Examining the five types of point guards in today’s game reveals a vast and varied positional landscape—one that traces the evolution of basketball and reminds us that playing the point is (still) essential work
From a bird’s-eye view, most NBA basketball looks pretty much the same. Teams work toward the same shots from the same spaces on the floor, streamlined by the same idea of efficiency. There is more or less one collective shot chart these days—with some slight variations based on personnel, of course, but framed by what are accepted to be optimized ends. A corner 3 is a corner 3 is a corner 3.
Except it isn’t. Bring your point of view down to floor level, and you’ll find entire worlds in the way those attempts are created. What makes a shot isn’t where it’s taken from, but how it came to be. An 18-footer from Luka Doncic has little in common with one from De’Aaron Fox. A James Harden pocket pass and a Jamal Murray pocket pass don’t serve the same purpose at all—even if they both lead to a score. Every offense is its own ecosystem with its own way of life. If anything, the widespread agreement on what constitutes quality shots has forced teams to find their own means of pursuing them. Defenses know to take away the rim and deny the 3-point line, so sets expand and redirect. Playmakers evolve. Life finds a way.
There is incredible diversity in how teams go about hunting the shots everyone knows they want—and, for that matter, in the point guards who only sometimes do the hunting. If all NBA basketball were really so similar, the point guard position wouldn’t be so vast and varied, encompassing Trae Young, Tyus Jones, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Kris Dunn, and Terry Rozier as nominal peers. Those five guards are separated by ability but even more so by philosophy. There are so many ways to be a point guard in the modern game, with differences that go far beyond whether a player looks to score or pass first.
Welcome to the Point Guard Field Guide, a reintroduction to one of basketball’s most storied and complicated positions. So much of the dogma of what makes a point guard has melted away in recent years, leading to a broadening of style and substance. The NBA isn’t a point guard’s league in the same way it was when Harden, Stephen Curry, and Russell Westbrook reeled off four straight MVPs. The game has turned. Yet the only way to really understand that change—and the state of NBA basketball in 2024—is to understand all the ways the point guard position has grown to accommodate it.
To that end, this guide will explore the five varieties of modern point guard, including a listing of which players fit each type. Some point guards change their classification over time or with the demands of a new team. Others might bridge the qualities of several different types. This is not a binding classification; it’s a snapshot of a moment in time. More than a hundred point guards logged NBA minutes over the course of the 2023-24 season. This guide, more than anything, will explain how they played them.
Illustrations by Adam Villacin
Systems
A system, player.
Luka Doncic, Stephen Curry, Trae Young, Tyrese Haliburton, LaMelo Ball
It’s hard to tell where Luka Doncic ends and the Mavericks begin. Dallas’s entire approach stems from the way he micromanages possessions, rearranging them on a granular level until the layout in front of him matches the vision in his mind. Doncic dictates everything—puppeteering defenders, reading their overreactions, and navigating toward the basket in fits and starts until the right opportunity materializes. There are point guards who run the offense and point guards who become it. Doncic does the latter with a kind of brassy maximalism, while Steph Curry—who is no less definitional to the Warriors—serves a lot of the same purposes by giving the ball up and running like hell to get it back.
Point guards aren’t connected by their playing style but by their function. Doncic and Curry have wildly different individual methods. Yet both decide, for better or worse, how their teams operate. The pull of their respective processes is so strong as to warp everything around them—in terms of not just how their teammates play, but who is even allowed to participate. NBA outfits are perfectly willing to make those accommodations for some of the very best players in the sport, but it’s harder to strike that kind of bargain when more complicated talents insist upon themselves. When you have Trae Young on your team, you are a Trae Young Team.
It can be a precarious business, putting the stylistic fate of the team in the hands of a player who can call their own number at any time. There’s a debate to be had about the merits of heliocentric basketball—and it’s been had, and will be had, on repeat, so long as any player dominates the ball to the degree that Doncic and Young do. Yet that conversation is ultimately too small. The issue isn’t whether a heliocentric offense can work at a championship level (it can, and it has) but what, exactly, it means when a team derives its style of play—heliocentric or otherwise—from its point guard. There’s a natural leadership in playing the point that lends itself to setting the agenda. There’s also the risk that when a System guard is countered or rushed or forced into passing out of pressure, it invites a full-blown identity crisis.
