The Patrick Beverley Effect

There’s one main reason why one might find yourself eating pumpkin: It’s in a delicious pie.

There are plenty of other benefits to pumpkin, to be sure. The seeds are delicious. It’s healthy. It’s the best latte spice out there. But pumpkin pie dwarfs the remainder of the pumpkin-related purposes.

Similarly, there is one key reason that recommends Patrick Beverley to this specific iteration of the Milwaukee Bucks: He is one of the best pick-and-roll defenders in the league. There are surely more to his abilities, but that is the pumpkin pie of his game. 

Beverley only averaged 19.6 minutes per game for the Philadelphia 76ers this year, but he defended a top-60 rate of picks as the ballhandler defender within those minutes. And among players to have defended at least 400 picks, none held opposing offenses to a lower points per chance. 

In his first game for the Bucks, he defended the ballhandler during six picks. Milwaukee allowed only three points in those possessions. The Bucks are now 2-1 with Beverley in the lineup. There has been more to those games than Beverley’s performances, but he has fit in smoothly, accomplishing exactly what the Bucks needed. 

He has been one of the league’s best pick-and-roll defenders through a variety of means. He spent his time with Philadelphia playing mostly drop-and-over, which is exactly what the Bucks play as well. And while the team defense has improved in some ways under Doc Rivers, the pick-and-roll defense remains a work in progress. Before acquiring Beverley, it allowed the fourth-highest points per chance among teams since Jan. 29, when Rivers coached his first game. 

Enter Beverley. He will chase ballhanders inside the arc and fight to recover position. He uses nifty footwork to dodge screens, and he ranks in the 91st percentile at not running into ball screens as the ballhandler defender. As a result, he often finds himself behind the balhandler, but he does so within the scheme of the defense and in order to shepherd the ball towards the big. He is excellent at fighting back into position once he finds a ballhandler in front of him. He worked well with Joel Embiid in Philadelphia, and he should have the same chemistry with Brook Lopez in Milwaukee once everyone is healthy and accustomed to the system. 

He can even occasionally detonate an entire possession by simply taking the ball from his opponents, and not just by jumping their dribbles. He has a huge block rate for a point guard; among players standing his height or below, he has the fifth-highest block rate in the league. While many of his blocks are mislabeled steals when he slaps down on the ball when a shooter is rising, he gathers a fair share of swats at the summit, too. 

While the Sixers mostly asked him to go over screens, he also switched as his second-most frequent defensive approach in the pick and roll. Beverley is comfortably switching onto wings and sticking with them for a possession, or even onto bigs and three-quartering the post to deny them the ball. Though Beverley has only defended a handful of picks so far in Milwaukee, he has actually switched more than any other defensive approach. He is also terrific at blitzing to get the ball out of opponents’ hands, and he digs into dribbles with aggression, often forcing steps backwards to allow for his teammates to recover their positioning. 

At times, the Sixers actually matched Beverley up against enormous players, with him playing plenty of defensive possessions against monster wings like Anthony Edwards, Scottie Barnes, Jayson Tatum, and others. The commonality between those possessions is that they scored little; Beverley takes perceived mismatches seriously, with a chip on his shoulder. 

Similarly, the Bucks used him mostly against Michael Porter jr. in their 112-95 win over the defending champions on Feb. 12. The Denver Nuggets had four turnovers in those 13 possessions, including one forced by Beverley himself on Porter.

That has long been his modus operandi: play hard, play fierce, and never stop moving. As a result, Beverley has always been a good defender, with his teams defending opponents better with him on the floor versus the bench during every season of his career except 2014-15. He has done that in many ways beyond how he defends pick and rolls.

Beverley is one of the best rebounders for his position. Despite his size, he battles in the paint, no matter the size of his opponent. He has been at or above the 75th percentile among point or combo guards for both offensive and defensive rebounding rate every season since 2018-19, excepting his partial year as a Laker.

