NBA Free Agency 2017 Player Profile: Brandon Jennings

Ti Windisch

Apr 26, 2017; Washington, DC, USA; Washington Wizards guard Brandon Jennings (7) shoots the ball as Atlanta Hawks forward Paul Millsap (4) looks on in the third quarter in game five of the first round of the 2017 NBA Playoffs at Verizon Center. Mandatory Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

Mandatory Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

Former Milwaukee Bucks could end up being future Milwaukee Bucks once NBA free agency begins. Would Brandon Jennings make for a good pickup?

The Milwaukee Bucks could use a point guard who can pour in the buckets from time to time. Malcolm Brogdon and Matthew Dellavedova are good spot-up shooters and defenders, but maybe a change of pace guard available in NBA free agency could help Milwaukee.

Enter Brandon Jennings, the genius mind behind “We gon’ win in 6,” an enduring Bucks mantra to this very day. What if the Bucks needs Jennings around to actually fulfill the prophesy of winning a series in six games?

Strengths

Well, obviously Jennings knows how to coin a phrase. Win in 6 is so good Adam McGee decided to use it as the title of the Behind the Buck Pass podcast, which includes the original audio from the first time Jennings spoke the phrase in the intro.

As far as on the basketball court, Jennings is most known for being a streaky score-first point guard. He put up numbers, especially in his time with the Bucks, with whom Jennings averaged 17.0 points, 5.7 assists and 3.4 rebounds per game.

In addition to putting the ball in the basket from closer, Jennings can shoot as well. He’s got a career average of 34.6 percent from beyond the arc, which isn’t incredible but it’s far from being bad as well, especially considering just 56.4 percent of his threes are assisted.

Unassisted threes are the variety of triples that can really open up an offense, meaning Jennings provides a boost to team spacing when he’s outside of the three-point arc. Unfortunately, most of the time he’s on the floor he’s handling the ball and doing things besides shooting threes.

Mandatory Credit: Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports

Weaknesses

For a player primarily known as a scorer, the trend of Brandon Jennings’ points per 36 dropping year after year is not a good one. After he put up over 19 points per 36 in 2014-15, Jennings was down to just over 11 points per 36 in 2016-17.

The buckets he gets usually come in an inefficient manor thanks to his love of bad shots. Nearly 35 percent of Jennings’ shot attempts come from between three feet and the three-point arc, areas where his shooting percentages don’t make it out of the 30s.

Those ugly two-pointers are the reason the former Buck has a 38.8 career field goal percentage. That’s strikingly low for a player who has built his career on being a flashy, if streaky, scorer. The buckets are coming less often, and at the cost of a lot of attempted shots.

Since Jennings isn’t exactly an ace defender, he needs to be potent offensively to be worth rotation minutes on most teams. If he’s not making shots right now, it’s hard to see the upside in giving him major minutes.

Finally, Jennings has had some nasty injuries in his career. He broke one of his feet when he was still with Milwaukee, and ruptured his Achilles as a member of the Pistons. It’s not encouraging that in his last stop with a good team, Jennings scored just 3.5 points per game as a Wizard.

Salary

Given all of the weaknesses and troubling trends detailed in the last slide, it’s really tough to see Brandon Jennings getting any more than the $4.8 million the Knicks signed him for last season. And to think that at the time that seemed like a great deal for New York.

Maybe his next deal will be more in line with his most recent one, when the Wizards gave him veteran minimum. At a time when just about every team has a good point guard on the roster, Jennings just isn’t worth that much.

It’s not because he’s awful, but signing Brandon Jennings is betting he can return to the form he once held. Teams would pay for 2012-13 Jennings, who averaged 17.5 points, 6.5 assists and 3.1 rebounds per game while shooting 37.5 percent from deep and nearly 40 percent from the field.

Unfortunately that player hasn’t been seen since Jennings was with the Pistons. It might make sense for a bad team to give Jennings a shot and hope for the best, although the Brooklyn Nets already have quite a few guards on the roster, and some teams without talented guards will doubtlessly draft some this summer.

Mandatory Credit: Tim Fuller-USA TODAY Sports

Fit With Bucks

To put it bluntly, this is a reunion that probably should not happen. Jennings makes those unassisted threes that can open up an offense, but the rest of his game is not so conducive to pace-and-space basketball.

More from Behind the Buck Pass

Jennings will dribble the air out of the basketball while he looks for a shot he likes, and unfortunately with the level of play he’s been at lately it’s not a great idea to invest so much of a team’s offense into him — especially a team that has Giannis Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton around.

The good news is that Jennings’ usage rate was as low as its ever been in his time with Washington. That means he was using less possessions and letting him teammates do more. Unfortunately, that killed his game, as Jennings shot 27.4 percent from the field and 21.2 percent from deep, career-low numbers that really aren’t tolerable for any sort of role player.

Next: Free Agency Player Profile: Ersan Ilyasova

The Milwaukee Bucks do not need those kind of problems. Win in 6 will carry Brandon Jennings’ legacy as far as the Bucks go in the postseason, but the team itself should not try to literally carry Jennings anymore, unless he can quickly prove that he’s still got what it takes to succeed in the NBA in him.

Ti Windisch