Great teams find some new part of themselves in those runaway four-on-three opportunities. If you trap Curry beyond the arc, for example, you invite the drive and lob from Draymond Green that are sure to follow. But not every Steph has a Draymond. Often, end-point shooters and cutters are forced to take control of the offense in those situations, replacing the wizardry of a System guard with something much clumsier. Even Steph has bumped up against the limits of what he can accomplish as one of the smallest players on the floor, and he’s the historical exception; over the past 20 years, Curry’s Warriors are the only team to even make the Finals playing a style defined by its lead guard.
Of course, those Warriors made the Finals an incredible six times in eight years, spanning the NBA’s entire pace-and-space revolution. The right System guard can change everything, including, apparently, the trajectory of basketball as we know it. The wrong one can trap a franchise in a particularly convincing mirage, moved by splashy box score production that will never be quite as impactful as it seems. The line between the two can be quite delicate. Steph was a curiosity up until the moment he took over the sport. Doncic is a dazzling playmaker, but he can sometimes hold a game so tightly that the offense doesn’t have anywhere to go. (At least until Kyrie Irving, a natural Tangent, busts it loose.) There are times when LaMelo Ball looks every bit like a freewheeling genius and others when his game feels like a hastily assembled carnival ride.
No matter the outcome, there’s something admirable about the fact that these System guards can only be themselves. Their games are too particular to be tamped down or modulated. Too undeniable. You can bring Tyrese Haliburton off the bench for Team USA in a lineup filled with other stars, and by force of pace and personality, he’ll get his decorated teammates playing his way. When a point guard is the system, the offense always travels with them. All a team can do is fine-tune that system into its best possible version and hope that it’s enough.
Tangents
Take the offense in new directions.
Jamal Murray, Tyrese Maxey, Coby White, Damian Lillard, Keyonte George, Kyrie Irving, Terry Rozier, De’Aaron Fox, Anfernee Simons
Conjure, in your mind’s eye, the vision of a point guard. Maybe your brain turns first to Steve Nash or Jason Kidd, two of the most inventive passers the league has ever seen. Some will surely bow at the altar of the Point God, Chris Paul, whose control over the game is undeniable—omnipotent, even. Or, if you’re of a certain age, perhaps the mind goes to someone like Lenny Wilkens, a literal coach on the floor, or Bob Cousy, the longtime Celtic regarded as the NBA’s First Great Point Guard.
These are the standard-bearers of traditional, pass-first point guard play. Champions of the textbook definition. Yet there have long been gifted scorers lingering on the edges of our understanding of what a point guard can be. The great leap forward in the position wasn’t the arrival of the scoring point guard but the democratization of it. Star guards have had the license to fill it up for decades; Tiny Archibald led the league in scoring and assists some 50 years ago, emboldened by, of all people, Cousy. “At that point in my career, I was a scorer first,” Archibald told Celtic Nation. “Cooz gave me the freedom to play.”
That lineage of star scoring guards continued on, through Isiah Thomas and Gus Williams, Kevin Johnson and Gary Payton, Stephon Marbury and Baron Davis. In the space between, however, were countless scoring guards who weren’t quite stars and thus weren’t allowed to remain scorers for long. Many were ground down by Play the Right Way coaches, forced into caretaking roles with all of the spark in their games stamped out. Those who stuck it out were often marginalized as tweeners or demoted to the bench. Even the high-scoring guards who did break through to stardom were treated as if they needed an on-court chaperone.
“I don’t want to be a two-guard,” Allen Iverson told ESPN The Magazine before the lockout-shortened season in 1999. “I want to be a point guard. I want to know how to win games at the point guard position. I want to know when to score at the point guard position and when not to score. I want to know when to hold back and when to go. And that’s what I’m learning.” Before Iverson played another game at the point, the Sixers swung a trade for Eric Snow to supplant him.
It goes without saying that Iverson would be granted his wish if he played in 2024; A.I. would run point tomorrow, and any defender trying to contain him would give their kingdom for a hand check. Yet the beauty of the NBA at this moment in time is that a scoring guard doesn’t have to be Iverson to get a crack at the point. You can be Coby White. Or Terry Rozier. You can be a young scorer learning on the job, such as Keyonte George, or a borderline All-Star playing the game his way, such as De’Aaron Fox. There is an entire spectrum of scoring guards today; before, there were mostly standouts. The biggest shift wasn’t in skill set but in perspective. “It’s more normal,” Nash says. “Versus in the old days, there was a lot more rolled eyes. You got called a selfish player because that’s not how the position was defined.”
