I think it’s really nice how Jonathan Isaac wants to be a jack-of-all-trades kind of player. It’s just super great that he’d rather be good at all things on the basketball court rather than focus on one or two. Really, really awesome. So great.
I do have some advice for young Mr. Isaac, though: don’t forget that the name of the game is BASKETball, not intangiblesball.
Everyone loved Andrei Kirilenko. He was everyone’s favorite role-player for a good stretch of the early 00’s. People still bring him up in the context of players who do it all while maybe not scoring as much as they could. And that’s the problem. Kirilenko was great and kind of an All-Star level player, but he could’ve been SO much better if he just manned up and said “you know what, I’m going to start actually trying to put the ball in the hole”. Maybe he wouldn’t be an all-timer, but even a few 20+ ppg seasons might put him in the Hall Of Fame. Eventually. Probably not, actually. But maybe.
I don’t want the same thing to happen to Isaac. Where he gets so focused on intangibles (and minor tangibles, like steals and blocks), that he forgets that the point of the game is to score buckets. Giannis Antetokounmpo started off in a similar mold, but eventually just decided to go out there and dunk it every time down the court; he’s now averaging 30 per game.
Isaac’s improved his scoring this year, both percentage-wise and volume-wise, so the trends are positive. His offensive game looks slightly more polished, perhaps; I certainly don’t remember him hitting many fadeaway jumpers his first two years in the league. His three-ball still looks really stiff and bad, but 33 percent is pretty okay, definitely okay enough where if he wanted to shoot 10 of them per game no one would really claim. And I’m not saying he should start shooting that many right away, but by the end of next season, he should probably be close to that.