Swing Skill Series: Can Shawn Phillips Jr. defend reliably in space?

Each summer, I carve out time to watch each of Missouri’s transfer additions play with their former squad. How do I choose the viewing menu? The pool is comprised of games they played against teams that finished in the top 100 of KenPom. Using descriptive stats, I identify five “median” games for that player. Those viewings are the basis for the Swing Skill Series, which fuses data and video to highlight a facet of a player’s game that might influence the scope of their impact once they put on black and gold. 

Under different circumstances, the waning seconds in a road victory at Colorado might have stood as an inflection point for Shawn Phillips Jr.’s two seasons at Arizona State. 

Eleven seconds remained. The Sun Devils had just turned the ball over in the backcourt. And Colorado would get a crack at overcoming a 69-68 deficit. Sebastian Rancik curled over a screen at the top of the arc, cleanly snagged the inbounds pass, and turned into the middle gap. Looming at the restricted circle, Phillips rotated, elevated and gently volleyed Rancik’s runner out of bounds.

Afterward, coach Bobby Hurley wasn’t measured in his praise. With Jayden Quaintance sidelined by an ankle injury, Phillips stepped into the breach, and his coach didn’t focus on the 13 points or nine rebounds the junior offered.

“His length around the basket challenging shots, blocking shots, the block he had there at the end where all hell was breaking loose was huge,” Hurley told reporters.

Yet hindsight tells us that night in late January was an outlier for Phillips, whose two seasons in Tempe were defined by ill-timed foot injuries, fluctuating minutes, and foul trouble. The former top 150 talent didn’t lack opportunities to take hold of a larger role, either. 

As a sophomore, he was the lone post player left on ASU’s roster after Warren Washington transferred to Texas Tech. Yet he only averaged 3.9 points in 16.1 minutes after moving into the starting lineup as the season wound down. Similarly, Quaintance’s absence gave Hurley the chance to bestow Phillips with a significant role.

“He gets lost in the shuffle, maybe with some of the freshman and the upside they have for the future, but Shawn is right at the top of the food chain in our program as far as raw upside potential if he puts it all together,” Hurley told reporters. “Hopefully, the switch gets turned.”

While Phillips found a modest niche as a rim finisher, averaging 7.4 points on 66.2 percent shooting, he groped around the dark defensively. According to Synergy Sports, he allowed 0.917 points per possession, and he committed almost six fouls per 40 minutes. 

But those struggles weren’t confined to 15 games, either. If we lump together every high-major player from the past two seasons, Phillips ranks in the 15^th percentile, and he ranks 176^th out of 210 peers with similar involvement on that end of the court. 

When Phillips committed to Missouri in mid-April, however, we left some wiggle room open. Maybe he was surrounded by poor perimeter defenders. Or perhaps Hurley’s schematic preferences didn’t accentuate Phillips’ skill set. 

Digging into full games, however, didn’t offer absolution. 

Now, Arizona State wasn’t a juggernaut defensively. The Sun Devils’ adjusted defensive efficiency ranked 56^th among high-major programs, and its raw efficiency in the half-court checked in at No. 44. Yet data tells us that ASU’s most-used guards — Alston Mason, Joson Sanon, and Adam Miller – graded out well. Only Amier Ali, a freshman, stunk, but he was the fifth in the pecking order. 

Lineup data also reinforces the idea that ASU’s defensive issues didn’t start with a porous perimeter. Using on-off splits, it’s obvious that Phillips and Bashir Jihad failed to provide enough insurance after they checked in.  

And just to confirm our suspicions, reviewing ASU’s most common lineups shows the bottom fell out of the boat once Hurley deployed Phillips. Only one of the groups features Ali, Jihad and Phillips. Ironically, the worst group included three above-average defenders: Mason, Miller, and Quaintance. 

There’s an old aphorism in medicine that applies here: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Phillips’ metrics are poor. So are his on/off splits. And he’s a mainstay in leaky lineups. We’ll add some schematic context in a moment, but ultimately, it’s hard to conclude that Phillips wasn’t a liability. 

MU’s upside argument goes something like this: Phillips has the wingspan and lateral agility to swat shots, snatch boards, and fits more naturally into aggressive pick-and-roll coverages. And to be fair, there are moments in Phillips’ film where that rationale holds up. Reality also puts some dents in it. For example, Phillips owns an 8.2 STOCK% for his career. That’s pretty good. Except he commits two fouls for every block or steal he tallies while racking up 7.8 whistles per 40 minutes.

As Hurley learned well, what good are Phillips’ physical tools if applying them ends with him as a bystander? 

What we haven’t discussed is how Hurley deployed the big man, and it’s where watching full games proves vital. For as brusque as Hurley’s personality can be, facets of his defense were conservative – almost passive. Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising. ASU’s lead and combo guards were slightly undersized for their positions, while his two wings were freshmen. Ratcheting back the intensity served to insulate them. 