Rule changes opened up the floor for players like Nash and allowed point guards to should what they could really do. Stuffy, traditional coaches slowly filtered out of the league. The public regard for scoring guards turned as the Iverson generation (and, later, the Curry generation) made its way into the NBA ranks. So much had to shift just for the league to make use of the scoring talent it already had, buried beneath layer upon layer of conventional wisdom.
Today, many scoring guards run teams of their own (see: Operators). Some of them work more as Tangents—playing out of the main action in a way that expands the possibilities of what the offense can be. There’s enough room and rhythm for a point guard to spend most of their time flying through handoffs or playing off a dominant big and still act as the most explosive scoring threat on the floor. “I think nowadays, we’re seeing results just from guys being aggressive,” Nash says. “And there’s much more grace for a player at point guard to be more aggressive and to take 25, 30 shots.” During the 2013-14 season—just 10 years ago—there were only 39 occasions in which a point guard attempted at least 25 shots in a game. This season, Luka alone had 33 such games. What’s more: 27 different point guards managed to get up 25-plus shots, from Luka to Jamal Murray to Malachi Flynn. There are simply more opportunities for scorers to be scorers, regardless of the position they happen to play.
There’s no rolling your eyes at a point guard who shoots for volume when, frankly, it’s now part of the job description. Some of the most interesting, expressive work at the position is being done by players who, until recently, probably wouldn’t have been allowed to play point guard at all—and certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to play it their way. Acceptance comes from understanding. Twenty years from now, there could be an entire generation of fans who, when asked to conjure the image of a center, first think of Nikola Jokic. That’s a dramatic shift in the way that position has been defined historically. It also stands to reason that in the future, the vision of a textbook point guard might look a lot like Murray.
Operators
Run the show.
Jalen Brunson, Dejounte Murray, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Scoot Henderson, Ja Morant, James Harden, Donovan Mitchell, Cade Cunningham
When a point guard is the driving force of an offense, their primary opponent is the defensive scheme. Everything about it has been specifically designed to challenge them. It is tailored to their weaknesses, built in every way to make them uncomfortable. It does not stop. It does not rest. And so an Operator’s job is to outwork and outfox not only the defender in front of them, but an entire defensive philosophy—the best-laid plans of a whole organization, from the coaching staff to the video room.
The work is never really done.
Consider Jalen Brunson, who had the ball in his hands more than any player in the league this season and has been more involved, somehow, in piloting the Knicks offense in the playoffs. The ball doesn’t find Brunson. He hunts it down relentlessly, dead sprinting through a constant stream of stutters, strafes, and cuts—because otherwise, the offense would cease to function. Somewhere out there, Tom Thibodeau just smiled a little too wide at the thought of his 6-foot-2 point guard rolling the boulder up the hill, again and again and again.
It’s just not enough to be a pick-and-roll guard these days. NBA defenses are too attuned to the spacing with any high screen, too rehearsed in their rotations. The league has trended away from high-volume pick-and-roll offense this season, mostly out of necessity. No matter how loaded an offense may be, it can’t survive with a single entry point. So heavy-lifting guards have diversified the time and manner in which they receive the ball, leaning on other actions to re-create the advantages of a pick-and-roll setup through less predictable means. For Brunson, that work starts early, in pursuit, with the kind of scramble that can tie a defense in knots before the possession even begins.
