Whatever deficiencies Justin Jackson may or may not have, I will say that he has the appearance of a really nice basketball player. This is probably partly because he looks like Klay Thompson with the face of Jabari Parker, but there are other reasons. He’s big. He can run, as well as jump. His jumper looks nice. He’s not too thin, but not too fat either. If you told me he was averaging 20 points per game as the secondary option on a championship-caliber team, I would absolutely believe you, assuming that you somehow disguised his identity so that I didn’t know it was only Justin Jackson.
Right now, he’s averaging 5 points per game on one of the worst teams in the league. You would think that being on an even worse team than the Kings would flip some sort of switch in him, the “shoot switch”, and he’d start being a little more assertive, like “I’m the 15th overall pick, dammit, and I’m not going to let Salah Mejri take shots from me anymore”. And maybe the switch went up, like, 15 percent of the way to “chuckmaster supremo”. But that’s just not what Jackson is built to do. He’s built to be a do-nothing wallflower, content to let the game come to him, the light version of Tony Snell. And I don’t think anything will change that, at least until he heads off to China and they tell him to score 40 ppg under threat of being sent to a prison camp usually reserved for Uyghurs.
He did have a nice amount of buckets in this game, true. As far as I can tell, the Trailblazers were extremely surprised to see him moving off ball and didn’t know what to do about it. I would’ve been surprised too. Not that he was moving, because tons of NBA players do that, but that he was shooting after receiving the ball. Teams are beholden to their scouting reports, and I’m sure the blurb for Jackson said “don’t worry about him, he’s not going to shoot”. Hah! They need to update that to say “don’t worry about him, he’ll maybe shoot but who cares”.