Film Study: Breaking Down What Georges Niang Can Bring to the Indiana Pacers

Georges Niang has shown some Draymond Lite capabilities during his NCAA career, and the Indiana Pacers may have found a rotation player in the second round.

This is a guest post being republished to 8 Points, 9 Seconds. It was written by Donovan Reed and originally appeared on Patterns of the Pick and Roll.

Just four years after the 2012 NBA Draft, Draymond Green is already the go-to woulda-coulda-shoulda selection of NBA talent evaluators. Prompt nearly any GM or scout, and they’ll besiege you with assertions that they were the only one in their war room lobbying for Green, or they were merely one selection away from snatching him up. Amazing how the guy everyone wanted somehow lasted until the 35th overall selection.

Down the road, Georges Niang may garner the same envious adoration from NBA decision makers. Niang is far from a perfect facsimile for Green, but squint just hard enough and you’ll see double. The most striking similarity is his value as a trap-buster. Teams send doubles at players like human heart attacks Damian Lillard and Steph Curry, forcing the rock out of the hands of these off-the-dribble bombers. Screen with the passing-bereft Al-Farouq Aminu, and the possession stalls out, asphyxiated. Screen with Draymond Green, and you have a dangerous 4-on-3 half-court fastbreak.

Niang thrives as a Draymondesque playmaking four. Leave him alone to corral the ball-handler, and watch as he picks the defense apart from the inside:

The best shooters make the best screeners, and there’s reason to believe Niang will be deadly from the outside. He canned 40% and 39.2% of his 3-pointers his final two years at Iowa State on a sample size of 258 trifectas; not huge, but not minute either. His college free-throw shooting, more highly correlated with NBA 3-point shooting, backs up his percentages from downtown; he shot 80% from the stripe each of his final two seasons.

Fear of Niang’s set shot forces the defense’s hand in ball-screen situations. Icing or trapping the ball-handler means gifting Niang a wide open 3 on the pop. Switching means subjecting a guard to the torture chamber. What Niang lacks in height he makes up for with a groovy low-post game equipped with spin moves and nifty short-range floaters:

Send help, and Niang simply aborts the low-percentage look, finds the open man and keeps the offense chugging along:

But Niang’s offensive arsenal means almost nothing if he is played off the floor defensively, and unlike Draymond he will struggle to protect the defensive glass.

He’s no J.J. Hickson; he understands how and when to box-out and can time the ball off the rim like a metronome, but these advantages are negated by a lack of Jay Bilas’s favorite eight-letter word: wingspan.

Emphasizing such a seemingly trivial detail sounds downright dumb at face value, and perhaps rightfully so. Wingspan is excessively harped on, clouding the bigger picture of many draft prospects. But Draymond’s 7-foot-plus wingspan allows him to high-point the ball in a way Niang’s T-Rex arms simply can’t. Even when Niang has inside rebounding position, he can’t prevent longer players from reaching over the top of him and keeping the ball alive, a Tristan Thompson specialty:

Things get better for Niang on the perimeter. Despite his rolly-polly physique, he has the agility to switch onto quicker ball-handlers without being used as a thru street to the rim:

That said, he will struggle when switched onto the league’s quickest jitterbugs. Everyone has trouble sticking to Damian Lillard and Kemba Walker, but many bigs can dissuade finishes at the rim with a thicket of thrashing limbs.

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Once Niang has ceded an angle to the lane, he has little hope of a chasedown block.

Trapping or dropping against the pick and roll with Niang will leave small pressure points to be exploited by smart opponents. Defenders impede passes out of traps by keeping their arms spread wide and hands held high. Even when spreading ’em like my stepdad during his drunk and disorderly at the Good Charlotte concert, Niang isn’t much of an impediment.

Dropping back against the pick and roll, Niang will need to dance the ballet between ball-handler and roll man flawlessly. Drop too far back, daring ball-handlers to meet him at the rim, and gifted finishers will be all too happy to oblige. Play too far up, and premier lob threats will feast on his ground-bound game.

Still, most of these holes are either small or relatively easy to mask. And like Draymond, Niang graduates college with an advanced degree in big-man help rotations (and an undergraduate degree in marketing, which may not help him quite as much). He makes up for what he lacks in verticality by almost always being in the right place at the right time:

Here, he spots an Iowa player driving baseline and comes all the way from the weakside corner to cut off the lane; only a handful of bigs have the brains and the mobility to make that play.

He may not possess the same moxie battling in the low post as Draymond, but there is evidence he can more than hold his own. His low center of gravity and strong base make him a cinderblock for larger players to move.

Even yielding an 8-inch height advantage to Adam Woodbury, for example, didn’t prevent Niang from kindly escorting him out of the restricted area:

Offensively, he can be a vital cog that keeps an offense humming, the Tetris piece that makes everything else fit. Defensively, the fit is more precarious. In the wrong matchups, he is a liability — getting roasted by road-runners and pulverized on the glass by oversized bullies. In the right matchups, he is a terror — switching across all five positions and providing backline stability.

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His holes are obvious. He appears too diminutive to thrive in the front court, too spherical to thrive in the backcourt. He will be 23 by the start of the coming NBA season. While it is naive to suggest he is an old dog, incapable of new tricks, it is reasonable to assume his growth is near complete.

But teams focused on these shortcomings run the risk of losing out on a highly-skilled amoeba uniquely equipped to succeed in the modern NBA.