Patches Perry wrote:slick_watts wrote:drawing fouls is a skill in the nba and has been for decades. shai is talented at drawing fouls, as are a lot of players of his caliber over the years. shai is hyper-aggressive, knows how to get defenders off balance and lives in the paint. he rarely settles for pull-up threes. so he's going to get calls. his free throw rate is in-line with other players like him.
In addition to this, and the thing that is rarely talked about, is that players like Shai are not elite athletes relative to their superstar status. They don't have the elite burst or rise of a Michael Jordan, Dwyane Wade, Anthony Edwards, Russell Westbrook, Derrick Rose, etc. Those kind of guys will go by you and you'll never recover as a defender. Shai is not like this. He isn't going to elite first step into a poster dunk. He is a guy who will use crafty footwork to gain an advantage and put the defender out of position, then use his body and positioning to keep them out of position.
If you put an elite athletic defender on Shai, he can gain an advantage, but without a mechanism to keep the advantage, defenders will recover. A lot of people use the cliche "putting them in jail" and I think that speaks to how guys like Shai, Luka, Harden of the past and now Jalen Brunson as well operate. They use their footwork and talent to gain an advantage over a defender, and then "put them in jail" to keep them out of position. The reason this results in so many fouls is defenders will try to force their way back into legal guarding position and will foul in the process.
It's possible for defenders to not get out of position so frequently. Herb Jones and Trey Murphy did a fantastic job of this in the first series. I imagine Jaden McDaniels would as well, but it takes a talented and disciplined defender to guard a talented and disciplined offensive talent like Shai.
Man you just word for word kept me from writing three paragraphs. Appreciate you.
To add, I think you captured why players like Shai and Brunson don't get their due as the superstars they are. When you watch them, by sheer athletic prominence they shouldn't be as good as they are but their craft and mastery of pace takes them to that next level.