Tricky Ty Jerome

Floaters, platypuses, and “I’ll come to your team and take your spot!”

To say Ty Jerome has exploded out of the gates doesn’t really do the situation justice. He’s exploded the gates themselves, incinerating portals and defenders alike while leaping to a Most Improved Player lead that somehow already feels insurmountable.

Basketball Poetry readers and/or close observers of the Association already know that Jerome has long been a fly in the advanced analytics soup. People used him as an example of why these catchall one-number metrics can’t be that good, or else they wouldn’t be listing Jerome as one of the league’s most impactful players year in and year out.

So much for that. To wit: in 2024-25, when he came in third in Sixth Man of the Year voting for Cleveland, Jerome was in the 91st percentile for EPM and 92nd percentile in OpenRAPM. Last year, in just 15 games for Memphis, he was 96th percentile and 95th percentile. This year, as the fulcrum of the offense and facing every opponent’s best defender each night? Solidly 97th and 95th, ahead of starrier names like Jalen Brunson, Devin Booker, and Austin Reaves in both metrics.

If advanced numbers aren’t your jam, he’s scoring more than those guys, too, both raw points per game and per possession.

Scoring isn’t all there is to basketball (and we’ll get to the rest of Jerome’s game shortly). But it is the most important part. Jerome’s 26.2 points per game rank 10th, and his 31.0 points per 75 possessions rank fifth (ahead of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Jayson Tatum, and on much better efficiency!).

Is this unsustainably hot shooting? Perhaps to a small degree. The NBA recently started measuring “shot difficulty,” which contrasts a player’s actual field goal percentage to what an average player’s field goal percentage would be after factoring in shot location, defensive pressure, and more. Jerome is currently shooting 50.3% against a projected value of 40.4%. That nearly 10-percent gap is the third-largest in the league, behind only Steph Curry and Luka Dončić. Is he that level of shotmaker?

There’s no denying that he has an uncanny ability to put the ball in the basket. The floater is his trademark. It’s a baffling, quirky little shot, the platypus of the NBA world. Did you know platypuses are venomous?

For most guards, the floater is a counter, something to roll out when defenders drop back too far and the rim is unapproachable. For Jerome, it’s the weapon of first resort. He’s capable of launching it from every angle, with either hand off either foot, anywhere inside the arc:

The flexibility of Jerome’s teardrop and his unconventional usage make up for Jerome’s lacking run-jump measurables. “If defenders can’t time you, it kind of takes athleticism out of the picture,” Jerome said on Zach Lowe’s podcast earlier this month.

Jerome is currently shooting a seemingly impossible 61% on shots between four and 14 feet. Impossible is carrying a load here, however, since he also went 59% in 2024-25 on over 200 attempts, the best volume/accuracy combo in the league. That’s higher than some guards shoot on layups. Hell, that’s higher than rookie teammate Cam Boozer is shooting on layups!

Jerome has some of the fanciest feet in the league. Sometimes, even he doesn’t know what he’s going to do next. I’ve never seen someone hit the spin-cancel button IRL: