Nuggets Film Room: Breaking down Gary Harris’ great cutting ability

The Denver Nuggets’ offense thrives around Nikola Jokic and movement, including excellent cutting. Gary Harris is a key part of it.

A vital part of the Denver Nuggets’ elite offense is movement. Whether it’s Nikola Jokic’s passing or the players curling past screens and darting into the paint around him, ball and player movement is essential to the team’s identity.

Cutting is a big part of it all. The Golden State Warriors were the only team to score more points off cuts last season than the Nuggets, and a leader in ensuring that Denver had so many of these high-percentage shots was Gary Harris.

It goes without saying that Jokic makes everyone’s life easier with how he fires the ball into the paint at just the right moments, but he still needs players to be active, ditch their defenders when possible with effective misdirection and find good lanes to cut. Harris does all of those things well, which helped him have his best year yet in 2016-17 with impressive career-highs of 14.9 points per game and a 50.2 field goal percentage.

In addition to the 42 percent three-point shot that he utilized so effectively, Harris’ ability to nip into the right spots in the paint and get easy layups off Jokic’s dimes helped him be so efficient. It’s one of the reasons why the Nuggets scored 7.6 more points per 100 possessions with Harris on the floor, per Basketball-Reference.com, and why he ranked among the league’s best cutters.

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There were plenty of big men who scored more points off cuts than Harris last season, but Klay Thompson, Gordon Hayward and Giannis Antetokounmpo were the only guards or wings (if you want to class Giannis as a wing, or just a do-it-all freak from the Greek heavens) who surpassed him. Harris scored 2.3 points per game off cuts and ranked in the 76th percentile in terms of his efficiency, scoring 1.39 points per possession, per NBA.com. Even though that efficiency may not be in the NBA’s upper echelon, Harris’ volume on such plays and his stellar standing among non-bigs certainly indicates how good he is.

Harris is decisive. When he sees an opening to cut or thinks he can catch his defender off guard, he won’t wait to capitalize and he has good enough athleticism to burst into the lane, something that’s also a little easier to do when you can trust Jokic to make the pass on time.

This was bad defense by Jeremy Lin to be so late to the punch, but Harris still knew exactly what to do and got himself an and-one layup:

Harris supports the Nuggets’ high-tempo style when he pushes the tempo like this, too. Denver ranked seventh in pace last season, and it’s hard to beat an offense that can score in a flash like this with quick, high percentage shots at the rim:

Here, you can see again how beneficial it is to not only have Jokic as the starting center, but to have Mason Plumlee’s underrated playmaking off the bench (we still need to wait and see if he re-signs in free agency). Harris can punish defenses that aren’t focused, and if his defender switches off for a second as Kyrie Irving does here (no surprise there), Harris won’t hesitate to exploit the gap in the defense:

Again, thanks to having two passing bigs who can pull defenders a little further from the basket (especially Jokic with his three-point range), Harris is perfectly supported to thrive in these scenarios. More so than just taking jumpers and spotting up outside, Harris’ aggressiveness to attack inside helps him be so effective.

This basket is a little different as Harris drove the hand-off from Plumlee from the three-point line, but it still shows how well Harris can fake out his defenders and finish strong at the rim. He doubled back around Plumlee in a flash to send Caris LeVert the wrong way before storming towards the basket and showcasing his finishing ability with a smooth reverse layup past the 6’8″ Rondae Hollis-Jefferson:

The Nuggets were full of great cutters last season, partly due to their own ability and largely due to Jokic facilitating such scoring opportunities with perfect timing. In fact, out of the NBA’s ten most efficient cutters in 2016-17, Denver had four: Darrell Arthur (98th percentile), Jameer Nelson (97th percentile), Danilo Gallinari (97th percentile) and Wilson Chandler (96th percentile).

Even though Gallinari and Chandler were the only players with high volume (Arthur and Nelson had no more than 0.5 points per game on cuts, respectively), this still says a lot about the Jokic effect and what he has to work with.

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Harris is right there with them. And next season, if he takes another step forward with his own game (as he has every year so far) and has both Jokic and Paul Millsap to play off, he’ll be even better.