Minute Basketball: Recent Episodes
Samson Folk and Louis Zatzman
Fear isn’t the only mind killer. All emotion is. Get too excited, too nervous, too confident: feel much of anything at all, and you can suffer the consequences. The problem for NBA players coming back from injury is that you feel too much of everything. Not just NBA players -- coming back to anything is an emotional affair.
Injury is the ultimate interruption, physically and mentally. You might not trust the injured part of your body coming back (Gordon Hayward), might not trust your teammates remember your talents (Pascal Siakam), or might not trust your place as the starting quarterback of the team will remain yours (Dennis Quaid). Those are all fears. Or, best case scenario, you might have total faith in yourself and your situation and itch to return to the field of play. The problem is that’s still an interruption, an emotion that’s not your usual gameday vibe. The pitfalls and traps abound.
This is all without even mentioning the actual injury itself, which in varying cases can often impact players long after they’re on the court shooting hoops. All this to say: returns are not, by definition, triumphant.
And yet against all odds many still are. As the NBA season lurches and grinds to the playoffs, returns, too, are increasing their pace. On what that might mean when the postseason begins, and celebrating the returns that triumph against all odds. The major and the minute.
This week in Minute Basketball: Return.
Folk - Hello, George
Ahh yes, return. Return to Minute Basketball where I pair my extremely limited sportswriter brain with Louis’ vast wealth of insights and anecdotes.
The name George, for me, means Paul and Costanza. Perhaps the most fluid and beautiful basketball stylist of all time, and a fictional character who is the very worst of us. I tried very hard to highlight Paul George as an MVP candidate early on in this season. He was tremendous, he was hot off the heels of a dazzling playoff performance, and he was still trying to drag the Clippers to middling heights without Kawhi Leonard. He broke down over the course of the season, had to have surgery, and was out for an extended period of time before coming back a couple nights ago. 34 points, 6 assists, 4 steals.
George’s return was the intersection of a couple returns outside of his own. The return of the questions surrounding Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell’s doomed partnership in Utah. Who could possibly serve as a better reminder of their shortcomings than the man who ended their championship aspirations less than a year ago? The circumventing of the Maginot Line that Louis and I talked about in our France episode still rings true. George took nearly half of his shots from behind the 3-point line, and did so in a way that only he knows how. When Steph Curry clears the screen, he pulls. He doesn’t care much about getting a couple feet closer. George, however, is the master of toeing the line. Little parking stalls for George’s feet are laid around the arc, and he visits them frequently. With forward momentum, or stepping back, they are specifically designed for him. If someone like Kevin Durant tries to park his larger feet there, he’ll go over the line and lose in game 7. The return of George’s feet to their parking spots.
And George Costanza, well that’s my return. I love basketball dearly and I mine it for meaning and progression in odd spots, but Paul George plays the game so beautifully. He doesn’t play the same grubby sport that Fred VanVleet, Chris Paul, and Steven Adams play. George returning to my TV screen every game makes me return to the worst version of myself: no longer mining the role players’ games for meaning. But instead, indulging in the all too easy “that boy nice” viewership of watching PG13 go to work. Lazy, gluttonous, self-indulgent, like Mr. Costanza.
Zatzman - The Big Picture
Playoff teams this year who aren’t either missing (and potentially expecting back) starters or currently in the process of working them back into the lineup are few and far in between. A list, then, with stats accurate as of Mar. 30.
The Clippers are only on this list because of the magnitude of George and Kawhi Leonard, but the list of teams with injured starters is far longer than those without. In fact, the only teams to have reached 40 wins this season that currently aren’t returning or will be returning an injured player are the Miami Heat (imploding), Philadelphia 76ers (mediocre in March), Brooklyn Nets (hardly exist as a basketball team under the weight of their own players’ existences), Dallas Mavericks (I have nothing bad to say), Utah Jazz (imploding), and Minnesota Timberwolves (surging). Realistically, none of those teams are winning the NBA championship.
Which means in all likelihood, the champion will be working a returned player back into the system during the critical time of the year.
The Suns are a machine with or without Chris Paul. They were on pace to break the clutch record before Paul hurt his thumb, and then they were 11-4 without him. And 2-0 in double-digit wins over playoff teams since his return. They, ahh, don’t have much trouble working anyone back and are my championship favourite.
The Grizzlies, similarly, don’t seem to have much trouble without Ja Morant. He has a negative on/off net rating, and the team is a buzzsaw without him in the lineup. His multiple returns from various maladies through the season have been seamless, and I imagine he would be playing right now if the Grizzlies had anything realistic to play for during this stretch run.
But then come some teams showing problems with their returners. The Warriors kind of stink without Steph Curry, and they’ve lost six of seven. They also have not yet found their footing with Klay Thompson, with both the defense and offense worse with him on the floor. The Warriors have outscored opponents by 245 with both Curry and Draymond Green on the floor (also a relatively recent returner from injury), and have only won the season by 392 points. That’s a heck of a lot of reliance on two players, one of whom will be a returner, and the other of whom is a recent returner. Thompson was supposed to help plug the gap, and the hope has to be that as he returns to form, so too will the team in his minutes. That’s a lot of ifs as the playoffs loom.
Milwaukee is probably fine. Its center is not the centerpiece of the team, though Brook Lopez will be critical to Milwaukee’s malleability in mixing in drop coverage against playoff foes. Yet the Boston Celtics, also missing a center, could be in trouble. Robert Williams III has the second-highest on/off differential on the team, and they’re 6-7 in games without him in the lineup. Boston has assembled a really nice cast of decision makers to surround the star wings, but excellence will always be a fine line when the stars are so similar. Williams’ presence may determine which side of the line Boston finds itself.
The Nuggets perhaps might not even return Michael Porter jr. or Jamal Murray according to recent reports from Mike Singer, so their inclusion on this list may be superfluous. But they will need the talent -- and the talent to fit in immediately if it does return -- to matter deep into the playoffs.
Ditto for the Bulls with the entire core of their defense in Alex Caruso, Lonzo Ball, and Patrick Williams. Caruso is back and has immediately been outperforming the team’s plus-minus, but he can’t stabilize the defensive free-fall on his own now. Ball suffered a small setback over a week ago in his return to the court, and he may not be back. Williams is starting to get his legs under him. All three, by the way, have defensive on/offs between the 94th and 96th percentile. Their presence and comfort will determine Chicago’s playoff fate, as long as the stars and their health stay dependable.
Toronto’s half-court offense has fallen off a cliff without Fred VanVleet healthy and creating advantages in pick and rolls. It’s doubtful that he’ll find his knee magically healed by the playoffs, as he’s said rest isn’t helping, and it’s been injured since early February. On the other hand, OG Anunoby’s return from (with?) a fractured finger is going swimmingly, as his shooting and defense have solved a variety of Toronto’s problems. Toronto is a realistic dark horse to reach the Eastern Conference Finals, but only if their top-end talent can play at its best.
The Cavs have gone 7-12 without Jarrett Allen in the lineup, as he props up everything they do on both sides of the floor. The Clippers are not going to win in the playoffs without at least one of their stars, but George’s return went about as well as reality could have allowed. Of course, covered above.
The teams that integrate their stars seamlessly back into the systems will have huge advantages over those that don’t -- partially because every damn contender seems to be in the process of grappling with one return or another. Talent, cohesion, and luck always determine results in the NBA playoffs. This year, returns, too, will have a monstrous part to play.
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Cliches are cliches for a reason has become a cliche. And for a good reason! Let me give you an example: timing is everything. Amanda and I were talking about how chill our baby was the other day. At exactly the moment I said this, however, his cries from across our home shattered the still night. Funny guy! Not because of his jokes (he has none) or his banter (still, none) or his words (obviously, of course, none). He’s funny because timing is everything. It’s even a Garrett Hedlund song for crying out loud. (who?)
Timing is the difference between Norm MacDonald and the regular at my old bar who never shut up, between our reality of English- or French-speaking Canada. In a zero-sum world like the NBA, timing being everything means it’s the difference between all those ranges of possible outcomes. On and off the court.
This week in Minute Basketball: timing.
Zatzman - Off the court
Masai Ujiri sat in front of assembled media from Toronto and elsewhere the day after the trade deadline and made a shocking and thought-provoking claim. Everyone knows that timing is everything off the court in the NBA. What Ujiri seemed to claim, and this section presupposes, is … maybe it isn’t?
“There’s no window,” he said, interrupting a question from Eric Koreen about championship windows and having players all peak within the same time frame, “I’ll stop you there.
“When do they reach their peak? You know that's what you're talking about. The younger players are (approximately) 21, Barnes and OG. That's the composition of our team. You have to mix in these players. I feel strongly that Fred, Pascal, these guys can get better. They are going to get even better than they are now. I said this when we talked about this before, and I think Fred making the All-Star (game) tells me that he got better. I think Pascal is having an All-Star year. I think OG, if he doesn't miss how many games from injury just like Pascal, he'll be in all those conversations too. Incredible dynamic player. Scottie Barnes. I think they're all getting better. This is just the composition of our team. Do we have to be at a championship level where all of them are 27 years old, 28 years old, peaking, and now we’ve reached the championship and this is what we're doing? I wish I could look at it and tell you like that's the way it happens all the time. It's not that way.”
The end there is the most significant part. One more time, shortened for emphasis: “Do we have to be at a championship level where all of them are 27 years old, 28 years old, peaking? It’s not that way.”
Well, that’s not so hard to fact check. Since the 2010 championship, nine champions have had their three best players -- defined here by VORP but almost always pretty obvious to all observers -- 26 years or older: what Ujiri meant by “peaking.” Some of them have been incredibly close in age: the 2010 Los Angeles Lakers featured Kobe Bryant (31), Pau Gasol (29), and Lamar Odom (30) with the smallest spread, but so too were the Golden State Warriors (many times) led by three stars within two years of one another. A three-year gap for the Miami Heat’s big three.
There have been a few teams since 2010 with three stars in different phases of their career. The San Antonio Spurs in 2014 are the most obvious candidate, with Kawhi Leonard leading the team in VORP at 23 years of age while Manu Ginobili (36) and Tim Duncan (38) were more than a decade older apiece. Similarly, a 24-year-old Kyrie Irving was relatively inexperienced for the 2016 champion Cleveland Cavaliers.
And most significantly, the Raptors’ own Pascal Siakam was 25 years old when winning a championship in 2019 alongside a 28-year-old Leonard and 33-year-old Kyle Lowry. So Ujiri had precedent for his there-is-no-window stance, including the championship he won only a few years before.
What does that mean for timing an NBA championship? It means in the micro (and this is Minute Basketball, lest we forget) that the Raptors aren’t waiting for st; they have their stars in Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet, and they may be older than Scottie Barnes and OG Anunoby, but it doesn’t bother Ujiri in the least. They aren’t building around one pair or the other. The team-building philosophical embodiment of “Fk it, let’s get both.”
But in the macro, Ujiri’s comments are even more revealing. It means, if you take him at face value, that there is no such thing as off-court timing. Good players make it work. Lowry, a previously score-first player, became one of the best pick-and-roll passers in the league in Toronto’s championship season. Jason Kidd basically stopped shooting inside the arc for the Dallas Mavericks. Perhaps Scottie Barnes -- now a transition demon, cutting wizard, and offensive rebounding extraordinaire -- would feast in the post more often were the Raptors organized differently (ie. had more than three shooters on the team). I doubt he’d need time to change, merely a difference in scenery.
The point is that players can be ready no matter their age. Rajon Rondo was a starting point guard on a championship team in his sophomore season. Danny Green will probably start on championship teams into his 40s. Championship windows, if they exist, are propped open by individual skills and their complex enmeshing, not by time.
Folk - On the court
This could just as easily be about sequencing rather than timing, but for this case I think they’re more or less synonymous. And in this case, the Philadelphia 76ers case, the “oh this team has lots of great players, how will they share the ball” case: timing is imperative. The Sixers are now 3-0 with James Harden in the lineup, and they’re simultaneously maintaining Embiid’s MVP status and Tyrese Maxey’s ascension to stardom. Oh yeah, and max contract Tobias Harris is in the mix as well. Mouths to feed, everything is new, how do you do it in a way that puts you in winning situations?
This might sound somewhat simplistic, but they’re relying on Harden, the new guy, to figure it out. He is the arbiter of whose time it is. Yes, the arbiter of time. When you have the seismic impact of either Harden or Embiid, your ability to break defenses isn’t reliant on beautiful set symmetry or clever misdirections on the weak-side. The exit screen to punish a tag, for example. These guys can run a simple ball screen and fuel a remarkable offense in doing so. That very access to easy baskets is what drove the advent of ‘Harden-ball’ in Houston.
“This guy can score unlike anybody else in history, just let him try to do it more?”
Harden paired up with Chris Paul and they were the shepherds of one of the NBA’s greatest teams to never win a championship. Relationships frayed, Russell Westbrook came in, and a weakness was recognized on the Rockets. Harden wasn’t the arbiter of time, the defense was. They doubled him when he crossed half court, and signed off on playing 3-on-4 defense to avoid Harden’s sensational isolation stylings. It worked. And one of the most dominating on-ball presences decided he wanted to be insulated against that, and requested a trade away from Houston. He ended up in Brooklyn, fought through a significant hamstring injury in the playoffs, then found himself mired in all the controversy of the 21-22 Nets. Kyrie Irving the part time player, Kevin Durant injured - Harden didn’t want ‘Harden-ball’ again.
So, here he is in Philadelphia, the arbiter of time, the author of their offense, and finding success for himself and others, at the right time. Maxey’s 21 second half points to help dispatch of the Nets came largely on second-side action after Harden tilted the defense in his favor. Maxey is rapid in every sense of the word, and giving him the option to attack off of Embiid and Harden’s incredible gravity is a death sentence. He’s had one 3-game stretch of scoring better than when Harden arrived. A scintillating stretch of 88 points on 58 shots. With Harden? 75 on 42. The efficiency is a little mind numbing.
Embiid’s comments in regards to Harden are no doubt applicable for Maxey as well: “That was probably the most wide open I’ve ever been in my career. I had a lot of easy baskets. I used to have to work for everything.”
The arbiter of time will continue to find it for himself and others.
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People usually lose the tiny sliver of the present in the infinitesimal gulf of the past, the yawning chasm of the future. How could we see a dot, ever obliterated by what it holds up, what it feeds into?
For the NBA, that means we are full of misconceptions of the now. People see a league in such a supercharged state of change and so see yesterday as today. If you try to snap a still frame, you can miss and end up grasping at its wake. That’s true in the micro, why it usually takes a year after players change their stripes for their reputations to follow, why lots of players who haven’t yet made the grade are considered stars because they one day may become one. But it’s true in the macro, too. Strategies that worked the year before can be old hat by the time a new season rolls around, or team leaders can try to innovate years before the tactic will actually work.
We wrote in the 2020 NBA Playoffs about the various futures of the big man in the NBA, about the possible visions of the role and the stars and hard-hitters who fulfill them. But any controversy about the value of the NBA big was laid to rest during that same playoff run as Anthony Davis ate the world, and then Giannis Antetokounmpo did the same the following postseason.
Now it’s the wing who is misplaced, who lives out of time in the general understanding of the NBA. It’s not that people misconstrue the value of the wing, it’s just that time shifts too quickly, like quicksand. Well, that and the fact that people misconstrue the value of the wing.
Wings don’t rule the league anymore. They’re far from extinct, but you can’t just throw an elite wing -- or even two! -- on the floor every night and expect to win. Too much has changed for that to be true.
This week in Minute Basketball: The State of the Wing
Zatzman -- The Celtics, lost in time
Sometimes when you take a risk in building a team for the present -- and sacrifice the multiplicity of possible futures that once were available to you -- you lose the pot when the present shifts under your feet.
That unenviable position is where the Boston Celtics find themselves this year. Just two short years ago, the Celtics started the season 11-2. Smart, plugged-in writers were calling the NBA a “wing-dominated league” and Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum maybe “the best young duo of them all.” Tatum played in his first All-Star Game that year, and Brown joined him the following season. Both averaged over 20 points a game, dominating in isolation, in the pick and roll. Both were elite defenders. The league was in the palm of their hands.
Boston lost in the playoffs that year to an (I still believe) inferior Miami Heat team. The following season -- despite continued excellent play from Tatum and Brown -- the Celtics were a .500 team. Now this year they’re 5-6, still stymied by a pathetic offense. More or less, they’re proving that last season’s .500 record was their true state, rather than a fluke.
Yet Brown is playing the best basketball he’s ever played, scoring more points than he ever has, and on better efficiency to boot. Tatum has seen a drop off, but he’s scoring almost 24 points a game to complement Brown. The two remain a star duo. The best in the league? No, absolutely not. But a wonderful one regardless.
So then what’s going on with the Celtics? More or less, exactly what was going on with them before. That might be the problem.
The Celtics are taking a similar diet of shots as they were last year and the year before, with few attempts at the rim and plenty of jumpers from midrange and from deep. (That mimics the output of another wing-heavy underachiever in the Los Angeles Clippers.) The Celtics are one of the most isolation-heavy teams in the league, but that was true of them in 2020-21 and 2019-20. They’re posting up a lot more than they used to -- but that’s actually one of the most efficient components of their offense this season! They’re in the midst of a small shooting drought, but that’s a normal thing that happens to every team during the course of a season. Good ones win regardless.
