Film Review: Is Anthony Robinson’s return to dribble Jumpers a glimpse at his future?

Admit it: part of you might have felt slightly bad for South Carolina’s Jamarii Thomas.

It’s OK.

Put yourself in his position. 

Your squad faces a heaving deficient on the road – again – in a season where the apex is beating Texas to stave off a winless record in SEC play. Garbage time has just begun. You’re faced up with Missouri’s Anthony Robinson. He attacks to your left. You slide. The Missouri guard snatches his dribble back, rises beyond the arc, and fires. 

The shot drops. Then, the sophomore hits you with a shoulder shimmy.

Brazen? Yes. Crass? Slightly. Overzealous?

Not if you have been paying close attention over MU’s past five outings. Over that span, Robinson has averaged 11.2 points and shot 64.7 percent from the floor, punctuated by a 17-point outing against Georgia. Underpinning Robinson’s success is a renewed sense of control as an on-ball creator, especially in early-clock PNRs or late-clock isolations.

And he’s achieved it using a tool that’s increasingly gone out of style in the pace-and-space era: pull-up jumpers. Since MU’s victory against Oklahoma, they’ve made up roughly 41 percent of his attempts from the floor and have been worth a gaudy 1.643 points per shot. 

Now, I’ll dispense with a caveat up front. Robinson’s raw volume of attempts remains modest in relation to his peers. For example, he ranks 39^th in the SEC, per Synergy Sports tracking data. However, a close examination of Robinson’s shooting portfolio quickly reveals their vital value.

It’s impossible to deny that those shots have become endangered over the past decade. Just look at a shot chart: dots scattered around the arc and clustered at the rim. In between, a barren’s no-man land. Yet there’s also opportunity in the forsaken mid-range.

Increasingly, defensive schemes emphasize preventing 3-point attempts or deploying ball-screen principles to protect the sanctity of gaps. But whether a team plays no-middle or pack line, there’s a willingness to concede dribble jumpers. Why? Because it’s easy to see that 0.81 PPS is significantly less than 1.1 PPP.

Yet the arithmetic inverts for Robinson. And that creates a value proposition he should be willing to exploit. Plotting shot volume and value highlights a point already in bold.

It’s easy to see Robinson’s efficiency is among the best in the SEC. Still, when we zero in on peers with similar volume, he’s outpacing ball handlers like Kentucky’s Lamont Butler (1.161), Arkansas’ Johnell Davis, Alabama’s Mark Sears (0.965), and Tennessee’s Zakai Zeigler (0.667), per Synergy. The question is what might happen if he boosted his dosage, but the upward slope of the trendline – at least this season – suggests that players take more dribble jumpers because they’re a reliable look.

To me, it’s worth exploring what an expansion might look like.

Shooting off the bounce isn’t a skill Robinson’s added and honed since he arrived in Columbia. When we scouted Robinson after he committed to Mizzou, it was easy to take note of his knack for on-ball shot creation with the Georgia Stars on Nike’s EYBL circuit. 

Back then, his pull-ups were only worth 0.887 PPS, per Synergy. But context is essential. For starters, Robinson’s volume of those shots was among the highest on the circuit. And secondly, he ranked 11^th among that group of 33 players in efficiency. Again, Ant was outpacing future SEC peers like DJ Wagner (0.800), Josh Hubbard (0.735), Tre Johnson (0.729), and Tahaad Pettiford (0.685). 

So, stopping, popping and knocking down jumpers in a defender’s face was already an act Ant was prone to carry out. 

The question, as always, is what happens in the process of acclimating and adapting to the high-major level. Coming out of his freshman campaign, Robinson flashed a knack for making dribble jumpers. Yet he also struggled with looks with lower difficulty – like layups in transition. So, it made sense for him to focus on mastering easier looks before pulling this club out of the bag. 

Through 28 games, he’s converting layups at a 52.6 percent clip, which grades out as average for a Division-I player. Along the way, though, it’s been easy to see that Robinson can get himself into binds when he puts his head down and tries to power his way to the rim: awkward release angles, ill-fated post-ups, and offensive fouls when extending his off arm. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his pull-up game re-emerged when his foul rate spiked. 

The reason why it might have gone unnoticed was the simple fact that Robinson’s shot selection dovetails nicely with the base actions that make up Missouri’s offense. All it entailed was for Robinson to adjust his preferences. Watch the clips below to see how simple it can be. 

The first snippet is as stripped down as possible: five-out alignment and a high ball screen. Georgia’s R.J. Godfrey hangs in drop coverage, and Robinson walks into an elbow jumper. Seven minutes later, UGA switches that initial screen. No matter, though. Ant resets, and Grill sets a second ball screen in Euro action. Godfrey gives a buffer – potentially against a baseline attack – and Robinson steps back from deep. 

But even in lesser-used setups, Robinson continued to gin up quality looks. He’s utilized a rescreen by Josh Gray in a Spain pick-and-roll. The aforementioned shimmy shot against Thomas originated from a spread pick-and-roll with Jacob Crews effectively setting a ghost screen. Heck, the third clip features three types of ball screens: 77, spread, and high. 

How these touches interlock with the flow of MU’s Princeton-inspired principles is heartening. The first clip shows MU’s using a delay set triggered by an away screen, flowing to an initial high PNR for Tony Perkins, and then running a spread PNR once the ball is reversed to the second side. In the next cut-up, the Tigers deploy a tweaked delay set featuring a wedge screen for Mark Mitchell at the elbow. When that short drive fails, Mitchell returns the ball to Robinson and sets a screen. 

During both possessions, MU’s set and spacing principles keep the floor balanced in a five-out alignment, creating a double gap for Ant to exploit and probe. What stands out, too, is Robinson simultaneously recognizing his defender’s positioning and congestion ahead of him. The first clip shows Dayton Forsythe staying attached to Robinson’s hip to walk him into help. He throws on the emergency break. In the following clip, we see Jacobi Wright scrambling to recover. So, Ant again halts and watches Wright’s momentum carry him on by. 

And in a pinch, Robinson manipulates isolation situations to his benefit. 

Encouraging as this data and film might be, it’s hard to know how much significance it merits. Are we simply seeing Robinson adjust out of necessity because his frame remains lean and susceptible to physical on-ball defense? Is it merely a matter of taking what the defense has been willing to give.? Or does Robinson finally feel comfortable enough with the ball in his hands to start returning to his roots? 

From my seat, I don’t know if we’ll get a resolution this season. Even if MU makes a deep foray into the bracket during March, its remaining tally of games is likely too modest to draw any long-term inferences about Robinson’s scoring package.

Either pathway is acceptable, but the optionality itself is a boon for a program that, at its core, was constructed around extracting gains via player development. To see Robinson progress to the point where a shot that’s otherwise considered poor becomes a weapon should inspire a measure of confidence.

And a smidgen of empathy for defenders Robinson might victimize along the way.