Anthony Bennett: Misuse, underuse, or both?

Anthony Bennett was the number-one overall pick in the 2013 NBA Draft. And that wasn’t his fault.

This has been explored ad nauseam by the online community, and everyone knows the story: Bennett was a reach at #1 by Cleveland, he had a badly injured shoulder, sleep apnea, and vision problems. All of these circumstances conspired to cause the freakishly athletic power forward to play overweight throughout his disastrous rookie season.

Not only that, Mike Brown, his head coach with the Cavaliers, buried the rookie on a 33-49 team that couldn’t make the playoffs in the miserable Eastern Conference. The Cavs, for reasons unknown other than the apparent potential embarassment (?) of sending the number-one overall pick to Canton, refused to send Bennett down to the D-League to get valuable playing time and experience. Instead, he languished on the bench of a bad team, playing just 663 minutes on the season.

But the point of this piece is not to throw a pity party for Bennett. That’s been done before. And by all accounts, he did a good job whipping himself into shape out in California with Shabazz Muhammad over a few weeks in late summer. Encouraging, certainly, and a sign that Bennett was beginning to take this professional basketball thing seriously.

Working out isn’t the same as playing in NBA games, as it turns out. Being in shape and relatively healthy hasn’t done a lot to improve his on-court production.

Overall, he’s been better in Minnesota over the admittedly minuscule sample size of 23 games and 391 minutes thus far in a Wolves uniform. Most of his rate-based numbers have improved, and, at least for stretches, his long mid-range game was producing nearly as many makes as misses.

Of course, shooting ‘okay’ from around the top of the key but inside the arc doesn’t cut it. It’s an impossibility to be a productive player while a) shooting 56.7% of your overall shot attempts from 16-23 feet and b) only making 40.7% of those shots. Yikes.

Take a look at the below shot chart. Yellow means that Bennett is sniffing league average in those zones, but it’s not pretty.

The funny thing is, Bennett is actually solid around the rim. He does not play in the post, but as the roll-man on high screens, especially with Ricky Rubio at point guard, he’s pretty deadly. With extremely long arms and impressive athleticism, Bennett can score on the move, power through contact, or use touch around the rim.

The problem is, only 34.3% of his shot attempts have come around the basket. Part of this can be attributed to Rubio missing significant time, but part of it is Flip Saunders’ play-calling and overall scheme. The idea of Bennett taking and making jumpers is much better than the reality of him shooting and missing those shots, as it turns out.

And while I’d like to think that Saunders, the veteran basketball man that he is, saw Bennett’s hot streak from mid-range in the preseason and very early in the regular season and realized that they largely weren’t good shots to be taking in the first place (contested long-twos early in the shot clock, for the most part) and that it was an embarrassingly small sample-size, I’m not sure that such a thought process occurred.

Instead, Bennett has spent large chunks of time floating on the perimeter, and generally not crashing the glass when his teammates shoot the ball. While nearly every other number across the board has improved for Bennett thus far in Minnesota, his offensive rebounding rate has plummeted from 8.1% to 4.9% from his rookie year through mid-December of his second season in the league.

It’s probably a combination of the spots that Saunders has Bennett at on the floor and a lack of effort, but whatever the reason, it’s not good. (Especially when 6′-6″ perimeter player Shabazz Muhammad is hustling his way to offensive rebounds at a 9.8% clip.)

One positive is that Bennett’s shot selection slowly seems to be improving. Not the location of his shots, of course, but when he shoots those bad shots. For stretches, it’s felt like Bennett has been playing hot potato on the perimeter, shooting the ball as soon as he touches it. The numbers however, boast a 9.5% assist rate. Not great, but not far off Kevin Love‘s mark of 10.7% so far this year and ahead of guards like Tony Allen, J.J. Redick, etc. It’s also more than double his horrific 4% assist rate from his rookie year.

The only things we can positively conclude at this stage in the season and in Bennett’s career are as follows: he has improved since his historically bad rookie season, he still isn’t a rotation-caliber player, and Saunders is using him incorrectly.

All that said, Saunders has admitted to the media that he’s now coming around to the idea of entering “rebuilding mode” in the absence of three veteran starters, but he’s still playing journeyman Jeff Adrien ahead of Bennett at times, and the former number-one overall pick has seen his playing time dip below 15 minutes per game over the past eight games.

The Wolves don’t know what they have in Anthony Bennett. He needs to a) play a lot, good or bad, or b) be traded to a team that will know how to (attempt to) use him. What they’re doing right now is of an uncertain and waffling nature, and it’s wasting precious time in a young players career, as well as on the clock that’s counting down when the Wolves will need to decide if he’s worth carrying on his hefty rookie salary.

It’s in everyone’s best interest to find out what to do with Bennett sooner, rather than later.

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