The Sixers have all but demanded that of Brunson in their first-round matchup, as bigger, longer defenders have pressured the All-Star point guard at every opportunity. Even the inbound pass can be a battle, but a carefully timed screen from Brunson—turning a pick-and-roll into a Spain pick-and-roll—can change everything:
Brunson initiates the action on his play before he even has the ball. Setting a back screen for Josh Hart puts Brunson’s own defender (Nicolas Batum) into a position of conflict: Should he shadow Hart on the cut, just to be safe, or stay attached to Brunson for the handoff everyone knows is coming? Before he can even make up his mind, Brunson is flying through the handoff and putting another Sixer (Paul Reed) in a parallel bind—holding his attention just long enough for Precious Achiuwa to slip into the paint and for Brunson to set him up for a score. Regular-season offenses can be very straightforward at times, but in the playoffs, everything moves in phases. A back screen into a dribble handoff into a pocket pass. Or a curl into a handoff into a full-tilt isolation:
It’s all connected, and it’s through that connectivity that Brunson keeps the offense humming. Operators don’t have the tailor-made luxury of going to work from their favorite spots on the floor. They have to get to their spots or find new ones, building out an entire offense from that unpredictable geography. There is a two-pronged test for any would-be Operator: Can you consistently create an advantage off the dribble? And, if so, can you turn it into something more? A prospect like Scoot Henderson has the profile of an Operator but doesn’t seem to know what to do with an edge when he gets one. James Harden has the vision and the savvy to turn an inch into a mile, but he struggled at times this season to turn the corner and create space as consistently as he needed to.
Brunson has it all. His game seems both frantic and methodical, a paradox that coaxes in overly concerned help defenders and leaves other Knicks wide open in the process. The Sixers have done well to chase and bother Brunson from behind, but none of their defenders seem to have any grasp on how to read Brunson’s first move. There’s being shifty off the bounce, and then there’s being so shifty that back-line defenders are all but waiting for the blowby:
This is what it takes. Work like hell to get the ball, trick some of the best in the world once you do, and then make expert plays within the teeth of the coverage. And with so much being denied, a point guard will have to pull it all together at times and angles they could never expect. This quick give-and-go from Brunson is just a crackling bit of basketball literacy, brought about specifically because of the way the Sixers tried to keep him from getting involved in the first place:
Being an Operator means adapting to the needs of the moment. How will Brunson and the Knicks keep scoring against the Sixers? However they have to. It may seem like glamorous work, having the ball in your hands, but with it comes a fight for survival.
Curators
Simplify and organize.
Mike Conley, Tyus Jones, Chris Paul, Kyle Lowry, Fred VanVleet, Tre Jones, Derrick White, Darius Garland
Positionless basketball is, on the most practical level, an effort to break all five positions down to their base elements before mixing and matching all of those elements back together. Every team needs playmaking—it just doesn’t have to come from a textbook point guard when a wing or a big can help carry the load. Every team needs structure—but instead of running the show through the point, they might feed a talented creator at the elbow and orient the offense to them. It would be ideal if a point guard could space the floor, but with enough shooting, even that isn’t required; bigger, stronger guards can float down in the dunker spot like the bizarro version of a point center (a center point? a center guard??), waiting to finish plays rather than create them.
We see these sorts of deconstructions all around us in modern life. Rideshare disrupted the taxi economy and turned it into an on-demand product. Cable television was reduced to a series of streaming services, which are now being bundled back into what amounts to a cable package. The products are ostensibly the same. Yet when you take something apart for the sake of rearranging it into something new, there’s almost always a piece missing. You can have a lineup with all the qualities of a great point guard distributed throughout—bigs who can handle and wings who can pass and the full suite of positional versatility—and still find that, in the end, you miss the game management that a more traditional lead guard provides.
The idea of having a sure-handed point guard around to set the table fell woefully out of style over the past decade, as positionless basketball became the NBA default. Yet several recent teams have bumped up against the realities of scrapping the tradition for parts. There’s a reason why the Wolves didn’t really make sense until they brought in Mike Conley. Why Victor Wembanyama’s season didn’t really take off until the Spurs swapped the avant-garde for an actual point guard. The Suns are off to Cancun because they figured they’d be fine playing point by committee. But making plays is not the same thing as running a team. Every offense needs the root skills of a point guard, but it also needs the fuzzier, intangible qualities that have long been native to the position. There is a kind of emotional labor in playing the point that goes hand in hand with the leadership inherent to it. There are logistical concerns that go far beyond reading and reacting; it’s someone’s job, after all, to get the entire offense in place.
Experimental lineups can be wonderful, but wonder doesn’t make the trains run on time. That’s Chris Paul’s job. Or Fred VanVleet’s. It’s the job of a point guard in its most recognizable form. Positionless basketball has matured to the point that many teams now find themselves in need of a player who can not only handle, but pass with precision and really keep a team organized. Congratulations: You’ve invented the point guard.
