On Bennedict Mathurin, choosing his own adventure

In running a maze, the third-year guard also ran through the finish line

By: Caitlin Cooper I @C2_Cooper

When Bennedict Mathurin was a sophomore at Arizona, it was easy to picture how the brash 20-year-old would overlay into Rick Carlisle's playbook. Tommy Lloyd's Wildcats ran plenty of NBA-like actions, some of which were even identical to those that were currently in play for the Pacers. On one night, he would feign setting a stack screen only to instead make a quick "exit" out to the corner to splash a three.

On the next night, Keifer Sykes (wow, there's a throwback!) could be seen making use of a similar escape hatch, likewise darting out to the corner at the same time as the big veered into a pindown for Buddy Hield above the break.

If that's how Mathurin was moving at Arizona, and this is how the Pacers were moving around Tyrese Haliburton, there was reason to think that the two could potentially grow together as natural complements. After all, Mathurin shot 38 percent on threes wheeling around screens in his second year of college. He was a frequent cutter, and he was capable of uncorking his athleticism in the open floor, even as he still maintained his steely gaze for attacking downhill into tilted defenses. Haliburton, meanwhile, dribbled off 1,088 ball-screens in 26 games after being traded to the Pacers, ranking third in the league in total volume over that period, and he appeared primed and ready to kick-start the offense, already offering glimpses of the pace he would come to dictate, jumping out of his skin for outlet passes with his eyes always focused up the court but never fully settled while staying a glance ahead of tertiary defenders.

In the simplest terms, Haliburton wanted to pass the ball, and Mathurin wanted to score the ball. The vision, when imagined within the framework of those very similar set plays, was that the two of them would feed off each other without much risk of feasting on each other. Now, three years later, the framework has considerably less structure, which means the future is reshaping the past in a way that will perhaps inform on the present.

Before Mathurin was drafted, he was the highest usage guard on the roster for Arizona, and he led the team in scoring. When plays were run for him, he generally operated as though the shot was for him, knowing exactly where it would come from and how he would get it. Despite the actual playbook similarities, that's a change from the Pacers, who prefer to play on the fly, moving and shaping up in relation to each other out of what they refer to as "pace after" or random half-court offense. It's in that setting, when quick, unscripted decisions are required, that he has a tendency to turn open shots into either contested shots or non-shots.

Along with some lapses on defense, this was evident at times throughout Indiana's recent west coast road trip. Even as he piled up a team-high nine points in the first quarter against the Lakers, there were still instances when he required direction from his teammates to get the ball where it needed to go.

Or, conversely, shoot when he (initially) needed to shoot.

After getting outscored 145-86 in the four first quarters of that trip, the decision was made to shake-up the starting lineup. For obvious reasons, the Pacers weren't going to not start Tyrese Haliburton, Pascal Siakam, or (insert healthy center here). That leaves Andrew Nembhard, who is responsible for guarding the other team's best player at the point of attack, or Mathurin, who led the team in first-quarter scoring but also first-quarter usage. As such, if a tweak was going to be made without Myles Turner available as a back-stop for a defense that hasn't maintained quite the same level of maximum effort and cohesiveness since returning stateside from Paris, Mathurin was most likely to be that tweak, even if he wasn't the main, let alone only, contributing factor for the slow starts.

To that point, there hasn't been a fast fix -- yet. The Pacers still lost the opening frame at home against the Knicks (-1), as well as on the road versus the Wizards (-2), albeit by much slimmer margins. Still, the return to playing with the bench wasn't the only change for Mathurin, as there was also a change to how he played coming off the bench in Washington, before eventually playing himself into closing time with the starters.

For the game, according to Second Spectrum, Mathurin was the cutter on 29 off-ball screens, marking the highest volume in any game in his career. Even when adjusting for the fact that he came off the bench and logged fewer than 35 minutes, he recorded 43.2 off-ball screens as the cutter per 100 possessions, which far exceeds the 34.0 that he notched as his previous high two Decembers ago in Minnesota.

Those actions were his playground during the second half and overtime, when he exploded for 26 points on 10-of-15 shooting, while repeatedly choosing his own adventure as far as which way to dart and when. Starting in the far right corner, he would set up his man along the baseline with a misdirection cut, only to then return to the same spot he had just vacated as though he was treating Siakam's flex screen like a swinging door that he was popping in and out of.

