Tre Johnson's ceiling and the skeleton key of shooting
Shooting is the NBA's most desired skill. Texas guard Tre Johnson does it better than anybody in the 2025 NBA Draft.
Shooting, and everything it unlocks for both the shooter and the offense, is the most important skill in basketball. In the 2025 NBA Draft class, nobody uses the skeleton key of shooting like Texas freshman Tre Johnson.
When using a key to open a door, the primary purpose that comes to mind is unlocking a path from area A to area B. However, the secondary purpose may be to escape from area A in the first place. Shooting doesn’t just add to what someone can do on the court, it solves problems and gets players out of sticky situations.
If a handler is being funneled into the paint, where a help defender is waiting, the perfect way to exploit that is to find the weak spot in the rotation on the perimeter. Shooting, in that sense, solves the problem. Of course, after seeing said shooter, if the player is dangerous enough, the closeout is going to come hard. From there, the offensive player can do anything he wants.
The difference between specialists and superstars is the way they see area B. For a specialist, shooting is the way to get him or his team out of area A. For a superstar, shooting is a way to unlock more territory and more options. Johnson has a chance to be the latter type of player, with the way he uses his class’s most dangerous jump shot to unlock the rest of his offensive arsenal.
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Firstly, it’s important to diagnose just how deadly Johnson’s shot is. On 224 3-point attempts, Johnson shot nearly 40%, an incredible mark on its own, made even more incredible by the fact that only 67.4% of his 89 made 3’s were assisted.
Compared to some of the other elite shooters of the past two classes, this number stands out immensely. Below are Johnson’s numbers compared to Kon Knueppel, Reed Sheppard, Jared McCain, Dalton Knecht, and Jordan Hawkins in each player’s pre-professional season.
Johnson: 89-of-224 (39.7%), 67.4% a3PM
Knueppel: 84-of-207 (40.6%), 92.9% a3PM
Sheppard: 75-of-144 (52.1%), 77.4% a3PM
McCain: 87-of-210 (41.4%), 82.8% a3PM
Knecht: 93-of-234 (39.7%), 85.0% a3PM
Hawkins: 109-of-281 (38.8%), 89.9% a3PM
Johnson’s efficiency on 3-point dribble jumpers (1.15 points per shot on pull-up 3’s) makes it a valid choice for the primary weapon in his arsenal. His footwork, balance, creativity, and quick release make him incredibly difficult to guard on these shots despite somewhat of a lagging handle.
Johnson doesn’t just make the difficult shots, though. Along with his deep pull-up mastery, Johnson shot a staggering 54.8% on his corner 3-point attempts, and 40.8% on his catch-and-shoot attempts.
Simply put, Johnson’s a master of shooting, with impeccable mechanics, held together in any setting on any shot, and as a product uses the skeleton key remarkably well, nearly unparalleled by anyone in his class.
He moves remarkably well off the ball, frequently game-planned to run off screens or into handoffs to catch the ball with a designed advantage. However, the gravity of his shooting allows him to find lanes out of the system to cut for easy baskets or exploitable advantages.
Johnson scored at a rate of 1.302 points per possession on off-screen plays, according to Synergy Sports, ranking in the 91st percentile nationally with a true shooting percentage of 70.6% on 49 true shot attempts. His aforementioned balance and footwork are what make him so dangerous on these attempts. Johnson’s core strength allows him to hold his mechanics together regardless of whether he’s fading back, running East-to-West (or vice versa), or stepping back off the dribble.
Regardless of how the rest of his game pans out at the next level, Johnson will have a spot in the league for a long time based on his shooting. However, assigning Johnson as just a shooter is a severely limiting casting.
His shooting off the dribble is a clear-cut sign of this. Johnson’s handle, while loose at times, is good enough to get him to his spots along the perimeter, and even in the mid-range. Just 17.8% of Johnson’s 2-point attempts were assisted as he routinely hunts mismatches in the in-between game.
Along with the shooting, Johnson’s wing-like size at the guard position helps him to accomplish this. In shoes, Johnson comes out to just about 6 feet, 6 inches with a 6-foot-10.25 wingspan. Against a team like Alabama, which features a bevy of smaller guards, Johnson made it a point to not just hunt for, but force, those mismatches.
Here’s an example of this. Johnson starts the possession with fellow freshman Labaron Philon guarding him. While Philon isn’t the biggest at about 6 feet, 4 inches in shoes and 175 pounds, he’s a talented guard defender who’s shown an ability to lock up players like Johnson. Guarding Johnson’s teammate, Jordan Pope, is the 5-foot-11 Mark Sears.
