The NBA is a copycat league, and for good reason: Once players discover something that works, they aren’t shy about borrowing it. A move that might only be the province of one or two players can quickly catch on around the league, sometimes to the point that the originator barely gets a whiff of notice. Over the course of two decades, for instance, a “Euro step” move mastered and popularized by Manu Ginobili quickly became part of virtually every perimeter player’s arsenal. (He’s also from Argentina, not Europe, but whatever.) Similarly, Jarrett Jack’s lethal rip-through move became Kevin Durant’s and Chris Paul’s, until the league legislate away the advantage.
Of late, there’s a new trendy move that builds on the Euro step, a hesitation move on the way to the rim that nearly every young perimeter player is feverishly working on adding to his game.
But every trend starts somewhere, and when I started digging, it seemed this one may have started with Nemanja Bjelica?
Yes, really. The Serbian forward is long gone from the NBA and retired from his international career in March 2024, but his legacy lives on in a move that, perhaps, started with him. Since then, however, it has been adapted, modified, and improved to the point that it’s almost unrecognizable from its origin point.
The move is what a lot of players call a “Euro decel,” for the deceleration at the end, but that isn’t a new phenomenon. Players like Kyle Anderson and Luka Doncic have been doing that for years.
More recently, however, a very particular application has become the rage — what I call the “Euro stop.” This isn’t just a player slowing down or speeding up on their way to the rim, a la Anderson or Doncic. Instead, the player comes to a dead stop in the middle of the move, often hanging awkwardly with one leg in the air as a defender flies by.
One of the league’s leading practitioners, the San Antonio Spurs’ Harrison Barnes, pulling it off to draw a foul on the Boston Celtics’ Jayson Tatum. Notice how Barnes mixes in a shot fake in the middle of his stops and then comes to a stop at the end, with his right foot staying airborne and left leg planted, before going into his shot:
It took years to get from players like Bjelica and Anderson slo-mo ambling their way to the rim to the types of steps and fakes that Barnes and his rookie teammate Stephon Castle now routinely incorporate. Castle, in fact, has become one of the league’s heaviest practitioners of the Euro stop, routinely pausing mid-move to wrong-foot defenders.
They are now teammates in San Antonio, but how we got from Barnes to Castle is a much windier pathway than you might think, even if the end product looks remarkably similar. Let’s let Barnes retell some of it:
Barnes spent the 2019 offseason working on his move with then-Kings assistant Noah LaRoche, but it took a while to perfect. Barnes broke it out occasionally but not nearly as often as he has the past two seasons in Sacramento and San Antonio. He was still figuring out how to apply it in live action.
The first time he broke it out in a game, ironically, was against his old coach in 2019-20.
One of the first times he did it was in Golden State; I actually got called for a travel,” he said. “I was like, ‘Look, I didn’t put the other foot down.’ When you show the ball, you’re still moving; referees at that point weren’t used to seeing it. Now, so many guys do it, they know what to look for, and they’re not going to call it as much.”
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