Myles Turner Can Protect the Rim But Still Has Plenty to Learn About NBA Defense

Myles Turner’s evolution this season is impressive, but his defensive game needs tweaking for him to reach his full potential.

Myles Turner has been a god send. The Indiana Pacers selected him with the 11th pick in the 2015 NBA Draft, and despite missing six weeks of key development time during his rookie year with a broken thumb, he is already proven to be a potent scoring weapon who can shoot with range and get buckets around the hoop. He has also been a force as a rim protector, blocking tons of shots including a signature swat of LeBron James at the goal.

Since his breakout game in Denver on January 17, Turner has been fantastic, averaging 15.4 points, 6.7 rebounds, and 2.1 blocks per game while shooting 53.7% from the floor. On top of all the blocks — he leads all rookies per game — another sign of his defensive ability is the fact shooters are worse off when he’s covering them.

However, this doesn’t paint a full picture.

Though his 7-foot frame, near 250-pound physique, and 7’4″ wingspan often allow him to overwhelm opponents in the paint, he is still a 19-year-old rookie. And 19-year-old rookies make a lot of mistakes.

Turner is no exception, and his ability to defend his position when he isn’t tasked with merely protecting the rim has been troubling at times.

Case in point: Myles Turner was flummoxed by the Charlotte Hornets pick and roll game. Part of the problem came from the fact Cody Zeller and Kemba Walker were executing it flawlessly, but the biggest problem for Myles was not being in control as he moved around the floor. He consistently proved unable to position himself in ways that he couldn’t properly react to the play.

On this Walker/Zeller pick and roll, Turner ends up in  no man’s land as he neither disrupts Kemba nor is able to do anything to stop Cody after the pass. To be kind, his footwork was terrible. He is off balance as he comes out putting his weight on the wrong foot so he cannot pivot back to even contest Zeller. He’s leaning over badly — perhaps due to tiredness, perhaps because he lacks the understanding of how to use his feet — and doesn’t have any sort of leverage to reposition himself. He’s having to shuffle his feet and rotate in hopes of stopping Zeller, which he never really had a chance of doing.

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Frank Vogel has usually had players like Roy Hibbert sag off in this situation, but even then he should, at least, be in better position to stop Zeller if he isn’t going to hedge and recover. Either way, he needs to be on the attack with either Kemba or Zeller, not somewhere in between. Most of all, he needs to be in better control of his own body and not have so much wasted motion.

Charlotte executed the play perfectly, but Myles Turner never gave himself a real chance to defend the play.

This wasn’t the only time Walker took advantage of Turner’s mistakes.

He looks lost at times and unsure of where he needs to be. He tries charging to where he thinks he needs to be, but in the end, he ends up making similar mistakes.

Serge Ibaka and the Oklahoma City Thunder carved up his inexperience a bunch of times. In pick-and-roll plays, the ball handler quickly got the ball back to the perimeter-menace Ibaka on multiple occasions and he was easier able to exploit a slow recovery time by Turner. On two other instances, Serge realized Myles was scrambling around undisciplined and hit him with ball fakes that led to 4 points.

Myles Turner’s Quest to Improve

We knew coming into the season perimeter defense wasn’t something Turner was had, but something he could develop. Early in his Pacers tenure, he told 8 Points, 9 Seconds that perimeter defense was a priority for him and something that he believed could help set him apart from the average shot-blocker. “Everybody knows I can block shots,” Turner told our Jordan Yant. “But I feel like I am pretty good at staying in front of people on the perimeter. That is something I have worked on a lot this summer.”

So far, however, that Summer work hasn’t led to great outcomes.

In the game against the New York Knicks, he got abused outside of the paint more than once. And like in pick-and-roll situations against Charlotte, there were issues with the way he positioned himself.

Turner never seems to decide if he wants to force Carmelo Anthony either direction, allowing him to get around him for a basket. Obviously this is a tough cover for Turner, who doesn’t have the quickest of feet. But that makes both his positioning and approach vital in situations like this.

Melo is a Hall of Famer and an all-time great scorer, so Turner should be quick to retreat and not get beat off the dribble. If that means Anthony gets a pull-up jumper, so be it. But he should be in a “no layups” mentality here rather than foolishly trying to pretend he is Paul George or Tony Allen while bellying up against a professional scorer.

Less forgivably, Turner was lost on the perimeter twice while covering Kristaps Porzingis, getting caught on a weakside screen in one example and, as we are seeing often, being slow to get out on a shooter in another. The result was 6 easy points from a guy who himself doesn’t have much more perimeter experience than Turner. When you’re losing a guy like Ibaka because you’re overly concerned about Westbrook attacking, that’s one thing. But here we see him paying way too much attention to Jose Calderon despite the fact that Paul freaking George was covering the Spanish point guard and clearly was close enough to thwart any minimal threat that Calderon could have presented in the middle of the floor.

It’s the type of stuff that shows he has trouble keeping all the mental and physical aspects of outside-the-paint defense square in his head. He is misallocating his attention, not minding his footwork/balance, and not understanding how to maximize his chances in a mismatch.

There are positive signs. Against Miami, he was stuck guarding Justice Winslow on many possessions, and he generally did well with a tough assignment. But still, we saw a mental lapse when he closed out too hard off balance and let Justise blow by him for an uncontested layup with less than 5 minutes left in a close game. His teammates had played 16 seconds of good D, but that was made pointless by one mistake.

He also got roasted by Goran Dragic in the pick-and-roll during a critical OT possession. As with the Carmelo clip above, this is a tough, tough cover. But it’s less the two-point result than the completely out-of-sorts manner in which Dragic puts him in a blender. Just one more example of his feet and mind not being connected or focused as he tries to learn how to play NBA defense away from the rim.

Room, and Time, to Improve

It is easy to forget that Turner is a 19-year-old kid, really. It also easy to forget that one of the knocks on him coming out of the draft was his awkward running style. It is understandable that he’s going to have lapses in the way he sets up on defense. He’s a rookie, and that comes with the territory.

I imagine a lot of these issues will be fixed with time and experience. Again, it is easy to forget that a few years ago Turner was playing in high school where his size was really all he needed. Now in the NBA, size isn’t going to cover up mistakes like it used to. He needs to get more precise, maintain focus, and improve his footwork and positioning.

Sure, there are plenty of good defensive statistics for Turner and his rim protection looks like it could be elite. But Roy Hibbert could say the same just a few years ago. Now, as the key actions during possessions increasingly take place away from the hoop, that isn’t enough to be a versatile, high-level defender against the majority of modern lineups. As team get more and more tape on him, they will find more and more way to exploit his weaknesses.

Next: Indiana Pacers Can’t Keep Up With Portland Trail Blazers

Turner is learning on the job, and there will be mistakes, but it is also easy to see how he can easily fix a few things here and there to become a better defender. That’s the good news: This is all fixable and even before the season he was trying to improve in this area. Expect better things as he gets used to defending in the NBA — on all areas of the court.