Jeremy Sochan is the Spurs’ offensive wildcard
When Jeremy Sochan scores, good things tend to happen for the Spurs. Now they need more of it.
Jeremy Sochan’s offensive growth may be the biggest wild card for the Spurs going forward. That may sound like s tretch considering he is primarily known for his defense, and even though he’s their fourth leading scorer with 11.7 points per game, he’s 8th among current rotation players in field goal percentage at just 43.7%, leading only his fellow sophomores Julian Champagnie and Malaki Branham.
But here’s the thing: when Sochan has a big scoring night, it has a greater impact on the Spurs’ win-loss record — lopsided as it is — than any other Spur. Case in point: when Sochan scores 20 or more points this season, the Spurs are 5-4, including wins against the Thunder, Warriors and Suns. By comparison, the Spurs are 11-36 when Victor Wembanyama scores 20+ points, 8-33 when Devin Vassell does, and 5-22 when Keldon Johnson does it. (Beyond those three, no other current player has more than four 20-point games this season, and the only one that came in a win was Malaki Branham’s 20-point outing at Golden State earlier this month.)
None of this is to say the other three players listed above aren’t carrying their weight — quite the opposite, actually — but rather it shows that the Spurs need an extra offensive oomph from outside their top three scorers to win on most nights, especially since they don’t have the defense to carry them (yet), and Sochan has been the biggest difference-maker in outcomes when he has a big game.
Of course, there are reasonable explanations for the Spurs’ inflated record when he shoots well. The defensive game plan of most teams is clearly to sag off him to double-team Wemby and sometimes Vassell, so teams are willing live or die with whatever Sochan does on offense. But there’s also another reason his big scoring nights make everything better for the Spurs: almost all them include him hitting his threes, which in turn either forces the defense to spread out more to open room for everyone else, or again, they just have to live with Sochan making those shots, and that’s added points the Spurs don’t usually get.
In the nine games he as scored 20 or more points, he has shot a combined 22-45 from three. That’s nearly 49 percent, and it’s a number that is drastically pulled down by his 1-7 shooting night against the Suns on Monday — and even then he hit the one that mattered the most. Otherwise, he has shot .500 or better from three all but one of the other nine games. By comparison, outside his nine 20-point games, he only hit half of his threes one other time this season, when he went 3-6 during a 14-point outing in their loss to the 76ers back in January.
There is a lot more the Spurs need to do this offseason to significantly upgrade the offense, and there is room for improvement for everyone, especially when it comes to three-point shooting. But beyond Wemby and Vassell, Sochan arguably has the highest ceiling of anyone else on the roster, and with his defensive prowess, the Spurs will want him on the floor as much as possible. Improving his offensive game will go a long way towards getting him more minutes, and as we have seen this season, big scoring nights from him provide as huge a boost to the Spurs as anything.
He presumably won’t be under the burden of developing his playmaking skills this summer now that the point guard experiment is over (although it does seem to have done its job in terms of improving his handles and helping him see the floor better), so hopefully he can focus entirely on his shooting mechanics with Jimmy Barron and become an actual offensive threat next season. If so, it would raise Sochan’s ceiling from defensive menace to potential two-way star, and beyond signing or trading for an All-Star this offseason, that could be the biggest boost the Spurs offense receives going forward.
* All stats are courtesy of basketball-reference.com
