SAN ANTONIO -- One of the joys of preseason basketball is watching an unheralded young player show potential, and Spurs rookie Ja'Kobi Gillespie did us one better with flashes of greatness.
The second-round pick popped against the Jazz for 25 points on 9-14 shooting and 4-8 from distance, adding three assists and three steals. This was a game where San Antonio rested most of their top guys in order to evaluate the other end of the bench, and the 22-year-old rookie made the most of one of his first opportunities to prove himself against NBA competition.
The numbers and the context are impressive, but not as important as the way that he put the numbers up. He operates with a level of polish and dynamism that calls to mind some of the best small guards to ever make it work at the NBA level.
He fires bombs from well behind the arc, he carves through the defense with speed and shiftiness and finishes among the trees. It would be silly to draw big conclusions from a rookie in a preseason game, even sillier to make any sort of comparison to any great player. Despite knowing all of this in the logical part of my brain, the pattern recognition part of my brain processed his dismantling of the Jazz and spat out the name of a surefire Hall of Famer.
The logical part of my brain immediately objected. The curious part of my brain wondered if anyone else saw the same thing, so I asked without revealing my exact intrusive thought. Half of the reason I did this was to not poison the well of responses to this basketball Rorschach test, the other half was cowardice.
As revealed by the many and varied responses to the prompt, plenty of people saw shades of greatness in Gillespie's performance.
At a hair under six feet tall Gillespie relies on lateral explosion to get to the hoop, and touch and intelligence to score when he gets there. The first highlight in the clip shows him driving to his off hand before shaking his defender off with a crossover and finishing off balance with classic body-body-ball positioning. He's short but sturdy and strong, capable of driving through certain defenders to create contact and space.
He crossed from left to right, beat his defender and drew three more in the paint, hovered in the air, and dumped it off to Tarris Reed Jr. in the dunker spot just before landing. Gillespie and Reed have been developing chemistry since Summer League, and it shows in the pick and roll. On a double screen up top Gillespie crossed over to split defenders, then read Reed's Gortat screen perfectly for another crossover and an easy layup.
When Gillespie grabs the ball in the backcourt his head is up and he preps his body for a heave pass if it happens to be there, one of many examples of his attention to detail. Defenders have to close up to him because he's willing to fire from anywhere. If he's open on the catch, shot's going up. If his man goes under the ball screen, shot's going up.
The threat of his shot opens the rest of his game, as seen on a handoff where the defender went over Reed's screen and Gillespie burst through the lane with the ball in his left hand for a scoop layup over the help defender.
On perhaps his most impressive play of the day he nearly lost control of the ball before snatching it back and maintaining his dribble on the baseline. As he turned to face the court and evaluate the defender relaxed for just a moment, and that's all Gillespie needed. He went right back to full speed for a lefty in-and-out dribble along the baseline, finishing on the near side of the glass.
That's probably the play that resulted in the most eyeballs falling out of skulls and lofty comparisons. Gillespie grew up a big Chris Paul fan, and the heady fake definitely looks like something out of CP3's bag.
Some Spurs fans saw Patty Mills, or Tony Parker, or a combination of the two. Others saw a smaller, less explosive, right-handed facsimile of Manu Ginobili or Dylan Harper. Outside of San Antonio, fans saw flashes of a full range of role players and true legends. A few people said Jose Alvarado, which feels like a reasonable projection in terms of role and career trajectory. Others mentioned Dennis Schroeder and Jeremy Lin, perhaps it's something about the number 17.
On the higher end of the hoping and dreaming spectrum is the place where you squint a bit and you can see inspiration from several under-the-rim All-Stars. It seems Gillespie has already adjusted to NBA range and beyond, which pairs well with his ability to drive both ways and score in traffic. He's got a polished and versatile set of skills, and he uses it to create baskets for himself and for his teammates.
Jamal Murray's name came up a ton, which makes sense given the strength in pretty much every area of his game. While many saw shades of one of the greatest marksmen ever in Damian Lillard, I found I wasn't the only completely insane inhabitant of That Looked Like Kyrie Irving Island.
None of this is to say that Ja'Kobi Gillespie will have a career like those guys, but when he played the best game of his life in the preseason it made basketball fans think of those guys. On one hand it's obviously a little overboard for the 42nd pick on a Two-Way contract who hasn't played an NBA game yet. On the other hand, Gregg Popovich once told us he saw similarities between Bryn Forbes and Steph Curry.
How did the Spurs manage to draft yet another talented guard? NBA teams tend to avoid spending high picks on shorter players, especially if they spent multiple years in college. The developmental ceiling is seen as much lower. Guys like Gillespie wind up on teams that need consistency and production, and they need to prove themselves in those areas at this level.
Some teams find gems outside the lottery, but it would be virtually impossible for a vertically-challenged second-round pick to become an All-Star, or unanimous Finals MVP and King of New York. On an unrelated note, lots of people who saw Gillespie's tape against the Jazz emerged with 'Baby Brunson' as their takeaway.
The Spurs will hope to distribute their point guard minutes among Dylan Harper, Steph Castle and De'Aaron Fox, with heavy overlap and at least one of them on the court at all times. Gillespie will likely spend a lot of his season making his bones in Austin. If all he does this year is hone his craft in the G League and in practice against San Antonio's fearsome backcourt, it would be a positive for his development.
Still, the Spurs will probably encounter scenarios over the course of an 82-game season where they need their reserves to step up. There are always a certain amount of injuries, and even when healthy the fourth-string point guard becomes a much more important position if the top three guys all start together.
Jordan McLaughlin brings a steady hand and eight years of NBA experience, and David Jones Garcia plays with pop and flair but also some streakiness as he returns from an injury that ended his rookie season prematurely last year. If Gillespie can prove himself to be more dynamic than McLaughlin and more consistent than Jones Garcia, he can make a case for the top spot among reserve point guards.
He'd love to be promoted to the full roster one day, but he knows the only way that's gonna happen is if he keeps his head down and keeps making the most of his opportunities to show flashes of greatness. Before his first real NBA game, he's already doing that.
This article was originally published on www.si.com/nba/spurs/onsi as Spurs Rookie Ja'Kobi Gillespie Shows Flashes of Greatness in Preseason Breakout .