And make no mistake, the Celtics were a good team in 2019-20. Even though the team is more or less the same at heart -- perhaps even more dedicated to their identity now -- they’re far from a good team now. That’s what happens when the context changes around you. Defenses now are smarter and more variable, trap more aggressively, switch more often. Hero ball became heliocentrism, but the latter only works when the center of the universe is also one of the best passers in the league. Without that ability, what once worked 50 times a game, 80 games a season, now only works 30 times a game. That adds up.
You can’t subsist on hard shots in the regular season. You can jerryrig it to work, maybe, in the playoffs, when that’s all you’re gonna get anyway. But in the regular season you need a diet of comfort, a little bit of breakfast-for-dinner every now and then. And Boston makes everything hard for its stars. Both take around 40 percent of his shots in the midrange. They can make those shots -- but that’s subsisting on the hard stuff. And the other Celtics have gotten worse at converting into easy points the advantages Tatum and Brown create. It’s not that the two are bad passers -- in fact, they’re both very good at that, if not world-bending. But the team lacks advantage extenders. Evan Fournier, Kemba Walker, Gordon Hayward: all are exquisite at that very skill. They made quick decisions, attacked rotations, and maintained whatever their teammates created. Without that, the real benefit of having star players who can initiate in isolation, the pick and roll, or the post is blunted. In other words, wings can’t do it all alone.
That same smart writer in 2019 wrote that “the best version of this team is still a couple of years away.” That would have been true if all things remained the same. But they haven’t, and so the Celtics have lost whatever cache they built over the past half decade, have fallen by the wayside of progress, are doomed to conquer a league that doesn’t exist anymore.
Folk - Coup D'état
French for “blow of state”. A seizure and or removal of a government and its powers. Louis and I still hold fast to our thoughts on “The state of the big”, and by proxy of other factions being underrated, the ‘wing’ faction seems destined to be overrated at this moment in time.
Why did the wing become the home of superstars and Finals MVPs? Why is it the most likely to reward the players who occupy it with exorbitant contracts? Wings are supposed to be the perfect marriage of guards and bigs. An emulation of guard skills on offense in a bigger body. True offensive engines. And defensively, capable of the weak-side rotation and block that few guards ever make happen, and still capable of stepping out on a switch and stonewalling some of the NBA’s most agile ball-handlers. Yet, the latest Finals MVP, Giannis Antetokounmpo delivered a championship to the Milwaukee Bucks by leaning harder into the ‘big’ aspect of his game. Defensively, he’s not at the point of attack. Offensively, he’s not initiating offense, but finishing it. Dubbed as a wing who could play point guard upon his arrival in the NBA, Antetokounmpo found success elsewhere.
Is the NBA’s fetish with wings subsiding a bit? Not for Henry Ward, or for the Toronto Raptors - the Secretary of the State of the Wing, and the militant branch of the State of the Wing. The landscape of wings in the NBA is changing, both at the top and the bottom. When Michael Jordan was everything in the NBA, the world waited with baited breath on the next version of him. A popular comparison at draft time for years (but no longer). LeBron James has dominated the NBA’s news cycle and so he became the archetype for “best.” The wing became supreme because it was adjacent to James - Adjamescent. This isn’t to say that James can’t claim supremacy on certain nights, but that his grip hold on the NBA has certainly slipped somewhat. And with that, the optics of the wing archetype are destined to change.
All-Star games will still likely be the playground for wings. It’s also likely that Louis’ aforementioned tandem from Boston makes waves in this year's version of it. But, when we look at the top 4 teams in the west, what All-Star wings can be found on their roster? A betting man would say none. And in the east? Jimmy Butler and DeMar DeRozan continue to beat All-Star drums, but they’re certainly part of ensembles. Kevin Durant sits atop the Nets, lonely, but averaging 30 points a game. Eagerly waiting for his non-wing co-star to catch up. The only wing capable of truly carrying a team right now also happens to be, probably, one of the 10 greatest players to ever touch a basketball.
I am a prisoner of the moment. It’s early. But, now seems like a clear point of rest, to stop and look at the state of the wing, where it was and where it’s headed. For now, the aforementioned trio of DeRozan, Butler, and Durant continue to hold the line. A platoon of the best, waiting for reinforcements (Paul George and Kawhi Leonard), desperate to avoid the coup.
A spotlight for DeMar
DeRozan, who was under qualified to carry the mantle of the Spurs dynasty, but succeeded in his own way, for his own game. Now, far removed from the expectations of toppling LeBron James for the ‘North’, and sitting amongst an immensely talented cast of teammates, DeRozan has translated the simplest aspects of his game directly to the Bulls roster - a roster that is un-gelled and in desperate need of DeRozan’s particularly straightforward playstyle. 2-man actions with Lonzo Ball, post-ups, iso’s, pick n’ rolls that players go under on, that immediately lead to re-screens and a barrage of accurate mid-range jumpers. The unfathomable shooting percentage against tight contests. Graceful pirouettes through the paint that would sooner land him in the Bolshoi Ballet than a basketball team, and the impossibly placed tungsten cube in his foot that anchors every pivot of his deep into the earth. The Bulls defense has insulated DeRozan, and in turn he has floated their offense to the tune of 27, 5.5, and 3.5 on absurd efficiency.
“You can sink and drown, or you can stay afloat. And we’re out here like Michael Phelps.” - DeMar DeRozan
Floating the Bulls, and wing supremacy - at least a bit.
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It didn’t take Squid Game to teach me that childhood is the core of adulthood. That’s literal, of course, in that we physically and emotionally grow from our childhood selves. But childhood is also locked away from adulthood, separate; we can be and become anything when we’re young, and adulthood is just the process of learning that’s not true. Games are meaningless for children, forgotten moments afterward, but they mean too much to us as adults. Squid Game played on that connection, made childhood games into the most concrete, most intense moments a life could contain, but not even such seriousness could completely annihilate the absurdity of playing tug of war for your life.
Basketball has the same effect. It takes the childhood game of tag and turns it into the currency of the league. Tagging is the act of defenders moving into a space that wasn’t technically their job, won’t be for long, but is necessary to allow other defenders to recover their positioning. It’s a short burst of responsibility. Tagging is as omnipresent as dribbling -- it probably happens on almost every halfcourt possession -- but it’s a quiet force. Almost every pick and roll involves a tag, an epithet, a signature whose failure detonates the possession, sets off the bomb, or whose success is completely unnoticed.
If pick and rolls are the staple food of the NBA, rich and filling, then tagging is the Pepto Bismol. Fail to consume space and get burned. Childhood game, then, as salve and salvation.
This week in Minute Basketball: Tag
Zatzman - Tag as Poker
Anyone who’s in the NBA can make the right play on the defensive end. They’re all so exceptional at what they do, such innate basketball geniuses, that the basic knowledge of “this is what should happen” is inherent to NBA players. Sure, they make mistakes -- who wouldn’t at 100 mph when the nine (ten, including the ball) other contexts on the court are constantly shifting -- but basic conceptual mistakes are rare.
The real skill is not only in making the right play; it’s making the right play and not letting your opponent know you’re doing it. Defense is a dance -- moving your feet is important! -- on a thin line made invisible by a wide floor, like Indiana Jones waltzing to the name of God, on the verge of plummeting through solidity at any moment.
Dive too far into the paint, and you open up a wide-open corner three. Like Squid Game, you’ve lost, and it’s certain (basketball) death! Stick with your original assignment, and you open up a wide-open layup. Certain (basketball) death again! You need to do both, to pirouette back and forth, pretending to be in multiple places at once, not ever allowing the ballhandler to know where your real intent lies.
Tagging an offensive player -- seizing that brief burst of added responsibility -- is a momentary game of poker. Am I holding aces? Am I banking on an inside straight that’s never going to appear? The defensive player pretends to show his cards, and the offensive player either folds (dribbles out to find a new play), calls (believes what the defender is communicating), or raises (disbelieves the defender).
When done well, taggers can wreak havoc with proper gambles. If they’re paying perfect attention, they can fool even the smartest players by pretending not to tag, only to throw themselves into the play at the last moment.
Or the sight of mountains not just moving but jittering across the court with verve is enough to frighten any roller into a turnover. That’s one benefit of rolling with your center so that the defensive center is available as the tagger; Joel Embiid as a tagger is poker’s equivalent of holding extra aces in your sleeves, just for fun, even though you already have the better hand.
A good tag can mean an offensive player will be left on an island against a defender of the defense’s choosing, crushed by the weight of the world. Good luck scoring -- good luck even passing! -- when Rudy Gobert has you in his sights.
But offenses can use the necessity of tagging to their own advantage, to draw and quarter taggers by pulling them in different directions at once. The Golden State Warriors built an empire upon the twin foundations of Steph Curry’s shooting and a tagger not being able to contain Draymond Green on the roll. Call them the Two Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding in different directions, torturing a poor tagger caught between them.
What happens off the ball is life or death. Good defenses can use taggers to maul offenses, and good offenses can put taggers in impossible positions. To complicate matters, NBA players face several such choices on every possession, of which there are some hundred odd, on both ends, per game. Players constantly see their responsibilities expand and contract like accordions, and trying to do too much, too little, for an instant -- even letting your opponents know what your plan is too early -- results in getting shot by a giant pigtailed doll. Ball is Squid Game is life.
Folk - You’re not It
There is a small faction of NBA players who make their money by combining shooting talent along with the childish motivation of “don’t get caught”. There’s full out sprints, quick changes of direction, and jukes around obstacles - don’t get caught. If you can continue to shake loose, you can find open shots for yourself, bend the defense, and crush your enemies.
I urge you to view a game that involves the aforementioned Curry, or one of Duncan Robinson and Doug McDermott. Evin Gualberto refers to this triplet as ‘The Three D’s’. Entertain for a moment, the idea that these players are actually trying, desperately, to avoid being caught. Not even looking for a jumper, but rather, “please god, don’t touch me, I don’t want to be it”. You’ll never see it the same way again, but you might have a new appreciation for how hard they work to get away.
The tag aspect of basketball is also where casual hoopers and NBA players can identify with one another. During every pickup run that has ever involved a person who is running around the court with reckless purposefulness, there has been another person tasked with defending them. Every person tasked with this job, when the game slows down, will say: “damn, you never stop moving huh?”. It’s a certainty. And the sheer amount of NBA players who have listed these greyhounds with otherworldly shooting abilities as their toughest defensive matchup, is what makes us the same. “Stop making us run, you b**s. How dare you turn this game of skill into a track meet.” The wizened veterans of the pickup court win the halfcourt games, but they won’t touch the full court run for this very reason. Young NBA teams hunt transition, older teams dread it.
Now, let’s watch some schoolyard b**t together, because that’s what this is.
Duncan Robinson is bent over at the waist, almost as if he’s trying to hide, before he signals with his hand to Kyle Lowry “let’s swap.” He punches into the space for an open triple. Next, Lowry with a bit of genius himself recognizes the lanes in transition, switches his own to create a 2-on-1 and finds Robinson who deftly avoids Mills’ tag and splashes the open triple. The third, he pushes off Suggs’ (you’re IT!) and attempts to hide behind a fire hydrant (PJ Tucker) and when Suggs attempts to cheat to his destination, he reroutes. Kid stuff, you know.
This movement from McDermott is tag. It would be silly to call it anything else. Jakob Poeltl is the teacher who is on duty for recess, and McDermott has used him as a pawn in his attempt to skirt Connaughton. 5 changes of direction in a couple seconds, I can’t imagine how defeating it must be to be told that this guy is your assignment.
And for the record, this is McDermott’s game. This is how he carved himself into an NBA player, and a good one. Insatiable movement drives his importance to the Spurs, shooting talent is obviously very important, but it’s all apart of McDermott’s 50/45/100 splits (66%TS). That, and clever set design, which you can learn about here.
Robinson was reaching out to media members looking for work, he had an active LinkedIn account! He thought he was done playing basketball for a career, and then shooting talent and the game of tag carved a path for him. He just signed a $90M contract.
The wide receivers who run every route with conviction even if they’re not the target, the strikers who make deep runs to keep the center backs on their toes, and the NBA players who never stop running. Winning by the smallest margins. Winning at tag every now and then.
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Sport is metaphor. It’s literal, of course, but the joy we take from it is metaphorical. There’s nothing inherent to putting a ball in a rim 10 feet above the ground, or a small compact hunk of rubber flying into mesh, or any other athletic endeavor distilled to its essence. In fact, it’s almost absurd plastering so much significance and money and fame onto sport when taken literally. But the grace, the community, the emotion: it comes from the symbolic meaning of what’s happening on the field of play.
That’s nothing new. We convert sports to meaning in our own heads all the time. You don’t need to read anything fancy to enjoy sports. Just watching the game is enough to know that you convert act to symbol in your own head without thinking. But expand your understanding of ‘symbolic meaning.’ Most sports writing is just describing what happens in an artful way. Basketball as chronology, basketball as poetry, basketball as music. The medium -- the prism -- is the message.
Anything can be description, can be symbol. So why not boats?
That’s right. This week, the triumphant return of Minute Basketball, we’re describing players as boats. Because it’s fun, and because we realized we have a lot of boat anecdotes saved up between us. So strap in, and let’s get nautical.
Zatzman
Kyle Lowry as Depth Charge
If there’s ever been an NBA player that was a robot in disguise, it was surely Kyle Lowry. The man is a shapeshifter -- or, hey, a transformer -- on the court, able to mold himself into anything a team needs to win. He can play on the ball as a scorer or a creator for others. He can play off the ball as a floor-spacer, a screener, or a decoy. He can spark stampedes in transition, or he can play slow and dig into the halfcourt like a gold mine.
For half a decade, Lowry was the scoring co-star alongside DeMar DeRozan. He looked for his own shot, thrived with bench units, and led the Raptors to 50 wins after 50 wins. Then when the Raptors traded for Kawhi Leonard, Lowry became a connective piece between Leonard and new scoring phenom Pascal Siakam. Lowry’s usage rate, scoring, and shot attempts dwindled, as his assists skyrocketed.
On the other end, Lowry could defend the point of attack either as a primary on guards or wings, and he has long been one of the most competent guards when asked to switch onto a big. He can defend the rim with verticality or by taking a charge. In playoff series, he’s been Toronto’s primary defender on scorers as diverse as Jayson Tatum (2019-20) or JJ Reddick (2018-19).
Lowry is whatever you want him to be. That’s more than any boat, really. But the closest thing is a transformer, and when I checked, there was a boat transformer with the word ‘charge’ in its name. A match made in heaven.
Kevin Durant as the Palladium
One summer I worked at the Thousand Islands National Park as a social research assistant. It was through the Federal Student Work Exchange Program (FSWEP! Hell yeah), and I lived in Brockville (Brockville! Hell no). It was a fairly low-key summer.
But one day when I was on the water, I saw the biggest yacht I’d ever seen. I’m from Halifax, so I’d frequently seen cruise ships that dwarfed the Titanic. But I’d never before seen a vessel owned by one person that was so long. It must have been 40 feet long, or 50! It seemed to be headed towards a planetary body of some kind that must have been a trick of the eye, was perhaps the moon reflected in the water but magnified. But -- that’s no moon! -- then I realized that the biggest yacht I’d ever seen was in fact docking inside of another yacht.
That second yacht belonged to Mikhail Prokhorov, then the owner of the Brooklyn Nets. (We’re creeping towards Kevin Durant slowly here, you see.) I believe that the yacht I saw was the Palladium, which is actually modest in length, as far as superyachts go, though it is famous for having perhaps the most futuristic design of all superyachts (seriously!).
Durant fits the bill. He is symbolically larger than the Brooklyn Nets, the planetary object within which the other fine yachts of the organization moor. The circus that is … everything in the NBA can only be perceived in Brooklyn through the prism of Durant. And though there are physically larger players, there is no one more futuristic.
Ben Simmons as Ever Given
Process, interrupted.
Folk
LeBron James as a Pontoon
The pontoon boat and LeBron James are the same for this exact reason: they are the simplest way possible in their respective realms to carry many people or teammates. James famously carried good teams and bad to 8 straight Finals appearances - truly the pontoon of team building.
What is there left to do if you’re a GM, a president of basketball operations, and James arrives at your teams doorstep? Naturally, you try to find the players that will help deliver a championship, but what ideas does James have? Left to his own team building devices, James curates a team in his specific vision. Coordinated outfits? Close friends? Alcohol? James’ locker room has all the trappings of a pontoon boat. It’s no coincidence that James and his closest NBA pals look most at home when frequenting floats on a parade - particularly of the championship variety.
Anytime I was able to go to a lake when I was a child, the biggest boats I saw were always of the pontoon variety. I always thought they were a signifier of great wealth. Of course, this means that I had little to no experience with boats. I wasn’t ever near the coast like Louis, I didn’t even swim in the ocean until I was an adult. But, when I look at the NBA, I see James as the premier example of what the NBA is both in terms of playstyle and marketability. He is the great bastion of wealth and good times, which is what the pontoon was for young Samson.
36 years old and nearly 37, James continues to carry the Lakers firmly on his back. Opening up the season to the tune of 34 points, 11 rebounds, 5 assists on a meaty True Shooting of 66-percent. Pushing the Lakers ahead, even as Russell Westbrook posted a ludicrous on/off net rating of -72.9.
Not to mention the first pontoon boat ever made was called “The Empress”, and naturally that fits quite well with “King James”.
