In his late-April appearance on Dunc’d On, Jared Weiss of “The Athletic” gave an interesting insight into the Boston Celtics organization: “I’ve had a few teammates of [Romeo Langford] say that he’s actually their best perimeter on-ball defender on the team right now.” With Marcus Smart on the roster, this statement seems hard to believe, but it shows that the rookie out of Indiana has impressed on that side of the ball. Therefore, I decided to watch a majority of his NBA minutes from this season to determine how well he did, and then compared my observations to the pre-draft scouting report of Spencer Pearlman of The Stepien to determine how Langford has progressed since his last NCAA game in March 2019.
Langford’s main defensive asset is his length and how well he uses it. The 6'11" wingspan (measured at the 2019 NBA Draft Combine) comes into play in passing lanes, when digging at ballhandlers, contesting layups or jump shots as the primary defender and on rearview contests. His 2.3 deflections per 36 minutes aren’t outstanding by any means, but he gives off the impression that he could get his hands on a lot of passes that are thrown in his vicinity. In addition to that, he times his digs at ballhandlers really well. On one play, he reached into a Kyle Lowry-spin move right at the moment where Lowry had no chance of seeing him coming.
His shot contests as the primary defender are impossible to discuss without first talking about his hip flexibility. Spencer wrote that he “has issues changing direction”, “does not have quick hip turns” and that “he won’t lock someone up on defense given his athletic concerns (though he flashed a bit if the ball handler is not that quick)”. These points are still very much visible today even though it seems like Langford has progressed a bit in some of these departments. Against forwards and slower guards, he can turn his hips quickly enough and slide his feet well enough to stay in front of most of them (some players he managed to stay in front of in the games I watched: Terry Rozier, Cody Martin, Evan Fournier, DeAndre Hunter and LeBron James) and is then extremely hard to finish against because of his long arms. Against quicker guards, however, not only are his hips turns not quite quick enough to prevent them from getting an advantage, his reaction time to the opposition’s moves could be a bit quicker as well (examples from my film study: Devonte Graham, Terrence Davis, Cody Martin, Brandon Goodwin, Jeff Teague, Collin Sexton). After the initial move, he often does a decent job of sliding his feet and taking contact to prevent his man from getting a full step ahead of him. In these situations, his length allows him to influence the shot even if he’s half a step behind. Of course, his wingspan also comes into play when contesting jump shooters. According to Synergy, Langford’s matchups made 14 of 47 jump shots this season, good enough for the 92nd percentile (small sample size alert of course).
Maneuvering screens as the on-ball defender was a major issue of his in the games I watched. On Dunc’d On, Weiss said that Langford is good at getting skinny over screens, and I don’t think he’s wrong, but Langford still regularly gets stuck on screens badly. Some of them are blatant moving screens, but on others he fails to anticipate them and therefore has a harder time fighting through. Maybe the communication on these plays could be better (impossible to say from the outside), but Langford could also do a better job feeling for the screen and using his peripheral vision to anticipate it. Off the ball, he does a way better job dodging screens, so maybe he’s just a bit overwhelmed by having to defend the ballhandler and anticipate screens at the same time. The transition to the NBA is hard, so I’m quite confident that he’ll be way better at maneuvering screens 12 months after the league restarts.
His post defense, on the other hand, is legitimately outstanding for a rookie of his size. Players that don’t have the quickness to take advantage of Langford’s lack of hip flexibility have tried to take him into the post — with little success. When the offensive player is waiting to receive an entry pass, the 20-year old does a great job putting his body into the opponent to make him catch the ball as far out as possible. After the catch, he makes sure he has a wide base and leaves a cushion between him and the offensive player so that he can take the first contact on his chest without losing balance. It also helps that he has unusually good core and upper body strength for a rookie. In June 2019, Spencer wrote “As he continues to get stronger, he should be able to defend up a little and might be able to switch onto some bigs (with some light help)”, and this projection has proven to be correct, maybe even a bit earlier than expected. Langford, in a limited sample, has done a good job on players taller and heavier than him:
Another interesting point from the scouting report: “does not stay in his stance — hunches over”. This issue seems to have largely been resolved. There was still the odd moment where he was hunched over, but he stayed in his stance a lot more than he did in the NCAA last season. Jared Weiss said on Dunc’d On that Brad Stevens loses his mind when guys make mistakes on defense, so you would expect that Langford is explicitly asked to do a fundamental thing like staying in a stance if he wants to get minutes, because his playing time has definitely been earned on the defensive side of the ball.
Off the ball, Spencer noted Langford doesn’t have the vertical pop to be a good weakside rim protector, “ball watches a bit too much”, “knows where to be positionally/off ball and in help”, makes solid rotations, and also that he should turn his head a bit more to locate his man. In the games I watched, he generally made the right rotations. Maybe he could occasionally make them a few hundredths of a second quicker, but that’s just nitpicking. In my eyes, he didn’t ball watch a lot, so he seems to have improved there, and overall was pretty active and aware of his man as well as the ball (although there’s still room for improvement in that department).
Regarding his weakside rim protection, I didn’t see enough plays to make a conclusive statement. His vertical pop definitely isn’t great, but it’s not terrible either. Here’s two plays he did have, a good one and a decent one. For further evaluation, however, I need to see more.
Overall, Langford showed quite a lot of promise on the defensive side of the ball, especially when defending SF-sized players. He definitely justified the trust Brad Stevens put into him on that side of the ball, but also still has weaknesses, which he should be able to improve on. It’ll be interesting to see what level he ultimately reaches, because it he’s already made decent progress on defense since draft day.
Other little things that didn’t happen often enough to discuss them, but might become more relevant in a bigger sample (I watched all games he played 15+ minutes in, 187 of 298 total minutes):
- Twice, he was in position to ICE a P&R, but the roll-defender wasn’t on the same wavelength (communication? (also, they executed it well another time))
- He lost his man backdoor once
- He fell badly for a pump fake once
- He had a few imperfect closeouts, including one foul on a three-point shooter (that’s especially noteworthy because Spencer mentioned that Langford tends to hesitate on closeouts too much. I have to admit that I didn’t really get enough of an impression to say if that’s changed, but it’s something to keep an eye on for the future)
- Collapsed really well on a driver once after his teammate made a bad reach
- Smartly hacked Dwight Howard under the basket instead of allowing an easy score
- Took one good charge