One of the major sacrifices of increased switching across the league is that it gives opposing offenses added offensive rebounding opportunities; when players are in rotation and guarding across the positional spectrum, it gives crashing lanes and makes boxing out much harder. Beverley helps in those situations. He will box out a big or die (get fouled) trying. If he’s in rotation and doesn’t have a specific player he’s guarding, he’ll find someone to hit as the ball is going up. Effort will never be a question mark.

Beyond the skills and abilities, Beverley is a veteran who knows how to win. Like Rivers, or Jae Crowder last year, Beverley is one of the most experienced playoff performers in the league -- he has played in 65 playoff games, the 44th most since entering the league in 2012-13. He will help organize the team’s transition defense, help communicate coverages on the floor, and ensure everyone is where he is supposed to be. That will have other cascading advantages; zones -- with which Milwaukee has struggled under Rivers -- will be more solid, for example.  

Beverley’s early minutes as a Buck has typified those tertiary abilities. He is keeping the offense organized and playing within himself. In Beverley’s very first minutes, against the Charlotte Hornets, the Bucks got two quick stops behind his energy and went on a quick 6-0 run. He played only 12 minutes, but his impact was immediate and sustained. In fact: The first thing he did was force a stop defending the pick and roll, run to the corner in transition, and hit a 3-pointer.

To that point, there are offensive benefits to employing Beverley, too. He is a shooting specialist, taking 42 percent of his shots from deep this year. But that’s actually the lowest rate of his career. He’s augmented those jumpers with the second-highest rate of drives of his career -- and the second-most efficient. He’s passing and shooting on a perfectly equal number of drives, so he’s not a one-trick pony there. When he’s looking to score, the shots are usually coming from the short mid-range, where he’s taking 30 percent of his shots -- an 85th-percentile rate for combo guards. He’s very comfortable with floaters and runners and push shots, on which he’s shooting 50 percent, a top-15 mark in the league among players with 50 or more such attempts. 

When Beverley drives to pass, the Sixers have been scoring even more efficiently than when he is the one shooting. Beverley has a good nose for internal passes for layups. He finds cutters, lobs to his bigs, and bounce passes through tight windows. 

Beverley will keep the chains moving offensively, and he’s more than just a standstill shooter. Still, don’t expect him to step in as a star scorer. Milwaukee’s offensive hierarchy is set. Beverley is coming to town as a defender. The offense is a cherry on top of the defense. 

Expect him to fit into a variety of lineups. Beverley will step in as Milwaukee’s backup point guard behind Damian Lillard, which has been his only usage so far. But he could play alongside Lillard for stretches as well. That would see Beverley defending at the point of attack to keep Lillard off the ball. If Milwaukee wants to ramp up its transition attack by playing lots of guards together, Beverley and Lillard can play alongside Malik Beasley for a flamethrowing combination with Beverley guarding forwards and trying to force as many turnovers as possible. If the Bucks want to downsize with Giannis Antetokounmpo at center, Beverley will certainly be on the court. His physicality and rebounding make such options possible. 

Ultimately, the Bucks have offense already on the roster at the guard spots; Beasley, Andre Jackson jr., and MarJon Beauchamp can all provide a variety of abilities. But the Bucks needed defensive versatility as the straw to stir the drink. That’s where Beverley will fit in. He won’t harm the offense, even if he isn’t the nuclear option that Beasley is. But he will make so much more possible. 

At the bare minimum, he is going to help lock down the pick and roll for Milwaukee. The pick and roll is the staple food in the NBA, the alpha and omega of league-wide offense. It is the primary play type of every team across the league. And Milwaukee has not been stopping such a foundational play for much of the year. Beverley will help there. That’s lifting the floor, adding vital and core skills to a team that needs them. And by unlocking so many other variations of the team, he will also help raise Milwaukee’s ceiling, allowing the team’s best to be even better. 

If Beverley does fix Milwaukee’s pick-and-roll defense, then all the Bucks will embrace their inner pumpkin pie and be giving thanks when it comes time for the playoffs.