On the surface, Noah Clowney’s third NBA season doesn’t look much different from his disappointing sophomore season. After posting per-game averages of 9/4/1 on 51.6% true shooting last season, he’s at
8/4/1.6 on 47.1% true shooting through 11 games to start this one. At least Clowney hasn’t missed games with a sprained ankle yet, which he did four separate times in 2024-25.
But Clowney, now 21 years old, looks different after a healthy summer of work…
Clowney has started each of Brooklyn’s last five games, initially replacing Michael Porter Jr. when the latter missed one game with personal reasons, but now firmly entrenched in the first five. When Cam Thomas eventually returns from his hamstring injury, Jordi Fernández will either have to downsize and bench Clowney, bench rookie Egor Dëmin, or bench the veteran Terance Mann (or leave CT on the bench).
But let’s not look ahead too much. Clowney is averaging nearly 15 points per game over his five starts, displaying some of the brightest flashes of his career.
That being said, his three-ball is not falling. Following the Nets’ Tuesday night loss to the Toronto Raptors, Clowney is 16-of-61 (26.23%) on the year from deep, in dire need of some positive regression at least to his career 32% average, hopefully higher. Still, it’s only an 11-game sample. The good, more important news is that his lack of 3-point accuracy doesn’t detract from overall offensive improvements…
Plenty of players bulk up as they progress in their NBA careers. But Clowney has immediately started using his newfound muscle, a massive development for his offense. Last season, I frequently noted his inability to take contact as a driver, to power through defenders without losing the ball or getting knocked off course…
His best chance of getting to the rim was by slinking around defenders with a euro-step or a spin move, trying to avoid contact entirely when finishing. Alas, playing through contact is a prerequisite for being a successful NBA player in 2025; imagine again how physical that NBA Finals series between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers was.
Noah Clowney didn’t the most dynamic athlete overnight, but he has seemingly embraced leading with his shoulder and creating contact on drives. His best play of the young season, this poster dunk, would have been unthinkable a year ago…
Clowney’s teammates and coaches have talked about him being a “sponge” since he entered the league, asking plenty of questions and soaking up the responses; evidently, those compliments aren’t just lip service. It’s one thing to glue yourself to the shoulder press machine over a summer, but it’s quite another come out of the gates playing with physicality in the fall.
Of course, Clowney isn’t one to admit this: “I worked on it the whole summer, repped it the whole summer, so I don’t really think about it. I’m just playing.”
Noah Clowney isn’t having a perfect start to the season, but this is a huge positive. If Clowney can survive inside the arc — maybe not dunking on everybody but hitting little floaters, getting to two feet, and getting fouled every so often — he is immensely closer to being a rotation-quality offensive player. The native South Carolinian has consistently flashed floor-reading skills…
It remains to be seen if Clowney’s newfound strength will lead to more successful layup and dunk attempts; he was one of the league’s least efficient finishers at his size last year. For now, the offensive rebounding numbers from his rookie year appear to be a fluke. While Brooklyn’s wish-list for Clowney goes beyond making more 3-pointers, he’s still had a nice start to the season.
Defense, however, remains a bigger question. What does Clowney do for a good defense? What is he good at? These questions would have had slam-dunk answers after Clowney’s rookie season. He spent most of 2023-24 in Long Island before getting called up to Brooklyn in the spring, but produced on both sides of the Cross Island Parkway. His 2.4% block-rate in admittedly minimal NBA minutes was right up there with the league’s best forwards (Cleaning the Glass).
Jordi Fernández has installed major schematic changes in Brooklyn’s defense the last two seasons. Again, Clowney never built momentum in 2024-25 due to all those ankle sprains. But the decline in defensive activity is sharper than these factors could explain on their own; he is blocking and stealing the ball even less frequently to begin this season.