Rajon Rondo as a Dinghy
A complete departure from the team he joins. He is meant to operate specifically as a lifeboat or means of conveyance to and from what the team actually wants to do. A short spurt of basketball that is completely divorced from your teams usual playstyle? Insert Rondo as a plug in, who brings with him a completely separate utility. Have you or your team ever wondered what it would look like if everyone on your team stood around and suddenly a backdoor pass gave you 2 points? Would those 2 points be even better if your offense had grinded to a halt and you wanted to lighten the load on your shot-creators? Of course. Is it even better if he’ll get a heady steal and if he’s shooting 40-percent on his last 100 playoff 3-point attempts? Yes. Enter Rajon Rondo, who has oscillated from the Lakers, to the Hawks, to the Clippers, and back to the Lakers - with the same allure for all 3 teams across all 4 stints.
Rondo is a dinghy. His feel for basketball (and connect-four) is supposed to make him the ultimate portable guard. An antidote to Trae Young’s free-wheeling game? Sure. Some semblance of point guard play next to the uber-wing heavy Clippers? Absolutely (although, Reggie Jackson took that and ran with it). A presence on the court to deliver on-point entry passes to Anthony Davis and occasionally hit a three that the defense is extremely eager to give him.
Oftentimes, Rondo seems like a boat on a boat. A player who needs the ball, next to other players that need the ball. However, like a dinghy, when you’re in need of him he seems essential.
Kyle Kuzma as the Amphibious Exploring Vehicle
A starter car! Kyle Kuzma is a finisher car! A transporter of Gods! The GOLDEN GOD! I AM UNTETHERED AND MY RAGE KNOWS NO BOUNDS!
Okay, so this is by no means the fault of Kuzma. He is a victim of the optics and the heavy expectations placed on him by Lakers fans. He was a future All-Star, the heir-apparent to the real hoopers and bucket-getters in a long lineage of those types for the Lakers. An equal to Jayson Tatum as a basketball prospect. Unabashed pull-ups, sweeping hooks in the lane, and 16 points per game in his rookie year allowed Lakers fans to indulge deeply into delusions of grandeur, as they are wont to do.
Fast forward to this past summer, where the Lakers were reportedly trying to offload Kuzma in numerous trade packages. Tossing his name out there repeatedly to see what would come back only to scream: “BE GONE FROM ME!” when teams rightfully point out that he isn’t a superstar (or that the car is underwater). In the end, the only trade that could be made that involved Kuzma was one that involved another player who is more superstar in name than in actuality - Russell Westbrook. It’s perfect, really.
Bonus: The Nick Nurse boat
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Bobby Fischer invented Fischer random chess. He considered the chess world ossified, hardened into its institutional knowledge and fat and happy without new inventions. (Imagine what he would think about what computers have done to the game since the 1990s.) At the time (and even more so today), chess openings were so specific and known that the first dozen or more moves of all master-level games were simply memorization contests. Oh, you made a tiny inaccuracy in your opening? A book told me that this move will punish you. So Fischer added castling and opposite-coloured bishops to shuffle chess -- meaning that all non-pawn pieces are shuffled across the back rows of the board -- to eliminate the role of memorization in the game and instead force players to be creative, unique, and dynamic. He had apparently practiced with Fischer Random chess for years to force those qualities into his game. In other words, he sacrificed his own floor, in the safety net provided by the massive history of theoretical knowledge, to raise his ceiling.
The Milwaukee Bucks tried to do the same this year. They started switching on defense. They made their offense more dynamic. They forced their team to add flexibility and dynamism to both sides of the ball. The cost, of course, was deemphasizing the massive institutional knowledge they had built in winning 116 games over the previous two seasons. The Bucks had gameplans so distinct that their players could perform them in their sleep. They tore up those opening databases this season, hoping that the house built on top of the ashes would be more flexible, better able to withstand storms. They hoped that they could do what Fischer did in 1972 when he became Chess World Champion. And they’ve done well! They’re in the Finals for the first time since 1974, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Bucks lost to John Havlicek’s Boston Celtics.
But like much architecture built atop of ruins, the Bucks remain a house divided. They don’t fit smoothly into the modern NBA. Giannis Antetokounmpo, who looks like a god playing against mortals, forces himself at times to endure the eternal punishments doled out by the real (?) Greek gods. For being an annual threat to join the 50-40-90 club, which means to signal excellence and consistency, Khris Middleton has oscillated between wildly different impacts from game to game. And Jrue Holiday helps solidify their strengths, but he doesn’t solve their weaknesses.
The NBA prioritizes pull-up shooting, skill, and speed. It’s a wing scorer’s league, and the Bucks’ best player is a big masquerading as a point guard -- the only skills he doesn’t possess are those of the wing scorer. The Bucks, much like Fischer was in the chess world, don’t fit. But they smash their way in, making space for themselves regardless.
This week in Minute Basketball, square peg in a round hole.
Folk - A very special square peg
Square pegs, round holes - there are workarounds okay? It can work! Be it the Dutch settlers in America who quite literally pounded square pegs into round holes (a factoid I’m aware of because of incredibly strange small town museums, the one in Sturgis is mostly pitchforks from different eras and a train Caboose!), or when everything went sideways in Apollo 13 and their method of survival actually included MacGyver-ing carbon dioxide scrubbers (they absorb carbon dioxide, which is important in space it seems) that were square (!) into a cylindrical interface - the fix included cardboard, a sock, and duct tape (among other things), which maybe applies to Milwaukee’s team building. I’m not sure that’s up to you. The peg just has to be important enough to work with! For the Dutch? Uhhh, maybe? Erm, probably could’ve just found another way. For the crew in Apollo 13, it would seem the square peg (CO2 scrubbers) was incredibly important - so yes, Giannis.
Giannis Antetokounmpo is one of the most impressive physical specimens that the human race has ever been able to create. Sometimes I like to think about it that way, because maybe there’s a version of him that popped out in 640 AD who, instead of playing basketball, was instead crowned as a god king. A near immortal man who grew above all others. Nearby towns and cities would revere him. He would be the glorious square peg that an era was built on. But in the NBA he has to fit into the existing superstructure, and one that desperately wants to devalue him. So, this unprecedented mix of size, balance, and explosion is being bonked on the head repeatedly as everyone attempts to squeeze him into the round hole that is the NBA.
We saw Devin Booker slither and shake his way to 42 points on blistering efficiency. The sheer amount of counters a talented shotmaker has in the NBA is a lot to behold. And credit to Booker for having the immense talent to access each and every one of them. Antetokounmpo’s fit in the NBA, and halfcourt offense in particular is tricky because all of the things that make him incredibly special on a basketball court require proximity to the basket. It might sound absurd, but Antetokounmpo’s skillset is genuinely more unique for his size than Booker’s is for his - one is just more expansive. The road to guarding a perimeter talent in the NBA is a minefield, where one wrong step explodes in your face. Whereas the paint is more of a cage match. And with the Bucks shooting less than league average (34%) from downtown, Antetokounmpo is seeing more and more opponents in the cage with him.
The good news for Antetokounmpo is he is the god king of the cage match on the other end. Playing the brash and forceful brand of help-side defense that saw him awarded Defensive Player of the Year, he controls everything from the backline. For all of the people who clamour for Antetokounmpo to pull his shorts up on his thighs and pound the hardwood in isolation defense above the break, now is the time to acknowledge that he’s at his best covering ground from sideline to sideline and stonewalling players in help-side. Antetokounmpo’s brand of generational talent is as imperfect a fit as it comes in the NBA, but it is generational - and the Bucks continue trying to make it work.
Zatzman - Jrue Holiday
Milwaukee’s acquisition of Jrue Holiday carried the price tag of a bonafide superstar. Holiday’s credentials were of course spotless. He is one of the best isolation defenders at the guard position in the league, so his acquisition allowed the Bucks to lean into switching defenses. He is a great self-creating scorer. But the Bucks already had an elite defense. They already had an elite self-creating scorer. The Bucks bet, like Fischer, that if they raised their ceiling yet higher and ignored their floor, they would reap the rewards.
In 2018-19, Milwaukee’s offensive points per 100 possessions in the halfcourt sunk from 114.9 in the regular season to 107.4 in the playoffs against the Toronto Raptors. In 2019-20, It sunk from 113.1 in the regular season to 106.9 in the playoffs against the Miami Heat. The Bucks couldn’t score in the halfcourt in playoff losses. Antetokounmpo ran into walls when he put his head down. Middleton couldn’t score more in isolation than opposing teams’ entire offensive systems. The machine broke down. It was too stringent, too structured.
Some observers, myself included, might have thought that the Bucks needed a halfcourt orchestrator to redeem those minutes when the Bucks were forced to play slow. Instead of adding a player with an offensive skillset similar to Middleton’s, they might have considered a player who created easy baskets for teammates. And though the Bucks ended up trading for Holiday, another, more traditional, point guard in Chris Paul was equally available on the trade market.
The Bucks chose to raise their ceiling.
It worked for Milwaukee. Their points per 100 regular season possessions this year were 117.5, better than any mark an Antetokounmpo-led offense has reached. They haven’t played a series yet that saw their halfcourt offense solved.
In only the final minute of the Bucks’ Game 4 win, Holiday collected a contested offensive rebound, a steal, an assist, a defensive rebound, and a pair of free throws. He’s shot horrifically from the field through four games, a putrid 23 for 69, or 33.3 percent. He’s been even worse from deep. But he’s averaged 8 assists per game (more than he’s ever reached over a full playoffs or regular season in his career).
Holiday has filled in the cracks. He’s fit around his stars when they’re hot, helping the team’s bigs find the easy baskets that no one else on the team creates for them. He’s penetrated to the rim, strong as a hammer, smashing his way through defenders and preconceived notions of team structure alike. More comfortable at the rim than behind the arc, more of a scorer than a passer, Holiday doesn’t perfectly fit the mold of what a point guard looks like in the league today. He doesn’t perfectly fit the mold of what the Bucks ideally require. But like the Bucks themselves, he’s created his own space, by force as much as by creativity. And the Bucks are now two wins away from a championship.
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Let me tell you what will happen in the future.
Come closer. Lean in. That’s better. Listen closely.
Money is going to slink back into sportswriting. It will come in the guise of a friend, recreating jobs that aren’t exclusively at the Athletic. It will reinvigorate a field that has had a titanic leech named Google sucking its blood for decades. Plummeting local ad revenue and table scraps from search engines aren’t enough to sustain an industry. But don’t worry -- gambling money is on its way.
That’s not necessarily going to be a good thing. Sportswriting jobs in the medium-term future will entail more prediction than they do even now. Matt Moore is a great writer. Every writer in the field trying to be him would be a bad thing. If longform is dead, you can blame fantasy sports for picking over its bones, and that’s just a start. The next wave of millionaire media members won’t be talking heads; they’ll help you choose a winner against the spread. But knowing the future isn’t always a good thing. Ask an Atreides. (That sounds like a fun mash-up between romance advice column and sci-fi extravaganza.)
Predicting the future is already an important part of today’s league, on and off the court. Perhaps too important. This week in Minute Basketball: Prescience.
Folk - Borderline Prescience
I don't think there is a truly prescient being in the world. Only people who see the markers, the tells of something already in action. Louis and I have both used the term "borderline prescient" to describe players before. Draymond Green's defense, for example. And I think that's just an efficient way of saying: "this player is operating on the advantageous side of an information deficit, and they often leverage that information into winning plays. So, in a way, they operate in the future relative to many other players".
Chris Paul’s methodical style of playing basketball - he famously slows down fast teams, you can even see a large disparity in the games with, and without him in the WCF - is a clever bait and switch. Defenders are slowed down, to be sped up. An opportunity for Paul to isolate sections of the court into fast-processing hotbeds, where his experience and battle-tested mind can tease out advantages in decision making that don’t exist for many players. Once the advantage is established, defenders attempt to out-think Paul and attempt their own brand of ‘borderline prescience’, but more often than not they surrender a different set of advantages.
Monty Williams’ brilliant set design - interwoven with counters, decoy actions, and small advantages created throughout - enhances Paul’s ability to win possessions as the fastest player on the court, at the slow game.
In this set, for example: The first play is completely scripted. It’s a gorgeous set that leads to a dunk, but more than that it teaches the Clipper defense that the ball in Paul’s hands is never just a point of rest - there’s always danger elsewhere. So, in the next play shown there really is a point of rest, and in the Clippers attempt to think along with Paul (fearing his playmaking) everyone on the strong-side collapses, leaving him wide-open. The first clip punishes a defensive shell extending out, and the second punishes the shell sinking in. The perfect marriage of Paul and Williams.
Simplistic pick n’ roll plays where the Suns want to isolate Cousins from defensive help, in this case Mann. Put him on an island. Cousins is always going to be there dropping - which isn’t a bad scheme, don’t be silly - so Paul works through the progressions each time of how to make Mann pay for every decision he makes. Mann forces a screen reject to funnel Paul middle and into tighter space, but to no one’s surprise, Paul snakes to the elbow for a jumper - the kind he can often be heard yelling “LAYUP” on. Next screen action, Mann knows he has to stay connected and Paul let’s him connect all the way to the free throw line, leaving enough space for Saric to hit a three after popping. Paul will lay breadcrumbs for you. Final action, and Ayton sets a flat screen to give Paul the most freedom. Once they get the chase from Mann, Ayton disguises his moving screen as an aimless meander towards the bucket and Paul snakes to the right elbow for his shot. Taking what is given because it’s there, but with the route you choose, in case there’s a shortcut.
Interestingly enough, the slow game, Paul’s game isn’t always the most advantageous way for the Suns to play. Devin Booker and Cam Payne can both steer the Suns towards heaps of success away from Paul’s ironclad grip on pace. But, I’m firmly in the camp of people that puts a premium on adaptability and diversity in the playoffs, and the Suns have pushed the proper buttons stylistically to make the Finals. It’s also fitting that a predator-like 41 points from Paul has sent them there - telling the future a split-second at a time.
Zatzman - What is a sportswriter supposed to be?
A funny thing happened in the Milwaukee Bucks’ third game against the Brooklyn Nets. Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant had mauled the Bucks in the first two games, and the Bucks needed a win. They started okay, taking an early lead after a Giannis Antetokounmpo dunk. But then came the turn. Antetokounmpo ambled up the court in transition, slow as you like, as his defender Blake Griffin stepped back and back and back until he was practically under the rim when Antetokounmpo reached the arc. But Antetokounmpo didn’t use the runway to soar in for another dunk. Instead, he launched a casual three, which he of course missed. A few minutes later, he fired up another. Then a few more in the second quarter. More misses in the second half.
Antetokounmpo missed six consecutive threes to start the game. He’s currently shooting 18.2 percent from deep in the playoffs, meaning when he shoots a triple, it’s expected to score around half a point, give or take. Yet when he’s under the rim, he’s the best scorer in the history of our stats databases (which include Shaquille O’Neal on the Lakers and Steph Curry shooting triples).
Watching Antetokounmpo miss and miss and miss and miss and miss and miss was like watching Hamlet. I was captivated. Perhaps the most athletically gifted basketball player in the history of … basketball … refused his athleticism. No thank you. I’ll do this instead. And this was a slog. He may as well have been pushing his boulder up the hill for all eternity, knowing it would tumble back down and he’d have to start all over again. The Greek Fate, more like it.
For what reason do you watch sports? Samson and I dug into this topic in our LIVE episode a few months ago. I described a type of fandom that I didn’t understand, which I called “the Sam Hinkie-fication of fandom, which is where people are fans only of the macro now.” And the Sam Hinkie-fication of fandom reared its flawless head again in Game 3. I watched writers and fans and coaches and bots pool their voices together and howl at Antetokounmpo, curse his jumper, braying for him to stop settling. And yes, that would surely have helped the Bucks win. But is maximizing efficiency the only reason we watch basketball?
I watch to catch a glimpse of perfection, yes, but also to gawk at perfection when it’s confronted with something better. To marvel at the crucible of flaws, and how players within either harden or crumble. And watching Antetokounmpo launch wayward three after wayward three was marvelous. It was captivating, far more so than if he optimized his shot selection and cut out his bad-habit jumpers.
It’s certainly the job of some writers and fans to focus on what would make players better. But not everyone, or else all sportswriters would just be coaches without a team. Has Zach Lowe bitten us with a bug like a vampire? Are we all just analysts now? Is the only job of the sportswriter to predict the future cold and sterile so as to make a meteorologist proud?
Antetokounmpo’s struggle was greater and more meaningful than a jumper-free win ever could have been. And his Shakespearean performance had a Shakespearean ending; he hit his seventh three in the fourth quarter. The Bucks ended up winning Game 3, and even winning the series. But the contained tragicomedy of Antetokounmpo’s jumper wasn’t plastered across anyone’s gamer or recap, other than for condemnation and to call him a weak-minded player for settling.
And maybe he is weak-minded. The strongest player imaginable who can’t help but succumb to his own weaknesses -- what could possibly be more captivating, more compelling?
Gazing into a crystal ball is fun. But not if it stops you from enjoying the present.
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Kyrie Irving. Kawhi Leonard. Chris Paul. Mike Conley. Not to mention, those already vanquished -- Anthony Davis, Jamal Murray, Jaylen Brown. Or some playing through it -- Joel Embiid, Trae Young, Donovan Mitchell, James Harden.
All injured or absent for other reasons.
