Shaedon Sharpe could boom or bust for the Trail Blazers

Photo by Sam Forencich/NBAE via Getty Images

Shaedon Sharpe is the most fascinating rookie in the NBA

No player in the 2022 NBA Draft class sparks the same level of intrigue as Shaedon Sharpe.

As a 19-year-old rookie who was rumored to possess a 49-inch vertical and sat out his single season at Kentucky, Sharpe seemed to be half-man, half-mystery.

But now that we have nearly a season’s worth of data on the Canadian-born prodigy, we can begin to parse through some once-unanswerable questions.

What are Sharpe’s strengths? What are his weaknesses? And just how good of an NBA player can he actually be?

The Good

While his alleged 49-inch vertical was never fully substantiated (he did not participate in the 2022 NBA Draft Combine), there is no question that Sharpe is capable of two-footed vertical eruptions, the likes of which we have seldom seen before.

He’s not even two decades into his natural life yet, and he’s already got a mixtape deserving of the AND1 Hall of Fame.

Sharpe’s verticality gives him the profile of a classic 1990s/2000s slasher, meaning that he provides off-ball value with his cutting (82nd percentile, per NBA.com), offensive rebounding (85th percentile for his position, per Cleaning the Glass), and lob-finishing (both in the halfcourt and transition).

Like all great cutters/offensive rebounders, Sharpe can combine the two skills – timing his cuts to collect missed shots and redeem them for two points (remember, offensive rebounding juices offensive rating, see the 2022-23 New York Knicks).

His penchant for play-finishing extends out to the three-point line, where he’s converting on 43.8% of his 1.9 catch-and-shoot treys. That’s the second-highest mark of all rookies (trailing only shooting specialist AJ Green) that take at least one three-pointer per game (minimum 25 games played).

Along with his jaw-dropping aerial exploits and play-finishing powers, Sharpe also has flashed utility as an on-ball scorer in the midrange. He’s in the 67th percentile in long midrange shots and 60th percentile in midrange shots overall (per Cleaning the Glass).

Whether it be that silky jumper or his Devin Booker-lite footwork (more on this in a bit), Sharpe has a smoothness to his game that further ingratiates him with the great slashing two-guards in NBA history.

On defense, his leaping abilities translate into high-end guard rim protection. He’s currently in the 68th percentile in block percentage for his position. With experience, his standing in this category is sure to increase as he learns how to better time his jumps. And eventually, thanks to his physical tools, he could ascend into one of the great guard shot-blockers of his generation.

The Bad

It’s weird because what makes Sharpe such a tantalizing prospect is also what makes him a worrisome one.

As we said, he’s got the makeup of a classical slasher. But there is a reason that we refer to those slashers as classical: they have sort of fallen out of style in the Space Ball Era.

Nowadays, if they aren’t an elite on-ball offensive engine, you want your wing/forward to be someone who plays primarily off the ball and makes lightning-quick decisions (to drive, pass, or shoot) whenever the ball isn’t in their hands.

To excel as an on-ball/off-ball hybrid slashing two-guard in today’s game, you need to have a great first step and tight handle (like Bradley Beal) or be a good on-ball passer (like the aforementioned Booker). We cite these two players in the parentheticals specifically because they are the ones that Sharpe is on the record as saying he aspires to emulate.

Sharpe can’t blitz defenders laterally the way he can rise over top of them vertically. This is evidenced by his low free throw rate (you usually don’t induce defenders to foul you if you can’t create separation) of 2.5 attempts per 100 possessions (Beal’s was already at 4.7 per 100 in his age-19 season). And on top of that, he struggles to maintain a tight handle when dribbling in traffic or absorbing contact (like his classmate Jabari Smith Jr.).

The intersection of those issues (poor first step and loose handle) is illustrated in the next clip below. Here, he fails to attack a closeout effectively as he is stonewalled by the archaic George Hill before getting pickpocketed as he was winding up for a jumper.

Meanwhile, his on-ball passing may be his worst skill right now. One of the best publicly-available measures for contextualizing a player’s pure passing ability is Ben Taylor’s Passer Rating metric (an estimate of a player’s passing ability on an ‘approximately’ 1-10 scale).

During his age-19 season, he posted a respectable Passer Rating of 4.8 (56th percentile in 2015-16). On the other hand, this year, Sharpe has a Passer Rating of 2.4 (5th percentile in the NBA this year). The only rookie with a lower Passer Rating than him is defensively-orientated big man Walker Kessler.

The tape spins a similar fable, as Sharpe is regularly missing reads that his contemporaries (like Dyson Daniels and Jaden Ivey) have demonstrated an aptitude for making.

(Sidebar: also worrisome is that his Passer Rating during his age-19 season is worse than many of the slasher guards he’s often compared to, with the lone exception being Anthony Edwards, who came into the league with a much more explosive first step to counterbalance that deficiency).

Fellow rookie Jalen Williams also fits that slasher build and struggles to create separation with his first step. But he combats these deficiencies by mixing his old-school style with the new-age, read-and-react elements that are now in vogue in the league today.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about Sharpe right now (mind you, he is two years younger than Williams). He’s a below-average off-ball passer (see the Passer Rating we just mentioned) and doesn’t yet have a great feel for spacing.

His read-and-react defense is also a solid negative at this point in time (6th percentile in Defensive Estimated Plus-Minus, per Dunks & Threes). He’s got a questionable motor, and because of it, he sometimes stops sliding his feet when he’s defending at the point-of-attack (first clip in the montage below). On top of that, he’s prone to submissively getting caught on screens (second clip) and aloof off-ball behavior (third clip).

[Sidebar: Sharpe’s poor off-ball awareness is further evidenced by his low steal percentage (a strong indicator of a player’s spatial awareness on the court), which is in the 13th percentile for his position.]

With all this in mind, it is important to note that consistent effort and better off-ball practices are not hard and fast limitations. In fact, they are skills that can be nurtured over time if housed within a strong defensive infrastructure (something this current iteration of the Portland Trail Blazers is lacking but could build in the foreseeable future).

The Outlook

This archetype of player has a strong boom-or-bust nature to them. There’s a chance that Sharpe never lives up to any of his promise and fizzles out of the league like a modern-day Harold Miner.

And there’s also a chance that he comes into his own as an on-ball/off-ball hybrid, improves his playmaking reads, tightens up the bolts on his defense, and develops into an All-Star caliber player.

Which path will Sharpe’s developmental trajectory ultimately go down? That answer will become more apparent in the coming years.

The good news for Sharpe and the Blazers is that his combination of athleticism, spot-up shooting, and flashes of lockdown man defense (or should we say sharp man defense) suggests that his floor is less like Miner’s and more like last year’s version of Andrew Wiggins (if Portland can build that type of stable foundation around him).

But if Sharpe is able to make the improvements we’ve prescribed, Portland will have much more margin for error as they attempt to build out one last contender next to aging star Damian Lillard. They will have that luxury because they will be embarking on this endeavor with the newest descendant in the lineage of great two-guards on their roster.

And that fellow’s name is Shaedon Sharpe.