keyonte-george-getty.png
Getty Images

Through his first two years in the league, Keyonte George was looking like anything but a foundational guy for the Utah Jazz. He was a sub-40% shooter -- a prime candidate for the dreaded no-defense/volume-scorer tag, a death knell for a modern starting point guard. 

Fast forward to January 2026, and George, who has been on an absolute heater of late, has a real-deal All-Star case and should, for my money, be the co-favorite alongside Deni Avdija for Most Improved Player (George, +500 at DraftKings, currently has the third-shortest odds for the honor). His numbers from Year 2 to Year 3 hardly look like the same player. 

SEASONPPGAPGPTS/100 SHOTSTS%

2024-25

16.8

5.6

108.9

53.9

2025-26

24.6

6.8

122.4

61.3

Yes, the usage rate and shot attempts are up. But this isn't just a volume leap. It's an efficiency one. For the month of December, George averaged 27.7 PPG on 64.9% true-shooting. Over his last 10 games, he's at 28.9 PPG on 44% from 3. 

George, drafted 16th overall in 2023, is also getting to the free-throw line almost twice as often as he did last year, up to almost eight attempts a game, and he's making 90% of them, up from 81%. When you add that kind of free-throw volume and also jump into the Stephen Curry land of percentage, you're an entirely different player on that alone. 

player headshot
Keyonte George
UTA • SG • #3
PPG24.5
APG6.9
SPG.94
3P/G2.697
View Profile

George is just flat out harder to guard now. He's always had gears equal parts shifty and smooth, but his first step is so efficient now and his handle has gotten visibly tighter, and he uses it to separate from defenders who now have to press up on him in a way that his improved shooting clips command. 

Jordan Walsh guards the best of the best for Boston and here George goes right by him to the rim, where this season he's converting at a 71% clip (identical to Anthony Edwards), per Cleaning the Glass, up from 61% a year ago. 

George is a smooth left-handed finisher, and contact doesn't bother him; in fact, he's becoming adept at seeking it, which is why his free throws are so up. If you just give him a little bump, he's going through it.

George's 3-point volume hasn't changed (7.2 attempts per game, negligibly down from 7.6 last year), he's just making a lot more of them at 38% (up from 34%). Same story, for the most part, at the rim: Efficiency up, frequency roughly the same. Where he's both taking and making more shots is in the midrange. 

Last season, George took 4.6 shots per game from somewhere between the restricted circle and the 3-point line, per NBA tracking. This season that number is up to 7.8, and he's making these shots at a 45% clip, up from 39% last year, per CTG. 

George is generally getting to these spots courtesy of some kind of two-man action, very often with Jusuf Nurkić, who has assisted George on 31 buckets (second-most on the team) and has been extremely useful operating as a high-post hub. 

If you squint you can see some of the same chemistry between George and Nurkić that has made Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray the best two-man partnership going in the NBA. Nurkić obviously isn't on Jokić's level, but he's a similar player in terms of skillset and schematic positioning. 

Meanwhile, Murray, for my money, is about the best George comp you'll find right now. Two electric, three-level shotmakers who work their two-man tandems like it's in their DNA. There's a clockwork choreography to the George/Nurkić handoffs. This happens over and over with George coming off for clean jumpers and downhill attacks. 

But here's where it gets fun. As soon as defenders start anticipating that over-the-top action and try to beat George to the spot, he plants on a dime and goes the other way and Nurkić is right there on the same page.

Here Ausar Thompson, one of the best perimeter defenders in the league, assumes a handoff is coming and is positioning himself high to take it away. So George cuts low. 

Same thing here against Boston:

This time Devin Vassell gets caught:

Next up, it's Duncan Robinson assuming George is going over the top on what looks like another standard handoff only to watch helplessly as he instead hits the brakes and reverses direction for an open 3. 

George's chemistry with Nurkić translates off the ball, too. Here the great Derrick White has his antenna up for George to continue toward the ball in the flow of this weave for another handoff from Lauri Markkanen, but instead Nurkić is on the spot with a flare screen as George goes the other way into open space. Bang. 

That shot right there has changed George's scoring profile more than anything else. He's a great pick-and-roll player but his ability to also wreak havoc off ball as an intuitive mover and deadly marksman makes him different than, say, Trae Young (or Monta Ellis, for those of you who can go back a bit farther in the scoring-guard annals, both of whom we'll talk about in a minute). This season George is scoring 1.22 PPP on all catch-and-shoots and hitting 53.7% of his spot-up 3s, per Synergy, up from a 1.06 and 35% a year ago. 

And he's not just making all these shots in meaningless moments. For starters, the Jazz are a competitive team; probably too competitive. As this year moves past the trade deadline, expect George to be taking a lot of "rest nights" as Utah aims to hang onto its top-eight protected pick in this summer's draft. 

Until then, however, Utah is giving a lot of teams fits, and George, like Murray, is fast becoming one of the most reliable clutch players. In fact, Inpredictable has him as the ninth most impactful player in the league in terms of clutch win probability added, and 10th in overall win probability, which also lends greater weight to box score stats in high-leverage situations. 

Meaning: A second-quarter shot isn't the same as knocking one down in the fourth quarter, or even more, the closing minute of a one-possession game, and George is doing a lot of the latter. 

Now, let's get back to Trae Young, who, unlike Murray and a little bit of C.J. McCollum, is not a good comp for George stylistically. Young dominates the ball. George moves away from it. But like George this season, Young has had some efficient shooting years sprinkled into a Basketball-Reference page that mostly shows an average, or especially from 3, a below-average shooter who kills a defense -- for which he is now being held accountable to a degree that his counting stats almost don't matter anymore. 

So for George, is this efficiency just a one-year thing -- or even a couple-month thing -- for a guy who is ultimately going to revert back to volume-based, good-stats-bad-team scoring? There's a world in which Utah never gets good and George becomes something closer to the aforementioned Ellis, another electric but, ultimately, relatively inefficient scorer who cost you more defensively than his stats could make up for. 

Indeed, the defense has to be talked about. George is a more engaged defender than Young, for sure, and he's a little bit bigger. You can see effort, and his rotations have gotten more instinctual. Still, when he's on the court Utah is getting outscored by 6.7 points per 100 possessions, per CTG, with a defense that would rank as the worst in the league. 

A George supporter would say Utah's defense as a whole stinks without Walker Kessler, who's out for the season, and they wouldn't be wrong. Over 101 non-garbage possessions this season, the Jazz blitzed opponents by 34.5 points with a 105.0 defensive rating when George played alongside the super-sized foursome of Markannen, Kyle Filipowski, Svi Mykhailiuk and Kessler. There's some evidence, if someone were inclined to hunt for it, that George can be a functional part of an insulative defense. 

A George naysayer, however, could also point to the fact that the defense, as it stands, gets better by nine points per 100 possessions when George sits and make a pretty compelling case that he's a big part of the problem.

Right now, nobody cares about that because nobody expects the Jazz to win. George is in the honeymoon period. But when the time comes that results start to matter, all this awesome stuff George is doing on the offensive end, particularly if it reverts back to some of the old percentages, will start to lose of its luster if his defense proves to be the liability that it looks like it might be right now. Monta Ellis was fun to watch. But you weren't going to win with him leading your team. 

So is George more Murray or Ellis? That feels like a fair ceiling and floor based on what we've seen. Will he experience some of the Trae Young blowback when he's on a team expected to compete and his flaws go from overlooked to magnetized? Can the defense improve? Can the shooting sustain? Will the Jazz trade Markannen and throw a wrench in everything? These are all things to watch, and consider, as part of the bigger Keyonte George picture, which, for what it's worth at the moment, is starting to look like a work of art.