It’s easier at this point to count the surviving stars. Devin Booker. Kevin Durant. Giannis Antetokounmpo. Paul George. Antetokounmpo is missing Donte DiVincenzo, but his team is relatively healthy. Durant’s legacy is already set in stone. Booker is young.
Which leaves us George. The Los Angeles Clippers are now without Leonard, the most significant of the two generals leading the charge around the Maginot Line.
What would the Clippers losing to the Jazz mean for George? A year after hitting the side of the backboard as the Clippers crumbled under an avalanche of Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray pick and rolls, George is back in the playoffs, playing better than ever. He’s been to the Eastern Conference Finals, of course, with the Indiana Pacers, but Roy Hibbert led the team in points in that series. George has only averaged more than his current 27.3 points per game over a full series in the first rounds of 2017 and 2019 -- and George’s squads lost both series by a combined eight games to one. What would the Clippers beating the Utah Jazz mean for George?
George has usually not been the type of superstar to shoulder his team over the finish line in the playoffs. That doesn’t mean he’s not able. With Leonard gone, the Clippers are George’s team now. And this moment marks an opportunity for George to do something he’s never done before. This week in Minute Basketball, Glorious Purpose.
Folk - Paul George
We planned to write about George before he broke out one of his best career playoff performances to date. I’m a George-optimist so, naturally, I was expecting good things. Luckily for me, he delivered to the tune of 35 points, 16 rebounds, 5 assists, 1 steal, and 2 blocks, on 67.4% true shooting. It was also probably his best defensive performance of the playoffs - to be fair though, he has underwhelmed somewhat on that end. All this, to lead the Clippers (sans Kawhi Leonard) up 3-2 against the Jazz.
I always thought George’s growing legacy was strange. That the story of his game had been divorced in the minds of fans in an unfair way. He and the Pacers punched up at the world-ending Heatles, expectation grew, and George suffered a gruesome leg injury in the middle of his ascension to superstar status. Since he rebuilt his body and his game, the expectations remained, but the achievements of his past had been tucked away in a hidden place for most fans. The cultural memory of George is only that of his failures, never of his triumphs. And, if you’re of the mind that any rung on the ladder that isn’t a championship means it wasn’t a climb, then you probably really dislike what I’m saying, and we fundamentally disagree about how NBA careers and accolades work.
George’s triumphs live large in my memory though, and last night was an addition rather than a standalone.
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. - Bruce Lee
I don’t think it’s too wild to suggest that George might have one of the most aesthetically pleasing games of all time. Bruce Lee’s “Be like water” quote is a metaphor for how to conduct oneself in the world. To be one with the world, while still maintaining the capacity to affect it. George’s game almost abandons the metaphor. Slithery and smooth like a stream running down a mountain, winding and twisting to avoid what might be a roadblock up ahead, George’s silky smooth jumpshot and means of conveyance is at times, that. And evidenced by his catalogue of posters over his career, his long stride and gather into shoulder bumps in the lane, carving out space in heavily contested areas and his capacity to bang around for rebounds - George can crash like the tidal wave.
Tidal Wave
Clip 1: A two-foot gather against O’Neale because he knows he can clear him out and finish under control. A one-foot gather against Favors, because he knows he can only get him off-balance.
Clip 2: George moves with the balance and explosion of a much smaller man, but you can really feel his size when he contests the glass and shoots over top.
Stream
Slicing through small crevices without a wasted movement, like the path ahead is intuitive.
Slithering to his spot, cool as you like. Mixing and matching the flow and the crash. Magical.
If we want to get cute with it, George’s in your face pull-up 3 is also the equivalent of a front-kick. I can take it or leave it.
Front-Kick
Kawhi Leonard is the deserved top dog with the Clippers, but without him in the lineup, George doesn’t need to tune into anyone else’s game. The cues come from no one but him, as we saw in Game 5 vs. the Jazz. The Clippers ran actions off-ball to free him up, and he if the Jazz loaded up, George backed off and let his teammates attack. If he wanted to force the issue he did (and quite often in the first half), but he chose his spots. The impetus wasn’t ever placed on him at random during the game, it was there from the beginning. The Clippers are at their best with Leonard and George in tandem, of course, and it takes work from them both to get there. But, this situation couldn’t be anything except a primer for George’s explosion. The platform for his categorically beautiful game to breathe and thrive with as much flourish as he chooses.
Fans and teammates alike have seemingly had problems with where George has placed himself in the hierarchy of the NBA’s elite. But, the NBA is a collection of players who have, until reaching the NBA, for the most part dominated every level of basketball they’ve ever played at. Every player is truly great.
Context allows for greatness, though. Ultimate winner, Kyle Lowry was always supposed to reach the mountaintop, and he did. Chris Paul hasn’t, though. They’re both Hall of Fame point guards, with no concrete differences in their games that dictate why one should be a champion and the other should not. Glorious Purpose isn’t a promise, it’s a concept. Mine might come at the expense of anyone else’s. Yours as well. A finite amount of achievements and winners dictates this.
The point? In a chaotic and somewhat tragic sequence of events and injuries, the roadmap for George to deliver on his Glorious Purpose (with an extreme burden of high-level performance on his end) has become clearer. I guess we’ll see.
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The Maginot Line was a marvel of engineering. The French cannibalized their existential sense of selves after losing the Franco-Prussian War, and then a second time after the magnified horror of the First World War. So Joseph Joffre and André Maginot had an idea to prevent such a disaster a third time. They built a line of fortresses between France and Germany so modern, so fierce, that France could never be invaded.
The Maginot Line comprised defenses stretching hundreds of kilometres across the borders of France and kilometres into France, as well. On the border, there were fake residential homes full of observers. A few kilometres back sat outposts equipped to destroy tanks or armoured vehicles. Behind those were gigantic walls of metal meant to stop whatever machines made it past the outposts. Behind those were small machine gun nests. Behind those were small fortresses built underground with small artillery hiding inside. Behind those were massive fortresses built underground with massive artillery hiding inside. Behind those were homes for soldiers, who were supplied by underground rail lines and even had air conditioning in their rooms.
Such ridiculous overkill of defenses stretched across much of the eastern border of France. The whole thing involved more than 100 fortresses. The only problem: it didn’t go far enough. Germany, of course, went around when World War Two began. The defenses were meant to stop one thing and one thing only, and they did! But the offensive didn’t really want to go that way, anyway.
Almost 100 years later, and the French have again built the greatest defensive wonder in the world. This time, with rather smaller stakes: the game of basketball. Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert is, in many ways, one of the best defenders in the history of the game. His presence virtually eliminates opponents’ paths to the rim, giving the Utah Jazz a massive advantage on the defensive end. The only problem is that the Jazz now face an offense with little interest going in that direction, anyway. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George (and to a lesser extent, Marcus Morris and Reggie Jackson) are some of the best pull-up shooters in the game. None of them really create all that many shots at the rim.
History always repeats itself, albeit in strange and distorted forms. This week in Minute Basketball: France.
Folk - The Clipper Offense
So, it’s possible that you could label this as cheating. Louis waxed poetic about France and the Maginot line, Rudy Gobert and the like. It’s a France episode! However (comma) since I’m talking about the attack that’s being launched against them, I am supposed to be speaking from the German side of things. I will be punting on this responsibility to some degree, in order to pursue Germany outside of its military and more so for, perhaps, its most famous philosopher, Nietzsche.
Some of Nietzsche’s core beliefs: constant flux, and the will to power. Self-mastery, and the fallacy of ‘fixed beings’ - these core tenets are what makes the Clippers operate in the fashion that they do.
Self-Mastery
Commentary on free throw shooting has been the same for a really long time. It’s an isolated action, wherein extra variables and stimuli are erased and your craft as a shooter can shine through. So, when someone fails at it, people typically just tell them to get in the gym. I’m not here to wage war against the commentary, just pointing it out. What then, is the most isolated (within reason) shot in the live version of basketball, that also happens to be common? In my mind, it’s the jump shot, be it catch and shoot or pulling up. Another “get in the gym” skill in basketball. It’s not as reliant on commonly discussed athletic traits as other basketball skills. Shawn Marion, Jaren Jackson Jr., Kevin Martin - whatever, find something successful and repeatable.
The Clippers jumper-heavy attack is spearheaded by Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. They’re joined by supplementary participants like Marcus Morris, Nicolas Batum, and Reggie Jackson. In that group, improving jumpers have brought careers from their death knell, back to life. Role players to MVP candidates, bruisers to plug-and-play scorers. Despite the power play off the court to bring the stars of this team into the fold, the very style in which this team plays was born out of the individual will of all the aforementioned players to add to their craft. Leonard, the almost unprecedented progression of skills. George, the return from his gruesome injuries. Morris, Jackson, Batum - all in search of a career renaissance (FRANCE!), and one they discovered. Self-mastery defines this team’s offense.
Constant Flux, and the will to power.
I’ve said elsewhere that the NBA overcorrected to what the Warriors were doing. The CP3-Harden Rockets were fundamentally the only team equipped to bludgeon them in the way they did, and the NBA threw bigs to the wind for a multi-year span, and one that I think is coming to an end. The Clippers could very well be the last meaningfully good team that chooses to play this way outside of what star power would dictate. The Nets aren’t included because their near unprecedented level of talent leaves DeAndre Jordan off the floor. A thought process isn’t necessary to decide whether to lean into the playstyle that benefits Harden or Jordan. There is a discussion to be had about leaning into Luke Kennard or Ivica Zubac, though. And I’m not here to talk about why. I just think it’s interesting to point out that it’s possible the Clippers are leaning into a lesser version of themselves because it suits an ill-fitted idea from, possibly, a bygone era.
Also, just for kicks, Nietzsche’s idea that the fundamental drive for power is stronger than the will to survive pairs exceptionally well with the fact that the Clippers gave virtually no thought to the human aspect of basketball as they haphazardly crafted a locker room that ended up killing last year’s version of the team - all in the pursuit of, let’s say, power.
Despite all that, and the Clippers indulging in trends that might be on their way out the door, they now find themselves across from a defense that is susceptible to them. The stage is set, Louis.
Zatzman - The French Defense
Rudy Gobert played more drop defense than anyone in the league this year. He was also better at it than anyone else. One aspect of that is of course that he stands 7-foot-2 with a 7-foot-9 (!) wingspan, the third-longest in the NBA, but it goes much deeper. He’s incredibly smart at sniffing fluff, doesn’t lose his positioning, and is strong enough to take contact and still contest everything. He was second in the league in blocks. When he contested opponents’ shots, they shot dramatically worse than expected; in fact, they shot 7.6 percent worse from the field, the third-lowest margin in the league. At the rim, his impact was even more pronounced. Opponents shot 14.6 percent worse than expected, the lowest margin of any player this season. NBA players shot worse than 50 percent from six feet or fewer with Gobert contesting.
In other words, Gobert’s presence at the rim transformed, on average, the likelihood of a make comparable to superhuman Zion Williamson’s accuracy (65.4 percent) to that of rookie guard Cole Anthony (49.7 percent), give or take a percentage point or two. That’s the type of thing you can build a defense around.
And that’s exactly what Utah did. They allowed only 30.5 percent of opponents’ shots at the rim, the fourth-fewest of any team. Of the teams that allowed fewer shots at the rim, only the Milwaukee Bucks forced opponents to miss more often. The Jazz constructed an entire defensive ecosystem around the impenetrable fortress that is Gobert at the rim.
Its players often ride offensive players’ hips over ball screens, forcing the ball paradoxically inside the arc towards the meat grinder that is Gobert. The Jazz were incredible when the ballhandler defender went over the screen and the screener defender played drop defense. That’s how they allowed the fifth-most pull-up threes this year as a team yet were the stingiest defense in the league when defending such shots. The entire premise was built around Gobert’s ability to chew up an entire region of the court and spit out stops.
The system held up in game one against the Clippers. The Clips attempted only 20 shots at the rim, giving a frequency of 23.5 percent -- far lower than the average that the stingy Jazz usually allowed in the regular season. Their accuracy of 55 percent was similarly poor. They hit half of their pull-up threes (uh oh!) but shot so rarely and so poorly at the rim that it didn’t matter.
That’s the gamble of the series. The Clippers don’t really want to get the rim, and the Jazz sure as hell aren’t going to let them, anyway. In the regular season, the Clippers constituted two of the Jazz’s seven lowest-frequency rim-attempt games, for opponents. These two teams were always going to pass like this, like ships in the night, refusing to collide out of principle (though very different principles on each side). The Jazz employ the longest, strongest defensive power known to the world. The Clippers were always going to go around.
But, some little-known military history: the Allies actually used the Maginot Line, for a brief period, during the recapture of Europe. It served them exceptionally well. So, too, will the Clippers at times be forced to attack Gobert at the rim. Jumpers are by nature high-variance, and the rim is where consistent offense is supposed to reside. Thus the results of the Clippers’ assaults on Utah’s Maginot Line will go a long way to determining this series.
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Pockets! More elusive in womens clothing than in mens. Citation - a woman showing off her dress and excitedly saying: “And look! It has pockets!”. A thing to hold something in. Is it conveyance? Is it protection? Is it the little pocket inside the pocket that’s supposed to house change??? The back left pocket that I’ve never used? The Herculean work of George Costanza’s back pocket - yes, the one that held onto his gargantuan wallet.
In Louis’ case with Luka: it’s protection. Maybe Luka is the pocket itself? And his shooting stroke is the smaller pocket within, the one that holds change, and the ball is the change! Because he’s dropping dimes all the time! Okay, sorry. He’ll talk about Luka and pockets and it’ll be much better than what I said.
For me, and I hope this isn’t too revealing about who I am, well… pockets are something to steal from. Read on, and enjoy! This week in Minute Basketball: POCKETS!
Zatzman - Shooting Pockets
It’s been almost a year since I last wrote about Luka Doncic deciding a playoff series between the Dallas Mavericks and Los Angeles Clippers. Their bubble series was tied 1-1, and Doncic’s ability to roast his primary defender determined both games. Defenders couldn’t get a handle on his intent, and his hips were the key reason why.
Only his hips will whisper the truth of his intent. The Clippers need to start listening to those bad boys. But Doncic will keep defenders guessing, hips swiveling in all directions yet always facing the rim, preparing to fillet the defense. Doncic’s hips tell the truth to his defenders, but so too will they hint honesty to you, the viewer, going forward. Make sure you pay attention.
This season, Doncic remains the determinant of the series. His hips remain dominant. Last series, he averaged 31 points a game on great efficiency in a loss. This year he’s up to 35 points a game on even better efficiency. The difference lies in his shooting pocket.
Doncic hit 16 of 44 triples against the Clippers in 2020. That’s extremely good -- 36.4 percent good, to be exact -- but it meant a jumper was less deadly for Doncic than a drive. It was a win for the defense when Doncic didn’t cross the arc. That was because if his gather was a few inches high or to the left, his shot could be far off the mark.
That’s not true so far in this series. The Mavericks lead 2-0, and as much as the world wants to use that fact to ridicule the Clippers, this series is about Doncic. He’s shot 10 of 24 so far from deep, which is 41.7 percent. Why? The biggest reason is that he’s changed how he enters his shooting pocket.
Last year, Doncic’s pocket was remarkably tight. Some players (hi Steph!) don’t have shooting pockets and can swing into their shooting motion no matter the relative positions of the ball and their bodies. Others have a shooting motion as specific as pregame warmups. Paul Pierce, for example, was a knockdown shooter once he got the ball in his pocket. But he only shot 36.8 percent from deep for his career in part because he was not as elite a shooter when his gather came from an unusual spot.
For the early stage of his career, Doncic looked more Pierce than Curry. That’s less true at the moment. First and foremost, Doncic has widened his gather a few inches to the left. That may not sound like a big deal, but it means the rare situation that virtually guaranteed a miss from deep is now almost surely the opposite.
In a single playoff series, the difference between 41 percent and 36 percent shooting from deep is just a small handful of shots. Yet it’s also the difference between how defenses organize to stop you. And Doncic has the Clippers chasing their tails because of his ability to hit shots from within a slightly larger pocket.
Most of all though, Doncic has sharpened his ability to gather the ball directly into the heart of his pocket. Doncic may not be Curry, and his pocket remains tight, but that isn’t such a big deal when he’s a mastermind at getting the ball into his pocket. The number of players who can gather into the pocket with this level of poise and speed can be counted on one hand.
Doncic has such incredible touch and mechanics that when the ball starts in the pocket, it doesn’t really matter what else is going on. He can be, say, tightly contested, drifting to his left, shooting a runner from behind the arc off one foot. Oh, wait, that happened!
Right now, the Clippers have no chance against Doncic. I wrote last year that Pat Beverley and then Marcus Morris had chances guarding Doncic, at least for a time. That couldn’t feel further from the truth today. The Clippers have tried playing drop, soft switches, blitzing -- they’ve almost emptied the chamber at Doncic. But like Neo in the Matrix, Doncic has twisted his way around each and every defensive bullet. Much of that is, as it was then, because of his hips. But his improvement to yet another level is because of his expanded pocket and niftier abilities to reach that expanded pocket. As long as Doncic’s relationship with his pocket remains true, the would-be championship contender Clippers don’t seem to have a chance against him.
