track the shooters' movements in 24 joint angles, creating thousands upon thousands of data points which are compiled in a five-page report for each player. The reports are a multicolored collection of graphs, charts and bullet-point insights that focus on three aspects of shooting: the set point (lower body), shot sequencing (path of arms and hands) and release point (elbow and wrist).

"I thought it was very informative," Overtime Elite product Amen Thompson, drafted fourth overall by the Houston Rockets, told ESPN. "Not everything works for everybody, but that [data] can't really be a bad thing. It can only help to get as much information as possible. I felt like that's what it gave us."

A 20-YEAR-OLD can't be expected to consume complicated biomechanical data -- such as degrees of a shot path angle, the body's vertical and horizontal velocities at release or the shoulder angle velocity -- and synthesize it into practical shot adjustments. For that matter, neither can most NBA veterans.

"In terms of making it understandable for them, that's the challenge for me," Overtime Elite vice president of health, performance and development Markus Klusemann told ESPN. "We're working together to be able to break down this really complex information into some easy takeaways that any player or coach can understand. You don't want to overload them too much."

Klusemann's goal is to use the reports to come up with "three things, max, but usually it's one to two" for each player to focus on improving. Amen Thompson, for his part, recalls focusing on improving the mechanics of his lower body, specifically his ankle mobility and hip positioning, as the data indicated he relied on his arms much more than the average shooter.

"We are still early in the data analytics game, and the best teams who do [utilize] the data have really strong interpreters," Shane Battier, a 13-year NBA pro and two-time champion who is an investor and adviser for Breakaway Data, told ESPN. "You still need people to explain how this is practical and what this means in the development of an athlete.

"As a player, you just want to know, am I on the right track? As a player, you're looking just for every edge that you can find, obviously ethically, and if there's something that can boost my 3-point shooting by two percentage points, that's real money. For the bottom line of a player, that makes a huge, huge, huge difference."

As Dave Anderson, a former Houston Texans wide receiver who is Breakaway Data's CEO and co-founder, told ESPN: "Our special sauce is turning that information into basketball speak."

The next step, then, is for coaches to come up with drills that specifically work on the targeted areas.

"It's only useful if you use appropriate training methodologies," Klusemann said. "The biomechanical analysis doesn't tell you how to do it, but it allows you to study that. We work on someone's shot and say they've gotten better, but other than makes and misses and competition stats, there's been no way to really prove that. This allows us to say, 'We want to improve this player's wrist-release point,' and then measure that improvement."

…

Both Monty Williams and Rockets coach Ime Udoka -- the Thompson twins' new head coaches -- mentioned that not all players are comfortable with the same shooting motion, as biomechanically sound as it might be. Udoka specifically cited the unconventional follow-through used by Reggie Miller, a Hall of Famer and historically elite shooter.

"I've seen some people with ugly shots become great shooters based on their work ethic," Udoka told ESPN. "So there's not an exact science to it, but there are some technical things that obviously help people's shooting percentage go up, and it's very similar a lot of times. You take the data and look at it, no doubt, but it's always repetitions. Some people learn to shoot with the mechanics they have really well."

Battier describes Breakaway Data's basketball mission as "an exploration of if there is an optimal biomechanical profile to become an elite shooter," but the company's approach, he said, is not necessarily one-form-fits-all.

It'd be foolish, of course, to suggest an outstanding shooter alter his form to pursue biomechanical perfection. But Breakaway's data can identify inconsistencies in a player's shot and correlate them to inefficiency.

For example, the reports show whether there are biomechanical trends for an individual player that correlate to accuracy. Does he tend to miss short when he has a shallower shot path with a lower shoulder angle? Is there variation in the wrist set point at release that factors into the ball's trajectory?

Battier says he believes a biomechanical shooting lab can eliminate much of the guesswork -- replacing it with scientific answers when players feel the need to make tweaks to their shot.

Battier laughs when he recalls the most important shot adjustment he made in his career. He was mired in a miserable slump during the 2013 playoffs, going 2-of-25 from 3-point range over an 11-game span that included his first career postseason DNP-CD in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. The ball felt funky coming out of his hand during pregame warmups, he said, so he decided to aim to hit the left side of the rim.

It worked. Battier snapped out of the slump, shooting 9-of-12 on 3s in the Miami Heat's two wins over the San Antonio Spurs in Games 6 and 7 of the Finals. But Battier, one of the first players to delve deeply into analytics, would have preferred data over dumb luck.

"It's not the holy grail," Battier said of biomechanical data analysis, "but it's an answer."