Clowney does believe he’s identified the problem though…
After two blocks agains the New York Knicks and another two against the Raptors on Tuesday, maybe he’s onto something. He hadn’t recorded a block in his first nine games. This wasn’t due to a lack of chances, but rather, Clowney seems to lack physical force at the rim, hardly getting off the ground on these plays…
Clowney will never be the most explosive athlete, regardless of his added muscle. His margin for error is thin, then; a 7’2” wingspan ain’t what it used to be. Perhaps that’s why Jordi Fernández has consistently brought up defense, saying this after Clowney scored a season-high 19 points in a loss to the Detroit Pistons: “I need him to do better defensively. And he knows it, his voice needs to grow and embracing the contact they’re playing with, with two bigs. Whether you’re the low man, whether your communication is good off the ball, all those things.”
As Fernández says, it’s not just blocking shots and stealing the ball, even if those are obvious indicators of defensive activity. It’s the basics like talking and positioning, even making more spirited closeouts than this…
Noah Clowney has had an encouraging start to his third NBA season, that is undeniable. There just might be a productive offensive player in that suddenly muscular frame; Clowney will need to become at least a league-average 3-point shooter, no guarantee, but it’s not like he’s stagnating at age 21.
His defense presents a more urgent area of concern, though. It’s not that Clowney is an abject train wreck out there, but it’s tough to highlight an area he does well in. Maybe the weak-side rim protection is coming back after a year-and-a-half hiatus, though we’ll need more than four blocks in two games to be certain.
Either way, Noah Clowney is healthy and entrenched in the starting lineup for the time being. With the Brooklyn Nets sitting at 1-10, we’ll take a bright spot where we can get it.
A note on Nic Claxton
Nic Claxton is off to a fantastic offensive start in his seventh NBA season. He’s smashing his previous career-highs in points, assists, free-throw shooting, and even offensive-rebounding percentage! This was the hope for the Claxton in the preseason, that 2024-25 was simply a testing ground for him to get more comfortable initiating offense as a hub at the top of the key, and that 2025-26 would see a healthy Nic Claxton at career-best levels.
This has largely been the case through 11 games; he’s emerged as a reliable offensive hub not just because he’s making the simple reads more effectively, but because his driving game looks refreshed and renewed with the help of some offseason lab work…
He’s making layups, little hook shots, and he is shooting 73.58% on freebies, though that will likely regress.
Nic Claxton still has two years on his contract after this one, and with the Nets in a rebuild, asking if they should trade him is a valid question. There are easy arguments on both sides, but it is a discussion to be had, especially with him looking good to start the year and with a descending contract that only has him making about 11% of the cap in 2027-28, his age 28 season.
But if a contender is going to sacrifice precious draft capital to the Nets for Claxton’s services, he’s going to have to improve his defense, specifically his rebounding. The 26-year-old is grabbing just under 15% of available defensive rebounds, and even though Brooklyn’s trap-heavy scheme is responsible for that poor number, film like this is going to scare some general managers away…
In that last clip, he goes for an ill-fated block attempt that leads to an easy put-back. In the first four, he simply gets pushed out of the way without much of a fight.
“I got to be better for sure,” said Claxton after the loss to Toronto, in which he only grabbed four defensive boards. “I’m only averaging around like seven or eight rebounds, and we’ve been struggling as a team in that area, so I can definitely step up my game in that department. We had a conversation about that.”
Until some of the defensive rebounding numbers and last bits of effort improve (though his motor has been slightly better than last year), I wouldn’t expect a team to make a trade offer for Clax to General Manager Sean Marks’ liking.
The front court many Nets fans have clamored for since the end of the 2023-24 season is finally starting games together. Both Noah Clowney and Nic Claxton have had promising offensive starts to the year, though their defense leaves much to be desired. For Clowney, it’s to establish himself as a proper NBA rotation player. For Claxton, it’s to not only get back all the way back to a peak we feared may be gone forever but to perhaps increase his trade value.
Clowney and Claxton’s next chance to keep boosting their stock comes in NBA Cup action, as the Brooklyn Nets travel to face the Orlando Magic on Friday evening. Tip-off is scheduled for 7:00 p.m. ET.