However, it also meant Phillips played in a system that utilized him as a form of containment, particularly in thwarting pick-and-rolls. The Sun Devils defaulted to drop coverage. It works just like it sounds: When Phillips’ man jogs out to set a ball screen, he drops back and sits one or two steps below the screener. At the point of attack, Mason or Miller tended to push the dribbler or the screen. From there, Phillips backpedals to keep the guard in front while staying even with a big man rolling to the rim.

Ideally, Phillips holds the driver up long enough for the guard to recover. If the handler does look to score, they’re attempting a contested pull-up or floater — assuming they’re not skilled at jump-stopping and playing off two feet — while staying deep enough to take away a lob feed to the roller. Below, you can see what it looked like when Phillips did a bang-up job.

There’s a mishmash of actions and locations in that package, along with some instances where Phillips switches late in a position. But in every clip, his footwork and agility are deft enough to bottle up a driver or force them into poor decisions as a passer. Unfortunately, that’s the entire sample. 

At its core, drop coverage is a calculated risk. You’re allowing a handler to use a screen and expose your big man to a mismatch in space, but it also encourages pull-ups, lets off-ball young off-ball defenders stay home, and discourages kickouts. Of course, this assumes the on-ball defender excels at fighting over and getting back into the play – and that dribbler isn’t crafty.

This is what happens when drop coverage goes sideways. 

First, this montage should reinforce why the brain trust adored Donovan Dent. The New Mexico point guard, who transferred to UCLA, excels at manipulating pace and using a snake dribble to change directions. But notice how common it is for ASU’s guards to get clipped going over the top of the screen? The extra time they use gives creators like Dent more time to slalom away from Phillips. Next, look at what’s happening off the ball. In almost all these clips, Phillips fails to maintain distance, commits to the handler, and lets the roller get behind him. 

In Phillips’ defense, he had no say in the guards Hurley recruited, and his coach wasn’t soliciting his input on game plans. This season, he’ll have the inverse in Columbia. Anthony Robinson II and Sebastian Mack assert their will at the point of attack and get skinny over the top of screeners. That physicality and control matter. 

What’s worrisome, at least to me, is Phillips’ penchant for losing track of rollers. Per Synergy, he allowed 1.118 points per possession in those situations last season, ranking in the 25^th percentile among Division-I players. Dissecting what goes wrong is straightforward: Phillips gets fixated on dribblers and fails to notice a roller making a beeline to the rim or peeling off for a catch-and-shoot. 

Again, it’s Phillips’ responsibility to see the ball and the man. In some of the clips, you’ll see that the guard defending the dribbler makes a relatively easy recovery. Yet Phillips has committed, erased his buffer and left ASU committing two bodies to the ball. 

As we’ve mentioned in the past, MU’s base PNR coverage is called 5-Up, which is another way of saying the Tigers ask their bigs to play at the level, softly hedge, and sprint back to the paint. If Phillips overcommits in that coverage, the downstream result might be a mismatch in the lane after a guard rotates to tag the roller. And even if the ball doesn’t get dumped inside, a timely pass puts the defense in rotation and scrambling.

Sometimes, Synergy might mislabel rollers as cutters, but this mistake tends to occur when the action involves a dribble handoff run in the slot. Or it might be the result of a blown switch on the perimeter. The clips below display both. 

You can probably sense a unifying element as well: spatial awareness. Often, Phillips gets so locked in on the action in front of him that he doesn’t know what’s unfolding on the rest of the floor. For example, there’s a clip where he and Ali are both watching a Cincinnati player with the ball in the slot. But they’re not trapping, and there’s no baseline help. One of them should take the unattended Bearcat. Instead, it’s an easy pass to an angle cut. The kinetic chain of that initial mistake leaves Jihad no choice but to rotate over, leaving his vacated assignment to freely cut to the short corner for a dump off. c

Oh, every so often, opponents went so far as to set grenade screens in the backcourt, allowing their point guard to accelerate into the middle gap. If Phillips was stationed there, the result might be a blow-by and a foul. Maybe another Sun Devil would stunt, resulting in an easy kickout. Or Phillips might not execute a controlled closeout.

This time of year, optimism is a given. Every player looks great in workouts, and staffers tout how their development program and scheme will unlock potential their colleagues couldn’t access. However, the reality is far blander. By the time a prospect like Phillips reaches this part of their age and skill curve, their impact is locked in. They may improve at the margins, but it’s rare to see significant jumps in efficiency.

Remember last summer? We were musing whether Josh Gray could make the same transition confronting Phillips. The answer was no. Gray’s defensive metrics guarding screeners and rollers remained unchanged. So did his foul rate. Meanwhile, his ratio of fouls to disruption (0.544) only saw a modest improvement. 

In other words, Gray was who he we thought he might be. Yet MU could accept those imperfections because the big man fulfilled his objective of wiping the glass and throwing his weight around defensively. His defensive mobility wasn’t part of the skills suite that piqued the Tigers’ interest.

That’s not a compromise that would work for Phillips, who was brought in as a veteran piece of hardware that should seamlessly run the program’s operating system. To his credit, Phillips flashed the ability to do it. Yet MU’s task is coming up with an effective patch to stop the worst glitches.