There are things that a positionless lineup can accomplish that a traditional one never could. Yet the cost of that, in many cases, is ease. Boston could have Jayson Tatum bring the ball down the floor every time and ensure that the team’s best player is involved—somehow and some way—in every possession. But by doing so, the Celtics would miss out on just as many opportunities to get Tatum the ball in a position of advantage. Everything he creates would be hard. Tatum can and will capitalize on the most difficult plays, but sometimes it’s easier just to give the ball to Derrick White. When the Celtics start to flounder, it’s amazing how much clarity they find by putting the ball in the hands of their most traditional point guard and running the most basic form of their offense: a high pick-and-roll, strictly by the numbers. No clever inversions or layered triggers or mind-expanding versatility. Just a guard who knows, above all else, how to read the room.
Enablers
Let the stars be stars.
Jalen Suggs, CJ McCollum, Immanuel Quickley, Jrue Holiday, Kris Dunn, D’Angelo Russell, Marcus Smart, Dennis Schröder, Russell Westbrook
There aren’t many point guards, living or dead, who could really justify taking the ball out of LeBron James’s hands. He has a better read on the action, better means to create advantages (even now), and a better mind for unpacking all the possibilities that a play might offer. To run point next to LeBron often means staying out of the way. There’s real virtue in that; not every guard can spring to life on the catch, but those who can position themselves as point guards to the stars. All the job takes is the complete absence of ego and then—when the moment comes—unflinching confidence to make a play or let it rip.
When the formula works, it really works. And when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t. During the Lakers’ short-lived playoff run, you could actually see D’Angelo Russell struggling with the mental gymnastics of his role in real time, launching jumpers as James ran toward him, calling for the ball. The truth is that the Lakers might not have made the playoffs at all if not for Russell, and once they did, he was clearly part of what held them back. It’s a tale as old as time, told through every Pat Beverley and Gabe Vincent and Delon Wright. Those are good players whose shotmaking, defense, and energy should be taken seriously. Yet when you stand aside long enough, you become an interchangeable part.
For many teams, an Enabler is a way-station point guard. It’s tempting to give any playmaking wing as wide a berth as you might give LeBron, and from a developmental standpoint, maybe there’s some merit to it. Enablers allow a star teammate to do more. They also require them to, in a way that can sometimes demand too much. So they fill a role for a time, until a team has other options or a more accurate feel for what it needs. It’s not a coincidence that this group of players is filled with journeymen and trade-rumor regulars. There’s always a place for an Enabler, but often it’s on the other side of a revolving door.
Jalen Suggs and the Magic will put that theory to the test. Suggs has been so good for Orlando specifically because of the ways he makes space for Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner, allowing a young team to explore its brightest, weirdest possibilities. The Magic wouldn’t be the Magic without him. They wouldn’t have one of the best defenses in the league if he wasn’t jamming up plays all over the floor, and they wouldn’t have locked up the fifth seed in the East this season if not for the humility of his game. Yet it’s impossible to watch Orlando sputter on offense for minutes at a time without wondering what could be, if only there was more shooting, or a steadier hand, or, to put it plainly, a different kind of point guard.
Enablers tend to invite those sorts of questions because of their willingness to be less involved, which makes it all too easy to project a different type of guard in their place. But the shell game works both ways. The Suns were so desperate for an Enabler that they tried to turn Bradley Beal into one. Some Tangents veer so far off course that they leave their team wanting, desperately, for restraint. Not every guard is cut out to be a high-level Operator, or to be one anymore. Russell Westbrook had to give that part of his game up; at some point or another, Russ has fit nearly every one of these designations (though not a Curator, never a Curator) before finding himself, most recently, as a bottle rocket off the bench for the Clippers.
The diversity within the point guard position—and even within the point guards themselves—means that there are always other possibilities to entertain. Maybe the fault, then, isn’t with players like Suggs, but with the premise of an Enabler and how teams deploy one. For ages, 3-and-D guards have played counterpoint to creative wings, and for good reason. It makes tidy logical sense: flank a star at another position with an unassuming guard who doesn’t take anything off the table. Yet if that star isn’t LeBron, they might be asked to do too much and their point guards trusted to do too little.
There are blurred lines between Enablers and Curators, after all, just as there are between Tangents and Operators, or Operators and Systems. Teams change. Playmakers evolve. There are so many ways to be a point guard in the modern game—enough for teams to reconsider what they have, and for the guards themselves to wonder what all they could be.