On the next trip down the floor, when he was being covered by Bub Carrington rather than trailed by Corey Kispert, he took an alternate route to work, sprinting underneath the pair of staggered picks to the top of the key to flow into angled pick-and-roll.

Once there, he demonstrated his growing patience navigating the middle of the floor while setting up the ball screen, changing directions, and keeping his eyes up.

Similar to the play from his time at Arizona, this is very much a play. Of course, he has agency to make reads within the set choreography, but he has a general sense of what the endgame will be in either direction. Notably, those two possessions occurred in sequence when he was playing as part of the bench with Siakam as the thru-line. During overtime, after he had catapulted himself into finishing the game with most of the starters, the Pacers made the call to make the same play-call again.

Likewise, there were also repeat sightings of him looping around a cross screen from Ben Sheppard to fly off of stagger away action on the left side of the floor.

Once he knocked down that shot, with the defense occupied and the big pulled away from the basket, T.J. McConnell was then presented with the momentary opportunity to transform the stagger away action into an isolation to attack the rim.

Again, although some of the starters were on the floor for the Wizards at that point, Mathurin was playing out of sets with the bench lineup that galvanized the turnaround for the Pacers, as what was an 18-point deficit when he entered the game at the 7:34 mark of the third quarter turned into a 134-130 win with him playing the entire fourth quarter and overtime. Coming against a hot-shooting, defense-starved Wizards team that rocked Indiana with early, free-flowing offense and quick-hitters, those movement actions countered for how often the Wizards had the Pacers on their heels by at least keeping them on their toes.

Eventually, on a night when the team's stars undeniably needed a lift (and then some) from the bench, the starters joined by a bright and beaming Obi Toppin melded to Mathurin's play-style, rather than the other way around. Just consider the change in floor spacing that occurred. Normally, when the Pacers run this play, which they call "two side," Mathurin cuts from wing-to-wing over a pair of uneven staggered Iverson-like screens for a clean catch at the area extended from the free throw line. Technically, that then flows into an empty ball-screen, with options to reject and rip the ball baseline or hit the roller.

More often, however, if those avenues are covered up, the ball gets swung back to the middle of the floor into a spread ball-screen to create an off-balance coverage for Haliburton. (Here's a complete video breakdown if a more detailed explanation and visual is needed.)

Here, though, after the Wizards switched the empty ball-screen from Toppin for Mathurin, look at Siakam.

He isn't stepping up to screen for Haliburton. He's staying low, as Haliburton instead throws the boomerang pass to Mathurin and motions for Nembhard to relocate to the dunker spot in what usually signals an isolation for Siakam. That way, not only is a wider gap created for the lanky forward to attack into, but a guard is positioned to protect the rim (so long as they don't off-ball switch as seen below). This means that, in addition to Haliburton deferring to Mathurin out of a play that's typically designed to optimize him, Mathurin also operated out of an alignment that typically optimizes Siakam. And yet, he was the player who was ultimately optimized, fed as the player who scores the ball by the player who passes the ball, albeit with help defense appearing more like an abstract concept and while, yet again, playing out of a play.

But, that's the thing. He won't always make as many shots coming off screens as he did in this game. Per Synergy, he's only canned nine threes out of that play-type all season; however, when he plays with the bench, especially against that caliber of defense, there's more credence to running set plays with him as a focal point, in which there's more clarity, as there also was at Arizona, in knowing where the ball is coming to him and when.

Following a game that saw both him and Toppin standout for less than desirable reasons on defense, there was no looking away from either of them in Washington, as they combined for 59 points to stave off what appeared like a premature, very bad break before the actual All-Star Break. In the end, Mathurin didn't only choose his own adventure as a maze runner, he also chose his own adventure by leaving no question as to whether he should be on the floor until the clock ran out, playing himself into a closing lineup that (for good reason) closed in line with him.

To what extent that continues after the break, with him either continuing to adapt to "pace after" as a starter with fewer defenses lapses or providing reason to finish with the starters, who occasionally adapt to him, is an adventure, three seasons in the making, that his play will likely still have the opportunity to choose.