Atlanta Hawks
Starter
Seriously, what’s Jalen Johnson’s true ceiling?
Source: https://www.peachtreehoops.com/anal...en-johnson-nba-analysis-breakdown-video-xs-os
If you hadn’t heard, Jalen Johnson had a night to remember on Thursday evening in Utah. Against the Jazz, he posted a historic, eyewatering stat line: 31 points, 18 rebounds, 14 assists, and seven steals while hitting four of his five three-point attempts and true shooting 65%.
With the loss of Trae Young to a knee injury, Johnson has assumed the role of point-forward for this team, with much of the team’s offensive initiation coming via the 23-year-old forward. To date, he’s responded with per-game averages of 21.5 points, 9.5 rebounds, 6.3 assists, and 1.8 steals on 65% true shooting.
It’s been a steady ascent for the former five-star high school basketball player. From leaving Duke prematurely, to sliding out of the lottery in the 2021 NBA Draft, to the G League, a bench role, and finally a key starting role in the span of a few years.
Could his next step be being named to his first All-Star Game this season? With his production so far and the team’s success, it sure seems so.
But the real question is just how high does the elevator to the top go? Top 30 NBA player? 20?
There is a four-time All-Star point guard soon to return to the Hawks lineup, and I will hear no argument that the Hawks are somehow better without him. But it might not be too soon to think about the big decision the brass has to make this offseason when Young is set to decline his player option as he seeks a hefty payday.
But first, let’s examine what parts of Jalen Johnson’s game are sustainable building blocks and which parts show cracks.
Transition offense
There’s no questioning that Jalen Johnson is a terror in transition offense. His functional handle in open space combined with an explosive and strong 6-foot-9 frame allows him to accelerate, get into the paint and finish over or through all kinds of defenders.
There are just countless examples over the past few years of him grabbing a rebound and pushing past disorganized opponents for easy buckets.
Below, Johnson starts his own fastbreak opportunity with a swipe down steal. This amounts to taking candy from a baby, but Jalen Johnson grabbing and going against a Kings defense is easy points almost every time:
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And that ability to steamroll his way to the basket often draws multiple defenders in order to stop the ball. But Johnson has such great vision that he can find supporting runs in transition, like rewarding Mouhamed Gueye for his sprinting efforts below:
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Last season, 23.6% of Johnson’s scoring opportunities were from transition possessions. He scored 1.16 points per possession (PPP) on those attempts in 36 games before his season was cut short by injury.
This year, through 13 games, he’s bumped it up to a 27.5% frequency in possessions while scoring on 1.28 PPP (through games played by November 13). His 74 total points in transition so far places him 10th in the NBA (minimum of 10 min/game and 10 possessions of transition possessions to qualify per the NBA’s tracking powered by Synergy).
His 1.28 PPP actually outranks the number one scorer in transition, the unsurprising Giannis Antetokounmpo who comes in at 1.25 PPP. So yeah, he’s good in this area.
The Hawks continue to play at a fast pace, even without Trae Young — the team is ninth in pace at 102.2 possessions per 48 minutes since October 30, the day after Young got hurt.
The solution without the team’s floor general has been to push after every make or miss, and over that timespan the Hawks ranked third in the NBA with 21.8 fastbreak points.
Clearly, this style of play feeds into Johnson’s strengths. And he and the team are being rewarded handsomely for it.
But, as we’ll see in the halfcourt offense section, this style of play may not be effective against better defenses. Johnson still functions better with a viable ball handler next to him, so that consideration should always be kept in mind.
Halfcourt offense
I showed a lot of examples of Johnson getting to the rim in transition. But that task is made a lot more difficult when Johnson has to contend with settled defenses. As explosive as he is, even he can’t always get into the paint with defenses keying on him.
So, the important questions are: just how real is his jump shot? And how much initiation can you give him when the defense is settled?
If Johnson is going to level up to being a primary option, his ability to find his own shot will be key. And while he’s made strides in that area over his career, he’s just a passable standstill shooter and not a reliable pull up shooter.
Johnson hit four out of his five three-point attempts during his career game against the Jazz. But all four were no-dribble, catch-and-shoot threes served up by his teammates.
Since stepping into a starting role in 2023-24, Johnson has shot 34% from deep on 3.6 attempts per game — nothing to shake a stick at for someone who is so multi-faceted in his game. But it still somewhat awkward when Johnson has to dribble or step back into a jumper:
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However, it’s unsurprising that his best attribute on the ball is getting past his man to either score inside 15 feet or draw a second defender and make the right pass.
Johnson can really pass from a number of different spots on the floor. He maps the court like a point guard, and knows how to distribute the ball behind rotating defenses.
