When the Easy Pass Is Enough

Olivia Miles can make passes that probably should not be available.

That is part of what makes watching her fun. She can wait for a defender to move, change the angle with another dribble and throw through a window that looked closed a second earlier.

Sometimes the possession needs something much simpler.

Against Las Vegas in August, Miles turned the ball over five times in the first half. All five were passing turnovers. Afterward, she acknowledged that Cheryl Reeve had been right to get on her about making the correct read when better options were available.

The second half looked different.

Miles had four assists and no turnovers. Reeve called her decision-making exceptional.

I keep coming back to the distinction between those two halves because it gets at a harder part of development.

Miles already sees a lot.

We have spent much of this series looking at what happens because of that. She reads the second defender. She changes pace to make the coverage declare. She can score deeply enough into the possession that another passing window appears.

The question changes when a player has that many available answers.

Which one does the possession actually need?

A difficult pass can create an advantage that a simpler one cannot. That is worth the risk. Miles' creativity works partly because she attempts things many guards would never see, much less try.

But difficulty does not create value by itself.

If the defense has already given up the throwback, the open shooter or the next pass out of the pick-and-roll, creating another window may only give the defense time to recover.

That seems to be part of what Miles and Reeve were working through in Las Vegas.

The lesson from the second half was not that Miles needed to become a safer point guard. Her creativity remained available. She was more selective about when the possession required it.

There is something interesting about reaching this stage of development.

Early improvement often looks like addition. A better jumper. Another finish. A pass you could not make before.

Eventually, having more answers creates its own judgment problem.

Miles can make the harder play.

The next question is whether the harder play gives the offense anything it did not already have.