Folk - Protecting pockets, and picking them
Sports can sometimes be a canvas for what’s happening in society at any given time. The easiest reference to make would be the intrinsic link between the NBA and Black Lives Matter. That canvas takes on the paint of more than politics, or human rights - it takes on the essence of humanity, our language, struggle, triumph etc. Everything. All this to say, pockets were invented before basketball. And pockets shouldn’t really have anything to do with basketball, but since our everyday language extends to the games we play, the “pocket” pass exists in basketball. As does picking someone's pocket, and a pocket can be a pocket of air, or a reference to spacing. Spacing being a big thing in basketball, we have, yes, pockets on the court.
Kyle Anderson, perhaps better known as “SLO MO” is an accomplished thief, and protector. A thief in that he picks pockets proficiently, and a protector in the sense that when the Grizzlies defense opens up a pocket that’s vulnerable to attack, he’s very good at filling in. Despite the reputation and reality of his glacial existence, he is both tortoise and hare defensively. I already used the prescience thing for Draymond last week, so I have to save some of this for when Louis and I inevitably write about Dune. So, we’ll stick with baseball jargon. Anderson’s route efficiency in court coverage, his read off of the bat, is very good. He’s constantly ‘left-braining’ on defense, noticing patterns and problem solving. He’s swiping 5 steals a game off of the Jazz (10 through 2) and that potency both on-ball and off of it should give the Jazz a little more pause with many of their longer passes. Keep the court smaller, and see what Taylor Jenkins can scheme up to defend the 2-man actions (that involve Gobert, in particular) in game 3.
So, what’s happening? Well, let’s watch.
If it isn’t abundantly clear to you, the man has long arms. Nearly 7’3” is sprouting out of his sides, and his ability to place them in spots that not only bother ball handlers, but strip them entirely makes for very potent defense. His excellent reads in 1-on-1 defense keep him square to the offensive player, and even conservative placement of his hands can put him in positions to pick the opposition clean.
Effective pressure on big men is always good, and ‘Slo’ can do that. The real meat of these clips though, is the incredible “oh you’re here too?” closeout, right before swiping away a steal from behind. Wonderful body control from his feet to the very tip of his hands.
Okay, protecting space.
You can watch him direct JJJ into help-side, deny the dunker spot pass, and then pop into the passing lane (let’s say passing pocket, even though it makes no sense but it’s thematically consistent) for the steal. Then on the next play he rotates over in help-side, denies the rolling Favors (meaning Melton can pop back out) and swipes the ball on the baseline once again. The last clip, he just does a masterful job of keeping tabs on the relocating shooter, while also tagging the rolling Gobert. He never loses track of his shooter, or Ingles’ desire to find him. And it’s pretty easy to notice through all these clips that he’s creating a lot of transition opportunities for his team. Transition is gold in the NBA. Especially for a team that was aggressively average (15th) offensively in the regular season. Although, they’ve found success against the Jazz pretty consistently - and Ja Morant’s ascension has been a very big motivator for that.
So, there you have it. Kyle Anderson: Protector and Thief.
Pockets everybody!
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How many times have you had to prove something that was already proven beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt? It’s one of the most common reasons good employees hate bad employers, why confident lovers become frustrated with partners who lack the same certainty. Being forced to prove a fact that’s well known is what turned Wild West outlaws into mass murderers, as runaway youths challenged famous Kids like Billy or Sundance to prove their speed with a pistol, again and again.
That same force animates our relationship with NBA stars. Oh, you’re the best? Do it again. The arms race of legacy is a natural outgrowth of such spectacularity that we have trouble comprehending. LeBron James does things that no other human can do. The same for Zion Williamson. And Luka Doncic. And Steph Curry. And, well, you get my point. So how do we compare the incomparable?
By proving you’re the fastest and the deadliest gunslinger to ever wear spurs over and again until technology passes you by and the railway comes to town and cow wrangling doesn’t even make sense anymore. And then? Then winning another duel anyway.
We have to appreciate the uniqueness of NBA talent. Or else what’s the point? Still, the guys who can outduel the best are the best. That is legacy. In other words, if Clapton is God, what does that make Hendrix? This week in Minute Basketball: Legacy.
Folk - Parity, the Highway to Legacy
The polarizing talking points that have gotten more polarizing with time. #Rings culture and the evolution of conversation around basketball. The dwindling list of achievements that are even considered achievements anymore, and if someone does accomplish something then a host of people will almost assuredly try to undercut that year’s ‘something’ - as Louis points out down below. X wasn’t A, B wasn’t C. Is it corny that LeBron James meticulously crafts narratives for himself to overcome? Yes, absolutely it is. Do I blame him for that? No, not at all.
All of what I said up there is true. However (comma) it’s mostly contained in conversations with fans of other teams; arguments under Kendrick Perkins’ tweets, or the online soldiers of each fanbase, who, for whatever reason, argue their respective fanbases POV with anyone who would speak otherwise online.
Some people enjoy arguing and being combative, and for them I think that works quite well. I think most people like sharing things, though. Enthusiasm for players, a team, or basketball in general. That’s where most conversations are had, I think, between like minded people who celebrate the same things. Maybe even people who don’t celebrate your particular thing, but respect accomplishments that exist outside of their rooting interests.
A certain era of Toronto basketball is, to an average NBA fan, the LeBronto era. To Raptors fans, it was years of unbridled joy in a team that won a lot of games and employed extremely likeable stars. While the CP3+Harden Rockets were considered cannon fodder in the face of the Warriors to some, fans in Houston (and hopefully elsewhere) appreciate the team that repeatedly came the closest to knocking off what was maybe the greatest team of all time.
And that’s the super fun thing about parity. Some new and exciting teams will be able to advance further and exceed expectations. Crafting memories (the means in which many people become bonded to their sports team) for old fans and new ones. And they won’t have to punch up against worldbeaters to do it. The insular moments for that fanbase to enjoy amongst themselves.
“In many cases, although we agree what considerations are relevant to the comparison, it seems all we can say is that one alternative is better with respect to some considerations while the other is better in others, but it seems there is no truth about how they compare all things considered.” - Ruth Chang
The quote is only meant to illustrate this point: Julius Randle has an opportunity to perform in such a way that the city of New York will elevate him to legend status. And that status can’t be trod upon by LeBron James’ legendary performances in Los Angeles. Parity allows for a wider variety of outcomes, and legacies. It doesn’t have to be Randle or James either, and that’s the point.
I’ll be more minute in the coming weeks as we get playoff games to break down, but for this week I’m just happy to see parity and all its possibilities looming large in the NBA.
Let’s enjoy these playoffs.
Zatzman - Steph Curry
Steph Curry shaped the NBA in his image. Before Curry, the idea of the best shooter looked something like this.
Beautiful. But mostly static. It’s not that a guy like Ray Allen couldn’t do what Curry does. It’s that it never was an option. There was no space in the game for this as recently as 10 years ago.
But Curry didn’t just succeed by doing the impossible; he completely broke the game. Two MVPs, the winningest regular season in league history, three championships -- that’s the stuff of Larry Bird or Tim Duncan. Except Duncan didn’t have the league shooting bank shots after him. Bird didn’t have players doing … whatever the hell his signature move was (fancy passing? Just not missing ever? Hard to say). Curry has had one season of his whole career shooting below 40 percent on pull-up threes. Such shots have three qualities in common: they are ostensibly the hardest shots in the game, the most accessible, and for Curry, about the best shot an offense can take. He proved himself the fastest gun in the West (and the East) by outshooting all comers. And even though the NBA’s caught up, and his disciples are sometimes taking more threes than he, he’s still going to win the duel.
So what’s left for a player who recreated the entire world of basketball? Obviously, doing it all over again, but this time with a twist.
Curry was as inevitable as the tide for a period of several years. With the help of Draymond Green and Klay Thompson (and Kevin Durant), he made LeBron James an underdog. There’s gunslinging and then there’s that. Now Curry’s an underdog.
The wildest part of the whole performance is that Curry is better now than he ever was during his run as the NBA’s scrawniest Superman. He averaged 32 points a game this year, the most of his career, as efficient as he’s ever been, and without Durant or Thompson in tow to space the floor. Curry changed the league, and he’s still light years ahead.
There are multiple components of legacy. Curry has already defined modernity. That alone puts him in a class including Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Julius Irving, Michael Jordan, Shaq, LeBron James. Maybe a few others. But no one his size has ever defined the league like Curry. That’s legacy chiseled in stone, crusted with diamonds, and encased in a titanium vault; it can’t ever be taken away.
And yet -- and yet! -- Steph Curry lost to LeBron James and the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing Los Angeles Lakers in the play-in game. Even if Curry beats the Memphis Grizzlies and makes the playoffs, the road to true playoff glory this year is more Sisyphean than ever before. He won’t win another championship, not this year. That doesn’t reduce him in the least. After all, there’s legacy and then there’s legacy.
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Homogeneity lends itself to utopia and dystopia both. The idea that humanity would eventually produce enough to fulfill everyone’s needs led to Star Trek and to Francis Fukuyama, to HG Wells and Karl Marx. But the idea that everyone’s needs can be fulfilled comes inherent with the degradation of culture and purpose: think Brave New World, Harrison Bergeron, The Giver.
The modern NBA is balancing on the same blade.
On April 16, Nick Nurse was discussing positionless basketball and said that he won’t be happy until everyone on the court is 6-foot-10 and “can drive and shoot the three and pass it and we can switch everything on defense.”
That may describe Nurse’s basketball utopia, but there are multiple reasons why it doesn’t exist. Of course, there aren’t enough such players to gather a full lineup’s worth on one team. Beyond that, the minute among us have some advantages that lurk beneath the surface; the league would be a worse place without undersized guards scampering around, winning basketball games. There’s a reason six-foot-nothing players remain a dime a dozen in the league. They’re damn good. It’s possible that’s not in spite of their height, but occasionally because of it. An NBA where everyone looks the same may be more dystopia than utopia.
Samson and I are both very short. Could have something to do with one of the meanings of Minute Basketball. So we thought -- who’s the shortest writer we know? Let’s bring Joe Wolfond into the mix. Ha. Just kidding. He’s one of the best and smartest people out there, let alone writers, so we at Minute Basketball could not be more excited to offer you Minute Basketball feat. Joe Wolfond: Short Kings.
Wolfond - The Low Ground
In combat, having the high ground is a massive strategic advantage, so much so that some consider it tantamount to victory. Generally speaking, the same is true on a basketball court.
Having a height advantage over an opponent presents myriad ways to attack them. You can shoot over them with a clear field of vision, back them under the basket to drop in an unimpeded layup or dunk, or peer past them to scan the whole floor for the best available pass. Even if one of those options produces a miss, you’ll probably have a decent chance to grab the rebound.
Basketball naturally selects for size. That’s just a consequence of a game in which the objective is to put a ball through a cylinder that sits 10 feet above the ground. But while elevation wins most wars in the NBA, plenty of battles can be won from the low ground. Doing so simply requires a special blend of skill and cunning. Certain things will always be out of reach from that position, but there are plenty of advantages you can leverage by virtue of being closer to the floor.
I grew up, as I imagine many diminutive basketball enthusiasts of my generation did, holding a special reverence for the likes of Allen Iverson, Damon Stoudemire, Earl Boykins, and that outlier of outliers, Muggsy Bogues. Admittedly, Muggsy was a little before my time, but I was always tangentially aware of him. (I liked to play as the Hornets with him and Larry Johnson in NBA Jam, and I trusted the Monstars' eye for talent when they chose to steal his in Space Jam. I even got to watch him finish his career as a backup for my Raptors.) You couldn't follow the NBA and not have at least a passing familiarity with his historically improbable career.
Watching NBA basketball is an exercise in object relativity. Because the vast majority of the league’s players are anomalously tall, and because you mostly see them in relation to each other, you don’t fully register just how anomalously tall they are. Point guards who would tower over me can look puny on an NBA court. At 5-foot-3, Bogues looked like a toddler skittering impishly around the shins of grown-ups.
Sure, that came with limitations. And yeah, Michael Jordan once taunted him in a playoff game by calling him a midget and daring him to shoot. But Muggsy knew who he was, and what he could and couldn't do. What he could do was burrow through the smallest crevices to find space, run laps around opponents in the open floor, and sling bounce passes beneath the prying arms of defenders. Also, nobody could do a damn thing to push him off the ball. Which makes some sense when you consider the short distance his dribble was traveling between hand and hardwood. Perhaps it’s no wonder that Muggsy’s career assist-to-turnover ratio - an incredible 4.7-to-1 - is the best of all time among players to average at least five assists per game.
I don't know if we'll ever see anyone quite like him again, but there have been plenty of players over the years who've channeled his spirit by finding ways to weaponize their small stature.
Ten years after pint-sized guard J.J. Barea helped swing the Finals in favour of Dirk Nowitzki and the Mavericks with his shiftiness and chicanery, another 5'10 waterbug is playing a key role next to another paradigm-busting big man on a championship hopeful. With Nikola Jokic's Nuggets down four rotation guards, 30-year-old rookie Facundo Campazzo has stepped into the limelight and helped keep Denver's high-wire act in balance.
Campazzo is a genius playmaker, with panoramic vision and a penchant for threading darts through narrow corridors. His assist-to-turnover ratio isn't quite Boguesian, but at 3.2-to-1, it's still one of the best in the NBA. And unlike a lot of the players who tend to comprise the league leaderboard in that statistic, Campazzo's passing doesn't lack for audacity.
His singular ability to spy openings between thickets of trees can be as valuable as others' ability to see over them. So, fine, Campazzo can't throw passes over the top the way Jokic or LeBron James or Luka Doncic can. He'll just drop a behind-the-back bounce pass under your arm or send one whistling past your ear instead.
Campazzo is also a deceptively disruptive defender, relentless and difficult to shake. While his size clearly limits the impact of his shot contests, he's at just the right height to dig and swipe and mess up an opponent's dribble. Getting him to run flush into a pick is damn near impossible, like trying to set a solid screen on a cat. And off the ball, he's a hidden prowler, disappearing in the tall grass before pouncing on unsuspecting passers and ball-handlers who literally don't see him coming.
Is he destined to get hunted and exposed in the playoffs? Maybe. He's still extremely limited as a scorer, and it's probably not a good thing that the Nuggets are as reliant on him as they are. But I'm looking forward to watching him navigate that treacherous terrain. Short guys finding workarounds to their physical limitations provide some of the NBA's greatest displays of resourcefulness. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.
Folk - The Short-Roll
My fixation with the short-roll is a two-headed monster that adjoins and separates depending on what side of the floor they occupy: Lucas Nogueira and Kyle Lowry. Nogueira, the gone too early short-roll savant, paired with Lowry for some of the most beautiful and penetrating pick n’ roll short-rolls and lobs in Raptors history. Lowry, the most potent partner of Nogueira’s offensively, but a novel defensive quarterback and mover; a player who harnessed his physicality and maximized it in a way that few players do, and a marvel who became an immensely affecting paint defender despite the aforementioned physical attributes. Lowry went on to carve out a HOF resume after Nogueira’s departure (and retirement), but those two had an undeniable neural link that led to some of the most inspired improvisational basketball that I’ve ever seen.
The NBA has changed, obviously, we all know that. The landscape of “big man attributes” has gone through a transformative phase, and what’s left are big men who are - on average - less capable of rote, practiced post moves and are more capable of incorporating a live dribble, extended shooting range (although, the stretch 5 is still a lot rarer than most think) and naturally, playmaking on the move. The All-Star Weekend’s skills competition isn’t proof on it’s own, but it does point to the changing landscape. Short-rolling is part and parcel of the new and improved ‘modern big’. However, it’s still underappreciated and underdeveloped relative to the other skills that are considered staples of said ‘modern big’.
Yes, teams were terrified of Steph Curry or Kevin Durant coming open off of a screen in the pick n’ roll, but there were few things more deflating than a hedge or blitz that failed to eliminate the pocket pass, and Draymond Green cruising to the bucket with ball in hand and a baseline cutter hard charging the paint. And if the defender on the weak-side tags the cutter, then the pass finds the corner shooter. It’s death, all of it. The nightmare fuel of the Warriors unstoppable run, and the reason the Rockets tried to flatten everything out above the break against them.
Curry and LeBron James have warped how we see playmaking. Curry, for his ability to distort and warp defenses that benefits his teammates in a way we might never have seen before. James, for his ability to leave defenders flat-footed because he read the pre-rotation and beat it. The 40 mile per hour skip passes that take a more dangerous arc because of his height. Still, playmaking from the middle of the floor is very dangerous. It fueled the Heat’s run to the Finals last season, because it’s adaptable and hard to scheme against. Bam Adebayo and Jimmy Butler catching the ball and evaluating with the whole floor in front of them and the proximity of the basket even closer, that burned teams. The Raptors, who employ ball handlers who don’t typically gain much of an advantage from turning the corner towards the paint (save for Lowry in the playoffs, what a man) baked in heaps of short-rolling opportunities for their bigs to manufacture pressure in the middle that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. Serge Ibaka, ever the mid-range release valve. Marc Gasol, the passing genius. And prior to their arrival, the wonderful ‘Bebe’.
Now, not every big man possesses the attributes to succeed in the short-roll, and Lowry hunts them down.
Lowry’s use of verticality (particularly while defending the fastbreak) is worth it’s own deep dive, and maybe we’ll do that down the line, but I think his greatest defensive feat is his ability to wield the charge as a means to defend the paint as a sub-6-foot guard. It’s a fantastical application of his defensive ‘feel’. For the ultimate piece on feel, click here. Try to remember how many times you’ve seen a big man catch the ball on the roll and the guard in waiting provided no resistance - it’s really common. Lowry’s ability to read developing plays, and beat big men to their own spot has led to countless plays where the short king, Kyle Lowry panicked big men in the paint. More often than not, Lowry takes a charge or converts a full on rim-run into a short-roll. That’s right, he loves it on offense, and dictates it defensively.
