Deep Dive: Leonard Miller And The New Age Of 'Tweeners
Minnesota's draft night heist doesn't fit any mold and that might just be awesome.
There was once a time when being a ‘tweener was taboo. If a prospect was labeled as someone who lived in the cold spaces between positions and roles, it was a death knell, forcing many prospects lower down draft boards and rotation totem poles and even more into basketball obscurity. Bit by bit, that stereotype has been burned to the ground, and players like Leonard Miller have strode forth from the ashes.
Well, sort of.
Miller still fell down draft boards, he still felt underrated at the end of draft night, and he still plummeted from a player widely recognized as a late first-rounder and even in the lottery throughout certain highly-educated circles. He still felt like a ball of clay that nobody was quite confident enough to start molding. Standing at 6-foot-10, with a 7-foot-2 wingspan, with a game that spits tendrils into almost every prototypical role without ever mastering one, Miller remains a bit of a mystery box.
Years back, someone without a defined niche like the G-League Ignite prospect would have been punted on draft night or taken at the night’s crescendo without much hope of ever leaving an NBA bench. That’s not the case anymore. Teams — the Minnesota Timberwolves in this case — are smart enough to take fliers on unique prospects, but he still doesn’t slot into the big leagues as someone who makes sense in any one way just yet and that should no longer be viewed as a curse.
As a player, Miller is funky. He is weird. He ticks so many boxes, but many of those boxes aren’t the standardized ones. He creates his own fucking boxes. He takes the old ‘tweener tag and rips it up, foraging into a new world of strange archetypes. For a team like the Wolves, devoid of draft picks and unfathomably committed to an unproven roster, taking the gamble on the late-blooming box-creator is smart process.
But now Tim Connelly, Chris Finch and all of the developmental mentors around Mayo Clinic Square need to be the ones skilled enough to squeeze the most juice out of their peculiar new fruit. Being a positionless alien is a trait worth coveting in the modern league, but at least semi-defined roles will need to be in place to help Miller carve out a dependable skillset at the next level.
Miller could be a legitimate big. A center who does all of the center things without losing his intrinsic ability to do all the wing and guard things as well. The tools are there and it doesn’t take a mental marathon to imagine him playing that role once he finds his feet in the NBA system. In fact, for right now, that seems to be the best path to early success.
For where Miller is at right now — which is admittedly still an ever-changing landscape considering how fast he has developed in the past few years — playing him in a more traditional big man’s role while allowing him to flourish his outlier skills maximizes his strengths and blankets his weaknesses most easily.
That’s because, despite Miller having a strange blend of skills and movements that make him resemble a wing or, at times, even a guard, he does the big man things that you want a big man to do.
There should be a lot of growth to expose in his pick-and-roll game. Because he has a dynamic burst of speed in straight lines, he can rocket into and explode out of screens, unveiling a lane to the rim in situations where slower-footed players often can’t.
This rolling thunder feels easy because his athletic uniqueness allows it to look easy. As the defense hedges the ball screen, Miller can pirouette out of his screen and pounce on the space before the guard can switch back onto him. Because the 19-year-old is so smooth with his movements, the low-man defenders are slow to react and ultimately watch on as he hammers it.
When the low-man does come to block off his rim-dive, Miller can finish with a more controlled body and touch, letting his size overpower a smaller help defender and his silkiness do the talking at the rim.
Fostering that roll-man ability and asking him first and foremost to become a menacing attack hound while torpedoing to the rim feels like a great spot to start Miller’s development. He has a long way to go to harness his volcanic potential, but that might be the easiest way for him to create advantages, relying on his god-givens and not just exponential growth.
Miller is oddly mechanical as a mover, despite his fluency. It doesn’t really make sense how he is moving most of the time. He almost always feels off-kilter and, while that often helps him to bamboozle defenders because he is hard to gauge, his rawness and relative newness to the game make for some clumsy travels and awkward finishes. Then, a minute later, he counteracts that with soft touch and neat footwork. It doesn’t make sense.
Miller played a post-graduate year at Fort Erie, a Canadian international academy, the season before stepping into the G-League, so he can swing wildly from multifaceted gem to still-learning-to-crawl, but there is enough evidence after a season against grown men and genuine NBA hopefuls (or cast-offs) to have faith in the peaks and worry less about the valleys.
He has a strong core and silky touch on low-post fades, step-throughs and spins, and he loves to slice cut from the corners into a post-up or deep seal when he has a defender he can overpower, but that inexperience does come into play on those deep-post possessions. He has a tendency to twist himself into trouble against bigger and stronger defenders.
Where he has the most immediate potential as a contributor is as a high post or elbow hub. From that zone, playing again in a way that many bigs play in today’s league, the Ignite’s offense could run both through him or around him.
As an elbow operator looking to score, the Canadian can be an enormous thorn in the ass of a defense when he turns and goes. Miller’s anthropometrics aren’t overwhelming, and his 212lb draft combine weight doesn’t scream hulking, but he plays with tremendous force in straight-line driving situations.
In his first full season against grown men, he shot 69.1 percent at the rim, ranking in the 83rd percentile across the G-League. Many of those looks came as he steam-trained his way through transition defenses, but Leonard still converted a respectable 61.7 percent halfcourt situations, per Synergy.
Simply put, smaller defenders get squished like gnats when they try to stay in front of him at the elbow.
While he is still able to stick his rump into a bigger defender and then beat them with his burst.
But, because he does have enough skills as a player who was 6-foot-5 not so long ago, he can also make plays for others from the elbow. Again, Miller is raw, he isn’t making high-level reads in really any part of his game, but because of his instinctive talent as a basketball player — not just a large human being — he understands how to make the simple reads and has the talent level to execute them.
Sometimes it’s simple dribble handoff action, an absolute must for any big man who wants to be featured within an NBA offense. All of the best teams have a player who can make the simple handoff while setting a screen, but they also have bigs who can freestyle within a handoff action and use their own advantages to poke holes open for their teammates.
He also set the table sufficiently when the Ignite ran plays for shooters and cutters where Miller was asked to provide the defense-splitting final pass. Possessions like this one can translate immediately in an NBA setting and, should he continue his natural progression, would help him play as a lone big in small-ball(ish) lineups without sacrificing his natural flair.
All of that screams big man right out of the gate. Not a boxy, traditional big. A ‘tweener big. A new age big. A big who can use all of his outlier small-man talents while operating in a big man’s role.
And, while he isn’t necessarily big compared to the giants that litter the league, he is better as a post defender than he is as a chaser of shooters or fleet-footed forwards. In fact, he has been such a disaster in those areas that he would be best suited as someone who guards bigger bodies purely to hide him from those faster matchups.
When he is in the post — or just lining up against bigs in general — he can use that sneaky strength and thickset core to stonewall bigs and bother them with his 7-foot-2 wingspan. That’s where he is best defensively and it might be the only area that he truly held his own last season.
He was even able to translate some of it against inhuman devils from different dimensions like Victor Wembanyama.
What he doesn’t do is defend the perimeter well. At all.
The shooting is a swing skill, for sure, but there is enough of a base there from a catch-and-shoot perspective to have some hope that he can knock down enough pick-and-pop or corner looks to stay away from the danger zone offensively. He started the season slow and icy cold from deep, but in the final 14 games of the season Miller knocked down 37 percent of his triples on a varying shot diet.
The perimeter defense never really came around. He is a slithering giant with the ball in his hands, but he is cumbersome, jumpy and often confused defensively. It’s not a laziness thing, it seems to be more of an awareness and experience thing.
Plays like this one, where his defensive mistakes cascade into one another, became a pretty regular occurrence for him this past season.
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