The Secret to Devin Harris' Success

In case you haven't noticed, the best point guard in the East resides in New Jersey. Devin Harris is in the midst of a surprising career year, ranking fourth in the league with 24.8 points a night and 12th with 6.1 assists. If anyone claims they saw this coming, well, he's lying.

Consider this: in four previous seasons, Harris scored at least 24 points in a game exactly four times, and never more than 27. This year? He's already topped 30 six times, including a career-high 47 in Sunday's game against the Suns.

What's he doing differently? For one, getting to the free throw line ... a lot. He averaged a career-high 4.7 free throw attempts a game last season, but he's obliterated that mark so far this season. In his first 14 games, he's averaging 11.2 attempts, second in the league only to Dwight Howard's 12.1. That type of improvement is simply amazing -- and virtually unprecedented.

As Kevin Pelton points out on Basketball Prospectus, only one other player in the history of the NBA (Neil Johnston from 1951-52 to 1952-53) has increased his attempts by as much as 7.1 from one season to the next:

In fact, Harris' leap has only been surpassed once in league history, and you have to go back more than 50 years to find that. However, this group isn't really comparable to Harris with the possible exception of West. For the most part, these guys saw their FTAs go up because they played larger roles and more minutes, not because they did a better job of getting to the line.

A better way to look at the issue is using the percentage of player possessions that ended in trips to the free-throw line. From this perspective, Harris stands alone, having gone from 13.4 percent of his possessions being FTAs a year ago to 23.1 percent so far this season, a 9.7 percent increase.

This begs the question: can Harris keep it up? Some might argue that 14 games isn't a big sample size, but I'd argue it's big enough. He's changed his playing style to be more aggressive and the referees have responded. And no matter how inconsistent you may think refs are from one game to the next, you don't get the type of calls he's been getting for 14 straight games without doing something right.

I suppose some teams might start to play him differently, but really, what can you do? He's one of the quickest players in the league so chances are he'll always be able to beat his man and get into the paint.

Plus, who else is going to score for the Nets? Now that Richard Jefferson is in Milwaukee, the Nets need Harris to score, and now that they've seen he can, they're going to keep asking him to do it. Vince Carter is second on the team with 23.3 points per game, but after him drop-off is steep: Yi Jianlian (10.6) is the only other player in double-digits.

Harris' numbers might decline slightly but his season so far isn't a fluke: as his role and style has evolved, so has his production. Is anyone else thinking the Mavs might want a mulligan?