Getting the job done when closest to the basket is not easy due to crowds of defenders, but these players are making it look that way.
Stats review: Meet the best closers near the rim
Stats
3 Mins read
The end of the BKT EuroCup regular season is just around the corner, and in Round 17, U-BT Cluj-Napoca notched a key victory over Dreamland Gran Canaria to position themselves for a bye into the quarterfinals in Group B if they can win their Round 18 finale. In Cluj's 115-111 overtime road victory in Gran Canaria, four players scored between 20 and 24 points, including Emanuel Cate, who put together the best game of his professional career in a high-pressure moment.
Going 9-for-9 from the field while corralling 10 rebounds and finishing with a plus/minus of +18, the 26-year-old big man maximized his time on the floor by playing hard, catching everything thrown his way, and tossing in shots around the rim with soft touch while playing through contact. Doing much of his scoring off drop passes and offensive rebounds, Cate plays a physical style that allows him to be brutally effective even as he does much of his scoring below the rim.
As the table above suggests, Cate is one of several workhorses that have thrived around the basket in the EuroCup this season. Shooting over 75% in finishing situations, his efficiency has been tremendous relative to his volume, which ultimately helped Cluj secure its most important win of the season.
Looking up and down this list, he is joined by several other players who thrive on physicality like Dusan Miletic of Slask Wroclaw and Leon Kratzer of Paris Basketball, who both have been tremendous in their roles this season. Setting screens, grabbing offensive rebounds, and playing angles to score, that duo does a lot of the dirty work on the interior, and does so at an incredible 80% conversion rate in close.
Their style of play stands in contrast to Karlo Matkovic of Cedevita Olimpija Ljubljana, Tyler Calvin Cook of Joventut Badalona, and Marvin Jones of Buducnost VOLI Podgorica, who have done more than half of their scoring on the interior above the rim. Whether it's a lob pass for a dunk, a tip-slam, a soft lefty scoop, or a sweeping layup around a defender, the key at this level is the result, and there's quite a contrast of styles among the players on this list.
That is perhaps most obvious at the top where Collin Malcolm of Paris is the lone swingman included here. Scoring at the rim running in transition, cutting out of the corners for lobs, and driving the ball to punish smaller wings on the interior, Malcolm has been remarkably consistent around the rim for all the different ways he tends to get there. It is rare for a wing to be as productive or efficient as Malcom has been on the interior, let alone both.
With the postseason looming, consistency is key, and each one in this group has lifted his team with how reliably he has finished inside.