Every summer, front offices comb through restricted free agency looking for “spacing” off the bench. Another 38% three-point shooter on a minimum deal, another corner specialist who stands in the right place and hopes the ball arrives. The diagnosis is always the same: the second unit can’t shoot well enough. The actual problem is almost never about shooting percentage.

Watch a contender’s second unit run a half-court set and you’ll see it immediately. The players who aren’t holding the ball stop moving. They drift to spots, plant, and wait. The offense becomes a series of one-man isolation attempts surrounded by statues. When a shot goes up, nobody has positioned themselves for a second-chance opportunity because they were already standing still before the shot.

This is an off-ball movement problem. It’s a reads problem. Shooting percentage is a symptom, not the cause.

A player who moves well without the ball - who sets ghost screens, who cuts when a defender turns their head, who relocates after a pass rather than watching the play - creates chaos that a static 40% shooter simply cannot. The defense has to account for someone who might be anywhere. They don’t have to account for someone standing in the left corner for six consecutive possessions.

The reason this gets misdiagnosed is that the symptom is visible and the cause isn’t. You can look at a box score and see that the second unit shot 4-of-16 from three. You cannot look at a box score and see that three of those attempts came from players who had been standing in the same spot for so long that the defense had essentially forgotten them.

EuroLeague teams have been better at this, partly out of necessity. Rosters with tighter salary constraints force coaches to build bench units around movement and system rather than individual shooting talent. The results aren’t always spectacular, but they’re coherent - possessions don’t die just because the primary creator sat down.

NBA teams can afford to paper over the problem by buying shooters. So they do. And then the second unit still stagnates, and they go shopping again next July.

The fix isn’t a personnel decision. It’s a coaching one - specifically, whether a coach is willing to sit a guy who can shoot but won’t move for a guy who moves but needs work on his shot. Most aren’t. That’s the real issue.