Here, with the Jazz not getting matched up well in semi-transition, Nurkic starts defending the near corner but pulls all the way over to pinch off Johnson’s post up. Johnson doesn’t even need to peek to know the corner shooter, Zaccharie Risacher, is open:
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His best attribute is reactive passing. Keyonte George is treating Dyson Daniels as a non-shooter and doubling Jalen Johnson at the nail. Johnson attracts even more attention towards the baseline, but knows to find Daniels for the cut into open space:
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Teams are often hellbent on going under screens against him, but it often doesn’t matter. Watch him reject this screen and finish through Paolo Banchero:
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Where he does excel, however, is as a counter to defenses focused on someone else initiating offense. As both a screener and roller and cutter, he has ascended to a status as one of the elites in the game.
This 45-degree back cut absolutely leaves Jay Huff in the dust:
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He was a less willing cutter last season, but early in 2025-26, he’s been unstoppable on these, often with the aid of great backdoor passers in Daniels, Okongwu and Porzingis. In his 11 games so far, 12% of his scoring opportunities have come via cuts and he’s scoring at a blistering 1.76 PP, placing him in the 98th percentile around the league.
He’s just as good a roll man during pick-and-roll actions. It helps to have one of the best pick-and-roll operators in the league at point, but even without Young for this latest stretch, he’s been good in that area — scoring 1.28 PPP while accounting for 28% of his scoring opportunities.
Overall, his finishing at the rim is so elite (77% inside the restricted area) that it makes sense to put him in motion towards the rim as much as possible. Handing him the ball at the top of the key probably doesn’t optimize that part of his game — rather rolling, cutting and getting out in transition does.
Will Johnson ever be a true number one option in the halfcourt game? Even with further development (did I mention he’s just 23?), you just won’t get the most out of him if you tell him to operate pick-and-rolls as a ball handler. That’s just not his game.
But in an ecosystem where he can display his versatility next to another high-level creator, I truly wouldn’t rule it out. He’s such a terror in so many offensive areas and can counter whatever defenses throw at him that I think his overall impact as an on-ball/off-ball hybrid player could be special.
Defense and rebounding
I’ll start by saying that Johnson has all the tools to be an elite defender. His size, length, agility, and versatility to counter many different matchups lets him slot into all sorts of defensive alignments.
But one thing that has become evident is his tendency to switch off for stretches on defense. Maybe the large offensive load is taking a toll, but his recent penchant for steals has obfuscated some disappointing defensive stretches so far this season.
He did have seven steals on Thursday, but there were clearly some unnecessary gambles baked into his performance on that side of the ball:
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And there are too often times where he’s caught napping in regard to the action unfolding in front of him.
His block rate is at his lowest rate of his career (0.4 per 100 possessions), and while he is defending further out on the perimeter than ever before as more of a 3/4 than a pure 4, it’s clear he’s not deterring shots near the rim like he once was.
We have seen better stretches of play from him defensively in the past — and make no mistake he’s still a part of the reason the Hawks have a top 10 defensive rating in the early portion of this season — but he could stand to be more consistent on that side of the ball.
The team as a whole has struggled to rebound the ball — 24th in offensive rebounding percentage (22.9%) and 23rd in defensive rebounding percentage (71.4) as of Nov. 15 — but Johnson hasn’t been to blame here. He’s still pulling down 13.9 total rebounds per 100 possessions. That’s the best mark of any Hawk who has played at least 20 minutes this season.
It’s especially important for him to be a great defensive rebounder in order to supplement his biggest strength: pushing in transition.
These two areas are important little aspects that separate an ‘empty stats’ superstar from an actually impactful superstar. Ultimately, it’s clear Johnson has the tools and talent to be a great player in so many different areas, even if he’s not a dominant isolation scorer.
Final thoughts
Jalen Johnson doesn’t exactly have the profile of a typical superstar in one surface-level sense — a profile of a player whose on-ball scoring talent regularly bends defenses. He certainly has some of that ability, but his best attributes are everything else. His leakouts in transition, upper body strength to hand in the air and finish through contact, and sneakily elite rebounding (among many other more subtle contributions) all combine to product a jumbo Swiss army knife of a player.
Per basketball-reference, his box plus/minus (BPM) is 5.8, as of Friday evening 13th in the NBA, suggesting he’s worth around +5.8 points per 100 possessions over an average NBA player. While his pure on-off plus/minus lags way behind (suggesting some major lineup wonkiness), it’s clear he’s been one of the most valuable players in the NBA to start the season.
I think it’s all sustainable frankly. There’s no hot three-point shooting involved, for example. It’s time to start talking about Johnson as both a first-time All-Star player this season and a top 30 player at minimum.
As for his ceiling? Who really knows. But after recording the first stat line of his kind in NBA regular season or postseason history, I wouldn’t rule anything out.
All stats via NBA stats using Synergy tracking.
Source: https://www.peachtreehoops.com/anal...en-johnson-nba-analysis-breakdown-video-xs-os