Lowry turns players away from the paint, forces counters, and elongates offensive possessions from the backline better than virtually any guard has ever done before. The cohesiveness and coverage of the Raptors defense has slipped this year, but Lowry’s uncanny defensive fortitude at the back end allowed the Raptors to play fast and loose with a lot of coverages that were instrumental in building a defense that won a championship, and many more successful ones prior to that. Taking heaps of charges, and dictating that uncoordinated and out of control big men suddenly become controlled, intelligent passers (it usually went his way). A short king indeed.
Zatzman - Fred VanVleet
One of these things is not like the other.
NBA Advanced Stats only has deflection stats going back to 2016-17, so this is all the historical data we’re gonna get. And there’s a clear outlier at the very top of (recorded) history. While most of these players have wingspans ranging near or at seven feet long, VanVleet’s is a miniscule 6-foot-2, only slightly longer than his height. But last season isn’t his only entry onto the list; VanVleet currently leads all players this season with 3.8 deflections a game.
So how the hell does he get so many deflections?
If anyone in the NBA channels the powers of Ant Man, it’s Fred VanVleet. There’s a number of reasons why VanVleet is such a master of disruption, and the list is common among all good defenders; he’s smart, and he’s fast, and yada yada. That’s normal stuff. VanVleet has those skills in spite of being short, not because of it -- or at least they’re unrelated to his size. But the uniqueness of VanVleet’s defensive savance is, counter-intuitively, his strength.
Ant Man is short. Famously so. That’s more or less the extent of his superpower. He retains the strength of a normal-sized man in his abnormally sized frame. That’s much the same as VanVleet’s incredible defensive superpower. He may be dramatically shorter than the average NBA player, but he is as strong or stronger than most of them.
It doesn’t matter how big you are; you can’t go through him in transition.
When gargantuan NBA bigs catch the ball on the roll and see a point guard in their way, the result is usually a foregone conclusion. Not so when it’s VanVleet. He can even wrestle with opponents’ other bigs before rotating over to protect the rim.
NBA teams often ask a weakside defender to sink into the lane in team pick-and-roll defense. Actually doing anything productive when they’re there is a tall order for guards, but VanVleet is comfortable on an island against legitimate seven-footers. Just hit them before they hit you.
Even when it’s not in the scheme, VanVleet realizes when his man cuts into the wrong space, and he will improvise and jet into the lane, outwrestling players with 50 or more pounds on him.
Even when the largest players in the league carom into him, VanVleet somehow ends up with the ball. Here VanVleet actually manages to come up with the ball because of his height.
What do all of those plays have in common? Among other things, opponents’ absolute inability to move VanVleet. The man doesn’t budge an inch. Sure, you could say part of that is because of his low center of gravity. More than anything else though, it’s because the dude is Hercules strong. If everyone in the NBA looked the same, it would be the league’s loss. There’s no replicating players like VanVleet.
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addition to being a sports writer, I’m also an LSAT tutor. (What a condemnation of the industry that this author of a free Substack newsletter needs a second job!) As a tutor, I teach the difference between sufficient and necessary conditions. To illustrate the difference, occasionally I’ll use sleep.
You need sleep to have energy. It is necessary, a requirement, like food or sunshine. But it’s not always enough; it’s not, on its own, sufficient. These dark gray quarantine days mean energy is as easy to find as your own shadow. I wake up exhausted no matter how many hours I get. Sleep is needed, but it’s not enough.
For the desired result of having energy, you need both the necessary and the sufficient.
Sleep matters less to someone like me than the majority of people in the world. I don’t have kids. I can drink a pot of coffee, write my nonsense, and worry about the effects on my heart later.
For people whose jobs matter, sleep is far more essential. The NBA has countless symbiotic/parasitic industries (hello Minute Basketball!) but sleep science has to be one of the fastest growing. At the same time, sleep as a metaphor for lack of attention is always a hazard on the job. Fall asleep on the court, and you’ll be made a fool of. Sleep, in the life and death of a basketball player, on and off the court, is omnipresent.
This week in Minute Basketball: Sleep.
Folk - Dying
I listened to one podcast about sleep science and have been coasting off of a couple platitudes ever since:
Relative to how restorative sleep is for your brain, being awake is low-level brain damage.
The less you sleep, the earlier you die.
Could I tell you why those things are true (maybe they aren’t, I did what everyone does with something they don’t know intimately, I took a few taglines and ran with it) I couldn’t. However (comma) all the people in my life who text me around 8am and receive word back around 10am, know that I revere sleep - this is also exacerbated by the fact that most of my dearest friends live in Eastern time zones, and I do not.
Anyway, the opposite is true in the NBA. The more you sleep, the more damage you cause to your team's defense, and the less you sleep the longer you live. Of course “awake” defense can be kind of toothless depending on who is exacting it on the offense, but typically it creates more of a burden on the offensive players to beat the defense in a more meaningful way. What’s more frustrating than a great defensive possession blown up by a sneaky baseline cut to the dunker spot, or a ‘45’ cut against a weak-side zone? Basically nothing, save for Raptors players over helping on an assignment OG Anunoby clearly has under control.
You can fall asleep in a team concept, or in 1-on-1 defense. The team concept usually involves a back-cut, maybe some light relocation, or some sort of missed box-out. In a 1-on-1 sense, there are players who hypnotize and cast sleeping spells on players like the Sandman. After all, Kyrie Irving cascades across the court like Ramona Flowers skating through Scott Pilgrim’s dreams - you start hearing music, your eyes glaze over, and at the end of it all Kyrie tells you it was the most efficient means for him to get to the basket. I’m sure I could take this Scott Pilgrim thing a step further and include something about dying and extra lives, but that’s entirely too much work.
There’s an element of ‘avoiding the chase’ when guarding guys like Irving or James Harden - two players who feast on whipping out counters to how you might defend, so why not relax a little bit? In most cases Irving and Harden are just working their way to their favourite spots, noting the time on the shot-clock and getting comfortable, and the defenders are so locked into tracking them that they don’t notice they’ve been compromised by a newly available driving lane, passing angle, brush screen - whatever. It’s how Irving manages to maintain 50/40/90 splits even when he takes 6+ seconds of touch time on a possession. Most players’ statistics nosedive when they hold the ball for a long time - NBA2K even incorporated a feature of their game engine that penalizes shooting percentages the less you move the ball - and yet Irving persists because of his ability to navigate the REM cycle of defenses.
Harden manipulates that REM cycle for teammates more often. That’s not a comment on selfishness or anything like that - Harden is better suited to playmake because he reads the secondary levels of defenses better than almost anybody in the world, and he knows that they pay a great deal of attention to him - 5 pairs of toes pointed in his direction. It’s how the Nets have uncovered a new position for Bruce Brown (the 6’4” dunker spot dominator). A good eye for when to attack a sleeping defense, and a generational passer like Harden means that a player like Brown, who rarely self-creates (less than 25% of his 2-pointers, none of his threes) can take over half of his shots at the bucket and hit on nearly 69-percent of them. The conditions of this freakish Nets offense (built on the back of perhaps unparalleled offensive stardom) have created new and novel basketball permutations.
There’s a lot of ways to die on the basketball court, and few ways to live.
Zatzman - Living
Hamlet said “to die, to sleep -- to sleep, perchance to dream,” but he was also a cold-hearted prick who murdered his good friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for acting sketchy around him. Hamlet only illustrates that sleep has always existed squarely in the middle space between living and dying. If death is the long sleep, then life is the short one.
Where does that leave the NBA? For a decade, and probably longer, the league has been obsessed with sleep science.
Here’s CBS from 2016:
Sleep deprivation...has become a way of life in the NBA.
Eighty-two regular-season games. Back-to-backs. Four games in five nights. Crisscrossing multiple time zones. NBA players are paid millions of dollars to push the limits of human performance, only to neglect the simplest and most effective tool.
Wired from 2018:
"Sleep duration is important, but we also focused on the quality and timing of Andre's sleep," says Mah, who consults with teams in the NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA—including the Warriors—on sleep and recovery strategies. "We worked on his caffeine intake, his nutrition, his wind-down routine. Big picture, we worked on his whole approach to sleep, to make it more of a priority."
Did it work? Sample size of one and all that, but boy, did it ever seem to: With more sleep, Iguodala's three-point-shot percentage doubled. His points-per-minute spiked 29 percent. His turnover and foul rates fell 37 and 45 percent, respectively. His coaches gave him more game time, and, in the 2015 Finals, tasked him with guarding Cleveland Cavaliers powerhouse LeBron James. The Warriors went on to win the series. Iguodala received the Most Valuable Player award.
And ESPN in 2019:
So how much sleep do NBA players get per night during the season? Ballparking a figure is tricky, but Czeisler, who has worked with three NBA teams, says five hours per night is not an uncommon answer from players; he's had "very famous" players tell him that they sleep only three to four hours a night. Multiple factors contribute to this sleep deficit, not least the siren song of the NBA nightlife (though the "Tinderization" of the NBA has arguably minimized that effect). That said, one former and four current NBA athletic training staff members all separately say that six hours of sleep per 24-hour cycle is common among players, an estimate that combines the nightly sleep and the pregame nap that is typical for many NBA players.
All three articles point to the same studies about sleep deprivation and the same impacts on the same NBA players. Dr. Cheri Mah’s original study, by the way, was done in 2011, so it’s not like the idea that NBA players need to sleep more is new.
All this talk of sleep deprivation in the NBA leads to the obvious question, which isn’t fully answered in the series of articles: why don’t NBA players sleep more?
Some of the reasons are obvious. Both in terms of quantity and quality, NBA players work far harder than the average human, often to all hours of the night. They work weekends. They fly across the country every other day during busy stretches. The league tried to cut down on travel over the previous decade, reducing back-to-backs, to help address the sleep deficit, but this season has reversed all of the good work and then some. It’s hard to have a consistent sleep schedule when you don’t have a consistent work schedule.
That’s not the whole story, of course. Players could just … sleep more. Go to bed early after games and practices. And many choose not to. That’s not a bad thing, but it is revealing about the mythos on which the league rests.
Many players are too busy living. Players have children, families. They have charities and foundations with demands on their time. They have cities to explore, teammates with whom to bond, and restaurants to frequent. They have video games to play and, yes, clubs to frequent. You’re only a millionaire 20-year-old for so long. The idea that NBA players need to subordinate their entire lives to their work is ridiculous. Even LeBron James, famous for his seven-figure annual budget for his physical recovery, has a life. Remember Taco Tuesday?
Sleep deprivation is not unique to NBA players. I myself, covering NBA games at night and tutoring early in the morning on many days, only sleep five or six hours some nights. I don’t need to compete at the highest level in the world for my job, so it’s apples and oranges, but the point is that life gets in the way for all of us.
Sleep deprivation is of course bad, but it’s common across the board in our society. That NBA players share some of the same problems as their fans is not an inherently bad thing. But the idea that NBA players should sacrifice everything is ridiculous. Even if Jimmy Butler does work at 3 am in the morning, he still lives his life in between those hours. Players don’t live in the gym, and nor should they. They have huge amounts of pulls on their time in every direction. Sometimes sleep takes a backseat. Yes, teams and players are always trying to find thinner and thinner margins for advantages. Sleep falls in that category, but players can’t give everything. That would make them robots, would make them not living at all. You may as well be dead if putting a ball through a rim is the only element of your life. So what’s sleep deprivation for the hard-working 20-something-year-olds in the NBA?
Just proof that they’re alive.
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Louis: Welcome to Minute Basketball Live! The first Minute Basketball Live! I'm looking at Samson and his gorgeous place. He looks wonderful. I just am happy to see him. It's fun to talk together. How are you doing buddy?
Samson: I'm doing alright. Hanging out. I just got a DM from Blake that says “Lourdes!”, so I'm guessing Gurriel hit a home run or something, and we were talking about how much we appreciated him for his vibes. That's something I'm looking forward to catching up on once this is over. Maybe a home run to catch up on.
Louis: On that note, we're talking fandom this week. Our own fandom. This season. I wanted to start at the beginning. What is your first memory of fandom in the NBA?
Samson: I think it's Chris Bosh and just him existing as a Raptor. The town I grew up in, basketball wasn't really popular. My dad didn't play basketball at all, even though he ended up coaching me in my grade 12 year. But I drew up most of the sets. And everything was hockey or lacrosse. Even curling. I watched more curling before the age of 10 than I did basketball. That's how insane and backwards my childhood was. Just seeing Chris Bosh exist on the Raptors. I didn't get to see Vince Carter live or anything like that. I caught maybe a game here or there, but I didn't even know what I was watching. Seeing Chris Bosh do things on the Raptors was really cool. For a time I was a really big fan of Luol Deng because he was the first NBA player I ever saw that donned the number nine. And the number nine is hallowed ground for me.
Louis: What's nine?
Samson: Nine is my number for all things. I wore number nine, baseball, lacrosse, hockey. If I got to wear number nine, I was extremely happy. I eventually got to wear it in basketball. Luol Deng became an obsession of mine. I used to track all of his stats even though I didn't watch any of his games. And then I came onto Anthony Parker, and then after Anthony Parker, DeMar DeRozan. And during the DeMar DeRozan era, I started watching a lot of basketball. And I caught the tail end of Jose Calderon and went back to watch quite a few of his games where I could once that technology was available. And Jose Calderon is a revisionist history type of favourite player of mine. That's basically my introduction to fandom. But when I started basically every Raptors game that I could, started with the Raptors in London where Brook Lopez got his bicep or his should muscle completely sliced open by an errant nail, and DeMar DeRozan became the NBA's leading scorer overseas, and that was really meaningful to me. They used to run these gut DHOs for him, and these pindowns at the nail, because the spacing was completely different back then. And I just remember hanging on -- because I started out as a bigger fan of DeMar than I was of the Raptors -- and I remember hanging on to everything I could every time DeRozan would come off of that pindown and take a free-throw line jumper, I felt like the world was in his hands. I needed that shot to go down because I needed him to score 18 points a game, and he finally hit the mark and I lost my mind. That was my start to Raptors fandom was with Chris Bosh, sparingly, Anthony Parker and Jose Calderon sparingly, and then very big with DeMar DeRozan.
Louis: Nine, first of all, before any of it, that's half chai. Chai is a magic number in Judaism. It means life because the letters add up to 18 because 18 means life. Life, Minute Basketball Live, there’s something there. Anyway, when you give gifts in Judaism, it's always a multiple of 18. So nine being half Chai, it's a wonderful thing for your favourite number. There's magic in it, man. I'm a huge believer in magic in inanimate objects, magic we imbue, and you may not have even known that element of magic, but it's there.
Anyway. The part you said about individuals, you were a fan more of DeMar more than the Raptors, I love when people are able to separate fandom. For me, Mo Pete. When he hit that shot. That moment where the guy, I don't remember who, threw the ball up way way in the air because he thought it would end the game, and Mo Pete caught it with point two or point four or whatever and made the shot to tie or win. That moment to me stands out as my first moment of fandom. And separating moments or individuals from teams is no neat in terms of what it is that we love. And I wanted to bring it up to today. I know we can run through memories for forever. But now you cover the team. Now you podcast about them every game. You write about them. Does that change how -- not how much you love -- but the ways in which you love? Or how you feel about fandom? Are you still a fan?
Samson: I am still a fan to some degree. Although it was also -- I'm one of those, as you're a writer, you'll recognize this as well -- it's silly to call them fans, but there are people who really love your work. Maybe it's a couple people. Maybe it's a lot of people. And I had really started to idolize writers. Not more than the players. But I really appreciated writers' points of view on the game. And so, no surprise to anyone, but Blake Murphy looms large in the way that I see basketball. And there's an analytical bent, and there's a responsibility to make sure -- it behooves you to understand a lot of what's going on on the floor, and I hope that's represented in my work. And I really appreciated what Blake was writing about the Raptors and how he did it, and that started to form my fandom as well. That it started to take on more of that analytical side because I came to basketball late, and when I first started watching basketball, DeMar DeRozan's point totals, when I was 13, were more important than basically anything else that happened in the game. That gut DHO. That pindown at the nail. That mattered more to me. When Paul Kariya, maybe my favourite player of all time of any sport ever, when he was scoring goals, or when he had an assist taken away from him with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, that bothered me. And I didn't care if the Mighty Ducks won, I would just check his stat line.
Louis: So you already cared about the numbers. The analytics were already something you paid attention to.
Samson: Yeah. And specifically, to one player. And then, seeing Blake put it in terms of, okay, there's these new numbers. And they're a little bit more specific, that made me more able to appreciate players that I might not have otherwise. And that helped me form a more analytical appreciation for team basketball. And then so obviously starting with reading Blake's stuff, I started reading more writers, and I started watching more informational stuff, and with that too I was starting to play a much higher level of basketball in my own life, which made me much more appreciative of defensive schemes, offensive sets, all that kind of stuff. And it made me appreciative of the minutiae of specific things players could do. Like Kyrie Irving, for some people, is just magic. And for others, there's specific types of dribble moves that you can describe. There's explosion and burst -- what's the term -- biomechanics that are attached to how he succeeds. You can go as deep as you like, and I started to go a little bit deeper in that.
