Darius Garland - The Dancer
For some players, basketball is a math problem. They attack the game and the opponent as an equation to be solved with deliberate precision and calculated moves. To others, basketball is a dance. It’s a swirling, shifting rhythm where opportunities appear and vanish in a blink, and the player’s job is to follow the flow and pick the right window to attack in.
There is no right or wrong approach, as long as the player himself is built for it. Kawhi Leonard is a mathematician. Steph Curry is a dancer. LeBron James is a mathematician. Dwayne Wade was a dancer. Tim Duncan, mathematician. Manu Ginobili, dancer. Kobe, mathematician. Shaq, dancer.
In this draft, the dancer is Darius Garland.
Strengths:
Garland is a natural scorer. He has the potential to be an elite shot creator at the NBA level, with an innate ability to read the defense, change pace out of nowhere, and square his shoulders and launch a shot at an instant’s notice. In both form and function, Garland’s scoring ability looks eerily similar to Damian Lillard.
The elite level handle is what Garland’s skillset is built on. He pounds the rock. Dominates it. For some players, dribbling is this overcomplicated mental exercise. You can see them consciously thinking through the process as they bounce the ball (see Wiggins, Andrew….) For others, it’s so natural it almost happens at a subconscious level. Garland is one of those guys. He doesn’t think about the mechanics of dribbling any more than you or I think about the mechanics of walking. We just….walk. He just dribbles.
That, combined with his show of hesitation and ability to accelerate and brake on a dime, means he can get anywhere he wants on the court. That’s the dancer in him. He meanders looking for the hole in the defense. When he sees it, he explodes.
This makes his skillset perfectly suited to the NBA game, which plays much faster than the NCAA and opens up the floor a lot more.
Concerns:
The biggest concern with Garland is simply that there’s essentially no data to evaluate him with. He missed all but 4 games last year with injury. In an era where analytics have proven themselves a useful tool in evaluation and confirmation, having to rely entirely on the eye test to compare Garland to Ja Morant and Coby White is definitely not ideal.
In addition, in the few games he did play, Garland averaged more turnovers than assists. As a guy who will have to play the point guard position in the NBA, that’s a big red flag, even with the small sample size. Garland struggled to make basic reads in pick-and-roll, a staple play of every NBA playbook. The team drafting him will need to be sure this was due to the sample size and the lack of an elite big to roll with, rather than a Jonny Flynn-esque deficiency in decision making.
In summary:
The Wolves were not tied in any way to Garland until just a few days ago, but all signs point to them aggressively trying to move up to 4 in the draft, and it’s hard to see who else it would be for. Coby White will not go fourth. It seems unlikely Sekou Doumbouya would either.
Minnesota is in desperate need of an all-star caliber shot creator on the perimeter, and a second star to pair with Karl-Anthony Towns. If Garland does indeed approach the Dame Time level of play, he and KAT are a duo the Wolves could definitely build a contender around.
