Dylan Harper Is Ready For The Moment

As most home teams do in Game 2 after dropping a series opener, the San Antonio Spurs evened their series with a vengeance Wednesday night, rolling the Minnesota Timberwolves, 133-95. None of the visitors scored more than 12 points, each of the 14 Minnesota players who saw the floor posted a negative plus-minus, and Anthony Edwards evaluated his team’s performance with quotes such as, “My momma used to tell me that a hard head make a soft ass. That’s what happened tonight.” The Spurs’ stars finally showed up, though the author of the game’s biggest moments was a rookie. Seven electric games into his NBA playoff career, it’s time to talk about Dylan Harper.

The box score will say Harper had a decent Game 2, with 11 points on 10 shots, seven boards, five assists, and two steals. The experience of watching him put together that stat line will have the observer thinking heretical thoughts about dynasties, superfluous All-NBA teammates, and the commissioner’s office taking regulatory action against the Spurs for getting another ball-handler this capable. Harper is simply good at everything. He knows where to be, itself a somewhat complicated challenge given that he typically plays with at least one other point guard. Harper is less experienced than Stephon Castle and De’Aaron Fox, but he’s a better shooter than either, leaving him to attack shifting defenses and move around behind the play while his teammates explode through people and shift around them, respectively.

Harper’s skillset is not yet as polished as those guys’, but it is more well-rounded. You can see it in his confidence around the three-point arc, where he’s been popping it with less hesitation with each passing month. You can see it as a help defender, where he finds ways to continually disrupt traffic in passing lanes without overexposing the Spurs’ weak side (in fairness, overexposing the Spurs’ weak side is basically impossible, given that Victor Wembanyama patrols it). Mostly, you can see it in transition: Give Harper a head of steam, and he’ll finish on anyone. His skill as a finisher around the rack jumped off the screen in his NBA debut against the Dallas Mavericks back in October, and he’s only improved as an open-court decision maker as the season’s progressed.

An interesting wrinkle to Game 2 is that while Wembanyama had a much better game than in Game 1, other Spurs players busted the contest open. I chalk this up to Minnesota orienting its game plan around dealing with Wemby more than anything else, a strategy that helped them limit the Frenchman to 19 points and 15 rebounds while opening up space for the Spurs’ shooters (16-for-39 from three) and slashers. Castle had a much better Game 2, scoring 21 and getting to the line nine times using his running back-looking bullyball game. After a disastrous Game 1, Fox was much better despite taking just 10 shots, which is an interesting phylum of bounce-back game: More often, a player needing to prove to the world that he is not the bum he appeared to be will force the issue, insisting on taking a larger portion of the action into their hands. That’s not Fox’s game, and it was relieving to see him let things come to him.

Harper played the cleanest game of anybody, and the moments when the Spurs’ advantage was most pronounced came in his minutes. As a team, San Antonio made a point of running in Game 2—in the first half, they scored more transition points off Minnesota’s made shots than the Wolves did in total—and Harper exemplified it, pushing the tempo off rebounds, attacking closeouts, and amplifying the pressure. San Antonio went on a big run during Wemby’s first rest at the end of the first quarter, and again at the end of the second. Both were keyed by Harper going nuts.

This play was particularly good, as he showed how to get around Rudy Gobert’s rim protection, which has been causing the Spurs a lot of problems:

Harper’s role will vacillate throughout this postseason, a luxury his team can afford thanks to its hydra-style point guard rotation. In the Portland series, he won his team a spectacular Game 3 with a heroic second half spent as San Antonio’s primary attacker. I kept having to remind myself that Harper is a rookie, though clearly not a normal one.