Louis: Which is what we do. Minute Basketball is kind of fandom of that most minute element of basketball. They say journalists aren't supposed to be fans, but I saw the NBA finals, I saw people cheering that were not supposed to be cheering on media row. You know? You cannot take subjectivity out of a human being. And so I don't think there's anything wrong with you and I loving parts of basketball. I think you have to. But I think Minute Basketball, what we do is try to love very discrete things. Like Kyrie's dribbling moves or Jimmy Butler's jump stop, or Anthony Davis' post shimmy. I don't know if we've even talked about that, but I love it. And it's so funny that you're talking about that evolution of fandom. It feels like Minute Basketball is the natural endpoint, right?
Samson: When I asked you, because we were doing the Black Box Report on Raptors Republic, and the name was alienating, and it didn't really fit the site, and it was too much for the site, it was too precise. Most people weren't interested in it. And so it was like, well let's find our own audience. Let's make sure that the people who are interested in this stuff can have one place to get it. So we did Minute Basketball, and that made sense for both of us because I think there is that bent towards minutiae in both of our writing, and we both -- that's how we became friends. We didn't know each other at all. We just started messaging each other like, 'hey, this thing you wrote about, I thought it kicked ass.' And then, had it not been for the pandemic, I would have stayed with you in my time in Toronto.
Louis: I'm still expecting a visit, by the way.
Samson: And your briefcase that is still in the closet. It's a nice leather briefcase that I bought for you as a present. Someday you'll get it. And it cost, I won't say how many, but it is a multiple of 18. So there's good juju in it.
Louis: The magic of inanimate objects, both for chai and for dribbling moves. Such a snug fit. Very excited, by the way, to rep that briefcase. So to continue the thematic thread here, I think joy is the element that is consistent. Watching Jimmy Butler play basketball, watching Kyrie dribble, is just a joyful experience. And this season is not a joyful season. Players don't enjoy it. Fans seem to not enjoy it. I know most media members do not enjoy it. Has that changed -- if our fandom is minute, joyful, and discrete -- has the way that this season has been a slog, just a heavy blanket cast over everything, has that changed your relationship with basketball? Your fandom with it?
Samson: I think it changes it for everybody because part of what makes media so important, and something that social media papers over, is that it's access to the players. And access to the players through a lens that you would not have been able to see otherwise. And so the fluff pieces that get mediocre teams and fans of mediocre teams through the season, they're not coming out anymore. And the only stuff you're getting is if the player happens to be a person who's fun on social media, you can pull from that. But Raptors fans, a lot of different fans might know, you have to go looking for more things to be happy about this season because there's not fun little side stories being brought in front of you. Everything is in-house, everything's protected, and it's less human by proxy of the access that's been removed from the players.
Louis: Katie Heindl, who is one of the smartest writers and best people I know, wrote this incredible Contract Tracing trilogy for Dime, and one of them was about the deletion of that whole element of relationship between media and player. That was really incredible, a fantastic long look at what you're talking about.
The other thing that I think this changed for how people look at it is maybe something that's been changing for a long time. The Sam Hinkie-fication of fandom, which is where people are fans only of the macro now. Not everyone, but tons of people only want a championship. And have trouble taking joy in the small things, or seem to take less joy in the small things. Even a win seems less fun than what maximizes the odds of a championship, which is what a GM is. And being a general manager and being a fan seems almost opposite, and yet somehow people conflate them. I don't think that's wrong, by no means, whatever you enjoy as a fan is what you enjoy. That's the whole point. But is that how you experience it? Do you see that changed? It's such a weird, different way of being a fan, to me. I don't understand it, even though I don't criticize.
Samson: There's basically three major avenues. The one is the Hinkie-fication, where people in Toronto rely on the hard work of let's say Blake for cap minutiae being passed down so they can legibly state a lot of the -- you have to have a certain amount of intelligence based on the cap, players contracts, how that stuff works -- CBA stuff -- to talk about it in that way. Kelsea O'Brien, prior to this season, was able to do a lot of that work with the 905. So there's this baseball aspect to it where the farm team is becoming more interesting. You're looking at prospects, and you're doing a lot of that kind of stuff. It's Sabermetrics and trying to get into fandom like that. There's a wider view of development and that kind of stuff, and it's more analytical.
There's the moments. You're just a fan. You're emotional. You experience every game you can as an up and down where you're invested. And what is more meaningful, truly, if you're a fan of OG Anunoby's career? That he won a championship already, that he wasn't on the floor for? Or that he hit an incredible shot in a series that they eventually lost? Moments. Moments are very important, and I think that is the bare essence of fandom.
Then there's standom, which is where it's this unabashed love for a singular player, and you, if we're linking back to the earlier part of this pod, is me talking about DeRozan. I just wanted him to get his point totals. I didn't really care about anything else. That's another type of fandom that's becoming more and more prevalent because standom in a lot of different ways, because of the internet, people are able to link with other stans of a certain thing way easier than they would have prior to anything else. I was just a fan of DeMar DeRozan. And who could I have talked to in Sturgis that wanted to talk about DeMar DeRozan? Nobody. Not a single person. And if there had been twitter like that back then and small Sam had wanted to talk to other DeMar DeRozan fans, I would have been able to find that. People are just indulging in their one singular thing, and they aren't forced to round out anything because they can have more closeminded -- and not closeminded in a negative type of connotation -- closed-world conversations. Emma Brown, I love Emma. I think Emma's fantastic. I think that she is the platonic ideal of a stan in that she clearly has a very guided appreciation for OG Anunoby, but she clearly has this perception of the rest of the team, and she talks about it in a way that's inviting for other people who don't just see the team in that way. But there's some people who alienate, I think, in their love for a certain player. And there's a protective aspect to it that I think is maybe significantly toxic for fandom in general.
Louis: I think there's nothing wrong with that type of fandom itself. I actually think being able to be a fan in different ways is just good. I think it's inherently good for more people to have different ways to enjoy things. Because that's what we're talking about -- different ways to be a fan. And I think this season with its dampening has sort of forced people into the crevices. You sort of have to find different ways to enjoy things. The Oklahoma City Thunder fans, not that I've ever encountered one, but theoretically. I don't understand what to be a fan of. You can't be a fan of a draft pick. Unless you are the general manager fan. A draft pick doesn't play basketball. A draft pick doesn't have a name. It's just a thing. And there's magic in it. We imbue that magic, this possibility of what it might end up being. Obviously Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Lu Dort are very worthy of standom. But the team itself, those moments, are not there. I think you sort of need to find these other elements of fandom, and certain teams may force you into it, but also certain elements like the pandemic, like what we're seeing in basketball today.
Samson: I think that different personality types have proclivities for certain types of fandom, and people who like the general manager thing are people who like to convey information or hold information that other people want. It is just as meaningful -- and you know these people on Raptors twitter, I like quite a few of them -- to indulge in the ability to say 'hey, this prospect, I can tell you about them. You'll like them.' It's somebody who goes to restaurants a lot and likes to tell their friends about them. I'm in on something. I'll invite you in. It's about trying to enjoy different aspects of fandom, and different strokes for different folks. A lot of different people like a lot of different things. The NBA has become so far-reaching in what it's able to provide as an entertainment conglomerate. Yasmin Duale, who is one of the best writers doing it, she wrote about how she treated it, or how a fan prospectively, could treat it like reality TV and how there's so many different ways to look at it that way. And she wrote about that for the Neon Playbook. And it was fantastic. It's just broadening the different ways, which also creates more rifts. By proxy. But that's -- different people can enjoy different things, always.
Louis: And the ultimate endpoint -- I'm trying to watch the clock, I'm trying to end on chai here, to make it circular -- but the ultimate endpoint is just more people having access to enjoying basketball. What we're talking about is just basketball being more inviting for people that aren't dads who need a break from their families. Basketball for so long was this very specific thing that only specific people liked, and I think we're seeing different types of fandom blossom because different types of people are enjoying it. Which is fantastic. And it's hard to say which is the chicken, which is the egg in that case. But it's a self-informing loop. And basketball should be appreciated by more people, and it should be described in different ways. Which, when fandom lends itself to different writing, that's just a good thing for everyone. Everyone can enjoy things. That's all we're trying to do. Get more enjoyment.
Samson: That's my favourite podcast, is probably Binge Mode. Because I read Harry Potter. I watch Game of Thrones. I watch the Marvel stuff. Their insight into that world can give you new avenues to appreciate something you already love. When something becomes so big that people -- that's basically the whole thing about anything, it's why artists can become so revered -- the artist isn't the most intelligent person. There are really genius-level people interpreting that art and then communicating their genius interpretation of that art to fans, and it just deifies people. The bigger you are, the more incredible interpretations. And horrible. But incredible interpretations you can get of a certain thing. So right now, seeing the influx of different interpretations of basketball, we're at a real high point. It's the only reason you and I get to write about it the way that we do. This would have been alienating even five years ago. There would have been no love for this outside of like seven people. And so the more people getting into it with a bent towards this kind of stuff, it's a beautiful thing. I appreciate it.
Louis: We're all little Roger Eberts. And may there be more Roger Eberts as a result.
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It’s a subtle secret that most of basketball happens from the waist down. Your legs offer power for your jumpshot, of course, but it goes much deeper than that. It seems counter-intuitive to say, but dribbling doesn’t actually take you anywhere. Your hands and the ball are just catalysts to movement; they help you get where you’re going, either by craft or guile, but they aren’t part of the equation.
Your feet actually control movement. They’re the pivots on which the lever of basketball rests. Not only during a live dribble, but also before and after. That footwork, those pivots, are a constant differentiator between stars and the role players.
Pivoting doesn’t just describe movement on the basketball court. It also is one of the biggest differentiators between successful and unsuccessful NBA franchises off the court. Anyone can succeed when the first option comes through. When the Miami Heat or the Los Angeles Lakers signed LeBron James, their successes were almost preordained. But how do teams respond when plans change? After losing James, the Cleveland Cavaliers cratered -- until they signed him again -- and then fell apart a second time until, well, to be determined. After the Heat lost James, they were in the second round of the playoffs within two years and the Finals within five.
That ability to pivot between options defines success on and off the basketball court. This week in Minute Basketball: pivots.
Folk
Put it in Reverse
As Louis highlighted at the top, a pivot on a basketball court is a means of conveyance. But, it’s also a tether to a location. So, the way that pivots are used would seem to be extremely limited - only they aren’t. The intention with which you pivot can completely change the function of it’s utility.
Players reverse pivot many times in a game, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of my favourite things to watch on a basketball court. For screen-setters, they’re carving out space and playing the role of obstacle. For scorers in the post or elsewhere it’s the precursor to an intimidating triple-threat possession. The slow swing backwards to see the court unveiled in front of you, while maintaining the momentum that feeds Jimmy Butler’s gorgeous stutter-rip (term coined by PD Web) or Kevin Durant’s famed (and now illegal) sweep through.
And that’s the appeal and the allure of the pivot. Everyone knows that something comes after, that the pivot itself isn’t dangerous, but instead each point of motion in the pivot provides a possibility of something you would have to defend against - and that thing is the danger. The pivot is the connective tissue between possibility and action, and those who do it well are introduced to more possibilities, and well, a more versatile range of actions.
And what would anything in basketball be without a little grift? The reverse pivot as a means to get away with obvious moving screens is a big-brained move by anyone who can consistently get away with it. Some bigs who do it really well are: Domantas Sabonis, Bam Adebayo, and Larry Nance Jr.. All 3 are mobile and have tremendous feel on the court. Nance Jr. gives the full range of how to completely decimate a player giving chase to one of your guards, and then get your primary defender to commit - it’s masterful, and it incorporates the very slick reverse pivot screen.
More than anything though, I love the reverse pivot because it seems like a point of rest before the dance of 1-on-1 defense can begin. Oftentimes it brings attacker and defender face to face. A quiet moment of collection before two of the world’s best attempt to best each other in a confined space.
The perceived tether
If I saw a dead ball handoff in a game, I’d still probably have it in my notes as a DHO. And what makes certain big men so dangerous when they run a DHO is that they are not beholden by anyone or anything to connect with their oncoming teammate. Some big men can extend their dribble and turn it downhill, and when they do they usually find success because most teams aren’t expecting that outcome from the action.
As you saw above with Larry Nance Jr.’s reverse pivots/screens, it’s no wonder teams view the player orchestrating the hand off as an obstacle that wants to hand off to a creator. It’s this perception of DHO’s as rote actions that has doomed certain teams down the stretch. I first saw the slipped hand off when Jonas Valanciunas hit a miraculous game-tying buzzer beating dunk against the Bucks. It happened again a couple nights ago with a clever SLOB and the Inspector Gadget-adjace, Mikal Bridges.
The perception of the pivot as a tether in these moments, allows the player on-ball to explode into the back end of a relaxed defense. Devilishly clever in its simplicity. Goes to show how often the inversion of something escapes the imagination of those who are trying to defend against it.
Zatzman
The Toronto Raptors and Giannis Antetokounmpo
We all make plans. Some of us, even ambitious plans. The Toronto Raptors put together one of the most ambitious plans imaginable. They are connected to Antetokounmpo before most NBA teams, with Masai Ujiri even helping his family emigrate to Greece. Though in his first draft with the Raptors in 2013 Ujiri doesn’t have any first-round draft picks because of his predecessor, he tries desperately to trade for the 12th pick, then the 14th one, but is rebuffed both times. Antetokounmpo is taken 15th by the Milwaukee Bucks.
So the Raptors wait. They wait eight years, watching Antetokounmpo become a superstar, watching his body become that of a god, watching his Bucks become perennial title contenders as Antetokounmpo ascends to MVP, then MVP and DPoY at the same time. The Raptors pivot to free agency in 2021, when Antetokounmpo is set to be unrestricted. They clear their books, freeing up a max slot, with the ability to clear a second one if they get really lucky and need the space for a second star. Nearly every contract they sign in the years before 2021 ends that summer; nothing can change their plans. They win a title in the waiting period, but all roads still lead to Antetokounmpo.
Then on December 15, 2020 he re-signs in Milwaukee.
What are the Raptors supposed to do? Well, maybe their money can be spent elsewhere. Rudy Gobert is going to be a free agent. Kawhi Leonard, too. There are other stars that can be available; open cap space can be spent on anyone, even though the Raptors have been planning for Antetokounmpo for almost a decade. But Gobert re-signs in Utah, and Leonard is not going to leave California after abandoning the Raptors to go home in the first place.
So Toronto is left holding a bagful of cash with no external candidates on which to spend it. Since December, they’ve pivoted in important ways. They’ve re-upped their own guys in Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby, and Pascal Siakam, although to be fair some of those contracts came beforehand. But the plan was for them to be integral elements of the future regardless. The goal was for those three to be a supporting cast for the next championship, but now they’re the leads. And the Raptors haven’t found a supporting cast for them -- with the team 18-30, it’s been a lack of depth that has been Toronto’s downfall, as much as anything else.
Toronto could well use its hoard to re-sign Kyle Lowry this upcoming offseason, who is 35 years old, but the team has him on the roster now and is still well below .500.
It seems there’s no clear plan B. Most likely, Toronto spreads the available cap space across a few different players, trying to buy depth out of free agency. Maybe they could land a useful center in Daniel Theis, Mo Wagner, or Richaun Holmes, retain Gary Trent, and perhaps add someone who can score at the rim. That would make them a solid team, if not equal to the heights they might have attained with Antetokounmpo. They’ll always have the option of trying to build from the middle, as they did when they traded DeMar DeRozan for Leonard. Heck, maybe they can actually bring DeMar home. He would be a hugely beneficial player on and off the court. Meanwhile, this year is the year spent bottoming out -- it seems to be breaking the players’ souls, but maybe they add Cade Cunningham or Evan Mobley to the mix in the draft, which would completely change the future outlook of the franchise.
That bottoming out theory is probably what Ujiri has chosen. He still has not found a serviceable center, and the team has two open roster spots despite having multiple players in health and safety protocols and others out with injury. Adding Antetokounmpo in free agency was Toronto’s first choice for adding talent, but the draft is the best option remaining.
But regardless, even if Ujiri is trying to lose games on purpose for a high draft pick, that was only a recent decision. It is starting to look as if Toronto’s plan B is the same as their plan A, but without Antetokounmpo on board. That’s akin to picking up your dribble without the option to pivot after.
The Oklahoma City Thunder and the curse of James Harden
It’s like the start of a joke: how many MVPs does it take to win a championship in Oklahoma City? Apparently, more than three. Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Russell Westbrook were once together, and all three have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow.
In 2012, Sam Presti -- more like Clay Bennett -- decided the team was too expensive to keep together and pivoted by trading Harden to the Houston Rockets for Kevin Martin, Jeremy Lamb, and picks rather than extending the star’s contract. Call it the curse of the Beardbino.
Then the Thunder spent a few years close but not close enough, lost Durant, and replaced him with Paul George. Then they weren’t close at all, and apparently three straight years of losing in the first round of the playoffs scarred Presti to such an extent that he pivoted straight to Moneyball 2: the search for less payroll.
