Denver Nuggets: Will Barton is stepping up when needed

Heading into tonight’s game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Denver Nuggets have found success at the second scoring option in Will Barton. Filling the shoes of Jamal Murray, Barton is fully healthy and looking solid.

Before this season, it was looking like Most Improved Player candidate Michael Porter Jr. was going to build on his successful end to 2020-21 and become an efficient second scoring option for an entire season.

While it’s a very small sample size, and there’s little to seriously take away from just two regular season games, Will Barton’s play has been promising.

The longest-tenured Nugget has had a rough few seasons, dealing with injuries that seem to come at the absolute worst time and having an unstable role on the team. Entering this season, Barton was fully healthy and knew that without Murray, there will be shots to go around on the perimeter.

In the two games this season, Barton has averaged 16 points a night with 5.5 assists while shooting 48 percent from the floor and a clean 50 percent from the 3-point line. He’s trailing only Nikola Jokic in minutes per game and has been asked to hold up some offensively-inept bench lineups.

Michael Porter Jr. has been relatively quiet in the first two games and that’s very likely to change, but there’s reason to believe Barton can keep up his solid play.

His 19.1 usage percentage is in line with the rest of his career (in fact, it’s slightly lower than average) and it’s not likely to go down anytime soon. Losing Jamal to an injury opens up a lot more opportunities for the rest of the team, including Will the Thrill.

Remarkably, Barton has zero turnovers on the season. He has tallied 11 assists on the young season but not a single turnover, even against the San Antonio Spurs, a team that feasts on ball pressure and steals.

Without Jamal and the replacement lead guards, Monte Morris and Facundo Campazzo, more than happy to cede the ball-handling duties, there are opportunities for Will Barton to lead the break and make decisions.

It’s plays like the one above where you can see that he’s empowered to get out and run. To be fair, Michael Malone would be crazy not to let Will be Will and always hunt for baskets, but by taking a step up the offensive totem pole, he can now play a more central role on offense.

Instead of being the third or fourth option on offense, he can attack more off the dribble and make smart decisions.

And another set Malone likes to run is what I affectionately call the ‘put your best players on the weak side and they’ll figure it out’:

This ‘play’ was run over and over again in the bubble playoffs. As soon as Jokic thinks he has a mismatch (that’s every single matchup in the NBA), the rest of the team clears out and the ball handler can either throw it down low or hunt for his own shot off a screen.

In the above play, Morris sets a screen to give Jokic an extra second on Jakob Poeltl before absolutely freezing him.

It’s these kinds of plays that should empower Barton to really make the most out of this season. On the surface, it looks pretty simple: give the ball to the best center in the world. In reality, the Morris screen gives Barton an escape option if he wanted to create for himself before swinging again.

MPJ will almost definitely average the 20-plus points we all assumed he would this season (especially against the slow-footed Cavaliers) but a strong start by Will Barton can easily be parlayed into a strong month, then a strong half-season, and then a strong season.

The longest-tenured Nugget has stuck around for a reason, he’s good at basketball.