Part of the reason Johnson’s able to force the switch is because of the shooting he threatens opponents with. Philon is top-locking Johnson, preventing him from reaching the 3-point line on off-ball actions. Johnson diagnoses this and calls for Pope to get the ball back and come towards him. He essentially pushes Philon until he’s forced to switch with Sears before attacking and scoring.
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A lot of Johnson’s mismatch attacks were made inside the arc, understandably. However, one of the bigger flaws within Johnson’s game lies in his ability to get to the rim.
While at the 2025 NBA Draft Combine, Johnson tested relatively well. His plus-5-inch wingspan is a great tool on the defensive end, and his 37.5-inch max vertical was tied for the eighth-highest of his class. However, Johnson, while strong of core, lacks the upper and lower body strength, as well as the North-to-South burst required to put legitimate pressure on the rim.
Of his 424 half-court field goal attempts, just 71 came at the rim for Johnson where he converted at a 46.5% rate. Additionally, Johnson only logged two made dunks in the half-court on just three attempts, marking him as a clear-cut below-the-rim finisher.
SIDE NOTE: Funnily enough, Johnson’s two dunks came from the exact same set.
Johnson’s handle doesn’t help him get downhill in many regards. While he has a good amount of sideline-to-sideline shift, allowing him to create space on his patented side steps, Johnson crumples a bit through contact, often forced to pick up before he enters the paint.
With the heavy creator role Johnson was tasked with (Johnson took 27.1% of his team’s total field goals, ranking in the 99th percentile), the defensive attention he was awarded as a product was designed to deter him from easy shots. That said, his physical weaknesses helped to turn many potential paint touches into pull-up 2-pointers and pickups around the free-throw line.
Regardless of whether Johnson’s ever able to put consistent pressure on the rim, adding strength and improving his handle will be paramount to actualizing his potential, going beyond the specialist role into one of an All-Star or All-NBA caliber player.
The question is, will he need to get to the rim to achieve this potential? A player like Devin Booker provides a blueprint to find an answer. Booker is a four-time All-Star and two-time All-NBA selectee. This past season, his shot profile looked remarkably similar to Johnson’s, especially at the rim.
For Booker, 16.3% of his half-court field goal attempts came at the cup, while for Johnson, it was 16.7%. Now, Booker is roughly 15-20 pounds heavier than Johnson, adding to the claim that he will need to add weight, and a more advanced passer and handler.
However, Johnson is far from a black hole. In Ben Pfeifer’s hand-tracked big-time passing metric, Johnson ranked fifth among 22 of the players projected at the top of the 2025 class. His single-game high of six assists doesn’t suggest an incredibly adept playmaker, but the passes Johnson throws tend to be eye-popping.
He’s still growing, of course, but Johnson has shown the wherewithal to direct traffic, throw his teammates open, run a pick-and-roll, sling passes with either hand, utilize velocity and arc, and pass off a live dribble.
His “Morey rate” (percentage of assists resulting in a 3-pointer or a shot at the rim) was just a shade under 85 percent. Johnson generates high-value shots by feeding cutters and bigs around the rim, with nearly 50 percent of his assists leading to layups (83rd percentile) and 17.8% resulting in corner 3-pointers (74th percentile).
Johnson’s passing, in large part, is in reaction to the gravity he demands as an overall scorer, due to the gravity he demands as a shooter. The fact that he’s this effective as a passer despite this is nothing to scoff at.
Johnson’s got a long way to go before he can be the focal point of an offense at the next level like Booker, who’s made the full transition to point guard. However, as he improves his handle, running more pick-and-roll could be a way to mend some of Johnson’s existing weak points.
For one, the screen creating an initial advantage would help rid Johnson of having to shed defenders with bumps of his own to get downhill. Additionally, he’s executed on pick-and-roll reads well all season, and has developed a versatile passing repertoire. It would also give him the option to shoot if it’s there, with the advantage created not just opening up downhill and passing opportunities, but pockets of space for Johnson to get to his jumper.
Additionally, if Johnson never becomes a point guard like Booker, it doesn’t mean he’s failed as a player. With a shot as clean and efficient as his, All-Star games are fully possible without being an elite, top-end pick-and-roll creator or passer. Even with the passing skill set he has, no player with Johnson’s scoring skill set — barring that they can’t handle and see the floor like Steve Nash — should be deferring even close to as often as they’re shooting.
Johnson’s ceiling will be determined and reached by his ability to unlock more areas of his game through the skeleton key of shooting. He could simply keep going through the doorway from area A to area B, or he could continue to go deeper, discovering an area C, area D, and so on, until he’s maximized his offensive skillset and the key won’t allow him to go anywhere else.
Work will be required to push deeper into these unseen areas, as Johnson will need to build on his body and handle, but with a shot like nobody else in this year’s NBA Draft class, Johnson has just as good a chance as any to reach his full potential.