Sacramento Kings: What’s up with Harry Giles?

The Sacramento Kings have two premier rookies in Marvin Bagley III and Harry Giles III, but only one of them is thriving early on in their young careers.

For the third time this season, Harry Giles was a no-show for the Sacramento Kings as the 20-year-old picked up his third DNP-CD. If you paid attention to preseason, this might come off as a bit confusing given how well he was playing.

In six preseason games for the Kings, Giles averaged 13.3 points, 5.7 rebounds, 2.3 assists and 1.0 steals in 22 minutes per game off the bench.

He showed flashes of his potential by stepping out and hitting long jumpers, getting to the free throw line and showed off his court vision with some nifty passes. At times, he legitimately  looked like Sacramento’s best rookie.

There was a lot of excitement surrounding Giles coming into the year after he missed the previous season with a knee injury. Expectations were high and the outlook on his rookie season was positive. Media outlets spoke highly of Giles. Bleacher Report even went as far as including him on a list of potential rookies “Who Could Be Next Season’s Donovan Mitchell.”

But that was then and this is now. We haven’t seen any of that potential or production this season from him so far. Everyone on the roster (including Marvin Bagley) has seemed to find their role and is embracing it. Everyone except Giles.

For the first four games of the 2018-19 season, Giles was playing decent minutes as a rotation player — 14.8 minutes per game — but he just could never quite give his team any kind of positive impact. He shot 27.6 percent from the floor on 7.3 attempts per game, averaged more fouls (4.5) than rebounds (3.3) and points (4.3), and was a -14.3 in the plus/minus department.

The four games were enough for head coach Dave Joerger to limit Giles’ playing time. Since then, he’s only played 6.4 minutes per game and had consecutive DNPs against the Miami Heat and Orlando Magic in a six-game stretch that saw the Kings go 5-1, including a five-game winning streak.

To make matters worse, Giles has by far the worst Player Efficiency Rating on the team. His depressing 1.0 PER puts him dead last among all rookies in that statistic. But wait, it gets worse. The only player in the NBA with a worse PER than Giles is Ron Baker of the New York Knicks, who somehow is at a -0.9.

So yeah, things have been pretty bad for the former Blue Devil. Luckily for him and Kings fans, the season is long and we’re only 11 games in. There’s a lot of time for him to turn that sluggish start around.

It’s going to be difficult for Giles to crack the rotation with the rest of the bigs on the team playing as well as they have been, but he has a game built for the modern NBA. He can step out and stretch the floor, deliver quick passes on the fly, and has the mobility and athleticism to develop into a capable and versatile defender.

Defensively, the biggest thing for him right now is to defend and contest without fouling. He has committed the seventh-most fouls on the team (20) despite playing significantly less minutes than the six players above him. That’s just…yeah.

As for his offense, he just has to find a way to create more space for himself and not force up so many contested shots. According to NBA.com, the highest amount of Giles’ field goal attempts came when a defender was covering him tightly (2-4 feet), which is not ideal. Thus, the tight coverage resulted in Giles shooting 35.3 percent.

It’s important to remember that he’s only 20 years old and missed an entire season due to injury, so it’s not like he can’t fix these things as the season goes on. He can. The potential is there, we’ve all seen it. It’s just up to Giles to realize it.