Now the Thunder exist in a perpetual state of a Piet Mondrian painting: awash in colour and shape and potential, but with nary a foundation in sight. Take on picks for the burden of acquiring Chris Paul, let him run the team, and then trade him elsewhere for even more picks. Do the same with Al Horford. The only commonality, Oklahoma’s only currency, is draft picks. It’s like a game of Pacman, with a higher and higher score being the ultimate goal rather than an actual possibility of winning the game. They play extremely raw players real minutes and then sign them for pennies on the dollar, signing players like Moses Brown or Lu Dort to team friendly deals before they can improve too much, which is another way of saying, robbing them of their fair value.
Where does the tailspin stop? When do 17 first-round draft picks become an actual NBA team, one with only 15 permanent roster spots?
The Thunder’s pivot to villain and vaudevillian Sam Hinkie disciple is an unexpected one, at the very least. Plan A was winning a championship or five with Kevin Durant, and plan B was stealing a spite title with Russell Westbrook. They’ve now pivoted to plan C, which is running the franchise like Out Of The Park Basketball, and simming for a decade or so before all the rookies hit the legal drinking age. We all make choices.
Oh, and the Thunder and Raptors played each other on Wednesday night. It was, as you can might have expected, a sloppy affair. The Thunder won, proving that no matter how hard you try to lose, you can still screw that up, too.
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The post-up is the most intimate event on a basketball court.
At no other moment are players closer together for a longer period of time. The offensive player has the defender on his back, likely with several points of contact. Arm or shoulder on back, hips, feet: there are more bonds of connection than usually happens in the NBA.
And the post-up is not constituted by an explosion of violence, at least not right away. Other intimate moments, like the in-air collision above the rim, or the bone-crunching screen, involve brief contact defined by force and immediacy. Think Bam Adebayo’s game-saving block on Jayson Tatum: sickening force, enough to make a normal human shatter into a hundred quivering pieces.
The post-up is not that. It’s quieter, slower. Opponents feel each other with enough time for sweat to form and fall before anything substantive seems to happens.
Yet substance is happening at all times. The wheels are churning from the beginning. Derided as a thing from the past, as obsolete, the post-up remains both an integral moment for a spectator, as well as a definitive for the outcome of the game. It’s not anti-modern as much as a foundational element of what makes the modern game itself.
Put another way, the post-up still matters. Desperately. Both as a scoring tool and to initiate an offense. It’s essential for watching and winning in the NBA.
The week in Minute Basketball: The post-up.
Zatzman - Scoring
The post-up lives as the last true challenger standing in the way of homogeneity in the NBA. Not specific homogeneity, as difference will always outnumber sameness at the level of detail. But in the general sense, the pick and roll has taken over the NBA like the Anglo-Saxons in Britain.
It is now, after James Harden has left Houston, the most popular playtype among 30 of 30 NBA teams. That’s been true for quite some time, of course, but the post-up remains a bastion. (So too does isolation offense remain a theme du jour in Oklahoma City.) As recently as 2015-16, six teams attempted double-digit shots out of the post across the league. Now only the Philadelphia 76ers and Los Angeles Lakers remain above that threshold, after just the Sixers reached it last season.
But you know what? The post-up is coming back, albeit less frequently. In 2015-16, 16 players attempted four or more shots out of the post per game. This year, it’s only nine. Yet post scoring at the elite level has never been better. In 2015-16, among the top 20 players in post attempts per game, only one player managed an efficiency of 1.0 point per possession or higher. The next season it was two. Back to one in 17-18. It exploded to six the following year, three in 19-20, and now sits at eight (!) of the top 20 this season (with four more averaging 0.96 or above). That’s right. As offense has become more efficient in the NBA, so too has post scoring. Let’s dive into that relationship.
The 76ers and Lakers are so high on the low post because both teams have multiple elite practitioners. Of course, Joel Embiid and Anthony Davis are the high-profile explorers in that regard, ranking first and seventh respectively in attempts per game. But so too do Tobias Harris, Ben Simmons, and LeBron James attempt multiple post-ups per game. It’s clear that using the post is a systemic approach for those teams, rather than simply a reflection of the physical dominance of each team’s center.
Embiid and Davis do form the bedrock of post scoring in the league today, though. Embiid’s 1.08 points scored per post possession and Davis’ 1.04 points both represent elite numbers, either when compared to other post scorers or to NBA offense in general. Among players who attempt 2.0 post-ups or more per game, both are in the top five for efficiency leaguewide. Those are equivalent to Chris Paul shooting off the catch, for Embiid, or Nikola Vucevic, for Davis.
Translation: the post-up is still an extremely viable scoring play if you have the right guys. Like Embiid or Davis. Also: Simmons and James are even more efficient post scorers than their big-men counterparts, albeit on lower frequencies. Post scoring is no longer a late-clock bailout. It’s now -- and was before! -- a feasible way to initiate good offense at the beginning of an NBA shot-clock.
The best post scorers have bags as deep as Chris Kringle. There are options at every turn, counters to counters to counters like the whole thing is some lost sequel to Pirates of the Carribean.
At times, offensive players don’t need tricks as much as the threat of those tricks. They get exactly where they’re going through sheer uniqueness of their games, their bodies, their skillsets. Here Davis leverages his every nook and cranny like a slinky. He digs the endless angles of his form into crevices to create a lever, forcing his defender to sink with him. He dribbles, dribbles, waiting, with the world expecting a spin or drive or … something. And the whole plot is just to unfurl at the end and loft a jumper over a helpless defender. It was all a magician’s flourish, a distraction.
Pascal Siakam lures defenders to moments of rest by pausing like the Beatles before the crescendo of A Day in the Life. You know something’s coming, and it’ll be big, but you don’t know quite when the storm’s gonna make landfall. Then when the defender’s expecting the uppercut, hit him with the quick jab (step) and have him beat.
That element of surprise doesn’t just have to happen at the beginning of a move. Zion Williamson is expert at shocking opponents by making midair choices that shouldn’t be available to him given his momentum. When opponents expect him to drive middle, he twists baseline. When opponents expect a reverse, he launches himself backwards and goes up on the short side. All the while, he maintains perfect balance, of course.
It can get much more complicated when players string together moves like they’re button mashing. Post scorers can face up, toss in a few jab steps, a few crossovers, finally spin middle, before pump-faking into an up and under. If that’s a mouthful for me to say, think about how much of a stunner it must be to defend.
Or it can be simple: be bigger than the other guy.
Sometimes, the post can be devastating. One wrong move as a defender -- say, you shade baseline and help doesn’t arrive fast enough -- and the best post scorers are sharks at a feeding frenzy. They can smell a weakness and turn it not just into points but into abject humiliation.
It’s a quiet secret in the NBA that the most efficient post-up scorers in the league are no longer centers. Sure, leviathans like Embiid and Davis are the highest frequency scorers from the post, but no longer do centers have the highest points per possession down on the block. There are plenty of guards or wings with more efficient post-up games than Embiid or Davis. Gordon Hayward, Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, DeMar DeRozan, Bradley Beal, Kyrie Irving: all average higher points per possession in the post than Embiid. In fact, among players who average two or more attempts a game, the NBA’s current post-up king is Kawhi Leonard.
Leonard seems to possess a combination of all the skills required for strong post play. He has the strength of a center, able to seal and hold all but the biggest players in the league on his back and hips. He has the first step to face up and zoom past defenders, and the second step to rise up and yam on help. He has fakes galore and the patience to outwait Georgy Zhukov at Leningrad. Plus, he has the touch to hit fading away to either side, off balance, with either hand, from any release point. When he puts it all together, it’s as much art as a Steph Curry triple, a Kyrie crossover, or a LeBron chasedown block.
And, it’s as much a contribution to winning. And yet (and yet!) scoring out of the post is not even the real threat of the play. The true reason why the post-up remains not a thorn in the side of the modern NBA, but in fact a definitive aspect of it, is because of post passing.
I cede the floor to you, Samson.
Folk - Passing
It seems we’ve found the real danger.
There have been formulaic teams in the NBA who have coasted to great regular season records on the back of heavy pick n’ roll possessions, lots of transition, drop defense etc. Dependable, regular season basketball. Those formulaic teams have traditionally had a tougher time translating all of their success to the postseason, because all of the quirks and rhythms change. Nothing comes as easy. A lazy Iverson cut in the regular season becomes a wrestling match at the elbow on both sides in the playoffs. Versatility isn’t the end all be all in the playoffs, but it’s really important.
The ability to invert a defense by playmaking from the post instead of the traditional above the break/downhill version of playmaking, is underrated league-wide. Doubling the ball requires different routes to defensive positioning, and the closer proximity to the rim gives defenders less reaction time to defend tight window passes to bucket-bound cutters. Marc Gasol helped add a different element to the championship Raptors. Split-action was packaged into the trade and delivered to the Raptors offense along with him. Pascal Siakam adds that element to the Raptors today, and when Nate Bjorkgren left his position as assistant coach on the Raptors to become the bench boss in Indiana, he took a lot of the plays the Raptors ran for Siakam, and repurposed them for Domantas Sabonis.
You’ll see a lot of similar actions run for many of the great post-passers in the NBA, but there’s still such a unique flair to each action, because post-passing is all about interpretation. Sometimes the baseline interpretations can be enough. If Joel Embiid gets doubled from the weak-side and the farthest man runs the gambit of the weak-side zone, Embiid has to find a way to make him commit and punish that decision. If he can’t do that, he can simply pass the ball out to the strong side, and the defense might be able to recover.
With players like Nikola Jokic or Domantas Sabonis, there’s always a game of cat and mouse going on. Their primary defender is there, sure, and they feel all the points of contact that Louis brought up, but they hate (hate!) giving the ball up to the strong-side - where is the advantage in that? There’s a constant push and pull, a manipulation of the defense trying to corner them, and they tease help-side players into positions where they can dissect them with their passing. Sabonis is a notch below Jokic, to be sure, but they’re both phenomenal. Two of the only big men who have the patience to let a baseline cut come all the way across the back of the basket.
Sabonis and the brass over at the Pacers organization know just how important the pass out of the post is. If I’m picking up that Sabonis is generating more efficient looks out of the post as a passer than a scorer, they most certainly are. And the thing I love most about post-ups is that the line between physical and competitive post-defense and thorough domination by the offensive player is really thin! You’re so close to the basket, that if a foot slides a couple inches too far, you’re not anchored properly and suddenly Embiid (for example) has wriggled his shoulder past yours and is pulling you away from the basket with his firmly lodged elbow in your side, as he coasts towards it. When teams send help too late, it’s just that - too late. When they send it too early, they’re bending their defense out of shape when the play wasn’t necessarily dangerous yet. Very few teams know how to navigate these situations with finesse.
Teams usually improve defending certain actions the more often they defend them. Closeouts to the 3-point line are as practiced as ever. The pace and clinical footwork/hand extension would look out of place in a lot of other eras, but it fits like a glove in today’s game. The fact that the post is rarely at the forefront of what defenses expect to be bludgeoned with, leaves defenses out of practice.
The post is the least cramped it’s ever been, and the forces that reside there are as talented as any era. The interpretation of what the newly found space should turn into makes the interplay of the post one of the truly underrated and beautiful aspects of basketball. As Louis noted, the right guys (Embiid, and Davis for example) see that space as a vacuum for themselves. Teammates walk along the 3-point line, forming up and maintaining the passing angle to provide help. Don’t cramp the space, ever. Wide windows to pass into, and a lot of space to smash into. These massive gravity post-dominators give life to spot-up shooters who can navigate a shifting defense to find jumpers.
Players like Sabonis and Jokic see space and often think the vacuum exists for others. Teammates don’t necessarily have to form up on the 3-point line, because if you come into the space they operate in, it could create the friction that sets them loose on a basket cut. An audible of a DHO could progress into an overhead lob pass that leads them directly to the hoop. The defender loses the step because Jokic and Sabonis are comfortable in the tight spaces - in fact they thrive in them. These wonderful tight-window, post-operators give life to players who don’t shoot that well, if they have a good nose for a cut. They dictate the inverse of a heliocentric perimeter player, in that it’s far less important to be efficient from your stationed spot, and far more important to indulge in well timed movement.
For the select few players who dominate the post with massive frequency as scorers, well done, you’re extremely tough to emulate and tougher to stop. But post passing is accessible to players who exhibit control and awareness, which happen to come along a bit more often than unbelievably talented behemoths like Embiid, and they reward teams who move intelligently off-ball. Not everyone can bully their way to the bucket, but every year (this years Thad Young for example) more people figure out how to outfox a defense from the post.
The post, in two words: Hell yeah.
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We love stories. Drink them like we drink water when we wake up hungover.
They’re the reason Tyrion volunteered Bran to be king in Game of Thrones. They’re so much fun that stacking them often makes for the best narratives. Don Quixote is maybe the best and first concept of stacking stories: a man who reads so many knight stories that he thinks himself a knight goes on ridiculous hallucinatory quests, then has that story published (in real life and as a plot point in the actual novel) and believes his resulting fame as proof that he’s a famous knight. Or the Grand Budapest Hotel -- a girl visiting the grave of a man who wrote a book, whose author recites on camera, which is told as a story over dinner, which is the narration of the movie itself. The episode Frame of Mind in Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was eventually repurposed into Inception: the concept of layered story-telling made literal into dreams within dreams.
Or, The Princess Bride. There’s no better story, layered or otherwise. A book falsely pretending to be an abridged version of a non-existent other book by a fictional author, then made into a movie by the author, and read -- abridged further -- by a grandfather to his sick grandson. The Princess Bride the movie is about as cult classic as cult classic gets. It’s never achieved the fame of Game of Thrones, Don Quixote, or Inception, but it’s about as perfect as Cary Elwes’ bone structure. It also predicted that everyone would be wearing masks in the future.
At this point, you may be saying, hold it, hold it. Are you trying to trick me? What is this? Where’s the sports? I would reply, don’t rush me son. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles. Got any money? (Just kidding, we all know there’s no money in this game, not even in Patreon.)
Regardless, here’s the connection, as you wish: stories are supposed to be what we love about the NBA.
The NBA is supposed to be full of stories within stories. This past week saw a number of games worthy of holding the A1 slot for a season. James Harden made his return to Houston for the first time since being traded to the Brooklyn Nets. But with 25 percent capacity for fans, and neither Kevin Durant nor Christian Wood, the game lacked both its full complement of star power and the crackling tension inherent to stars returning to their former home as opponents. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jamal Murray faced each other in the battle for the title of Best Canadian Player. Zion Williamson and Giannis Antetokounmpo combined for 72 points in the battle for the title of Most Athletic Player. At least we have MVP Joel Embiid to keep us warm at night, chilled though we are by the pervasive and insidious ref talk.
All of that was just this past week. Inconceivable! Yet none of the games carry the weight that the NBA promises. That’s life now. Weightless, uprooted. Hollow, in the NBA and real life. At least we have movies. Let’s attach as much weight as we can to the league. Let’s write some of the stories ourselves.
This week in Minute Basketball: The Princess Bride.
Zatzman
Vizzini, Inigo Montoya, and Fezzik
As much coworkers as friends, Vizzini, Inigo Montoya, and Fezzik are the ultimate trio in film history. Forget Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Gone are the Dude, Walter, and Donny. Don’t even mention Joel, Crow, and Tom Servo (okay, mention them a little.) But in the three hired to kidnap Princess Buttercup, The Princess Bride stands apart. Vizzini, (played by Wallace Shawn, is a genius fit to render Plato and Socrates morons. Inigo Montoya, played by Mandy Patinkin, is a fencing master as dedicated to politeness as he is to revenge. Fezzik, played by Andre the Giant, is kind and straightforward and enormously strong.
In Mike Budenholzer, Jrue Holiday, and Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks employ the NBA’s version of The Princess Bride trio.
Budenholzer is as like to Vizzini as a brilliant NBA coach can be. Clever yet rigid, he seems to shout ‘inconceivable’ every year while the playoff losses keep on conceivin’. He would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. He’s not a great fool, so rather than letting Antetokounmpo play 40 minutes plus in the playoffs, he handicaps his own team in the process of being clever. Left with the clear inability to choose neither the goblet in front of him nor the goblet in front of his opponent, Budenholzer is seemingly just stalling.
The master swordsman Inigo Montoya waited to kill the Man in Black, but he helped up the cliff, gave him time to rest, and complimented him throughout the entire fight. The master defender Jrue Holiday’s high school teammates used to plead with him to score when scouts came to watch him play. As far as I can tell without knowing the man, Holiday is as kind and genuine as a human can be. He and his wife Lauren consistently donate millions to non-profits and black-owned businesses. Yet he’s a killer on the court, with the fluidity and agility on defense of a man who only pretends to fight left-handed for satisfaction. He used to warm up in high school by sinking left-handed 3s.
And Antetokounmpo is simply the most athletic human to have ever graced the NBA. He is a colossus, this great legendary thing. He hasn't been defended by just one person for so long. He’s been specializing in groups. Battling gangs for local charities, that kind of thing. He’s loveable and direct. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. He is Fezzik.
With the three, the Bucks are probably better than they have ever been. (Khris Middleton, who is half Miracle Max and half Yellin, certainly doesn’t hurt, either.) For all the jokes, Budenholzer has never been a bad coach, far from it. The Bucks have drifted through stretches of the season playing like a .500 team crawling through the fire swamp (mostly aligning with stretches where Holiday hasn’t been healthy), but that’s probably a good thing for a Bucks team that has been epically dominant for multiple regular seasons in a row. It’s sometimes necessary to shake things up and face some adversity before consequences start to matter.
Vizzini, Inigo Montoya, and Fezzik failed to achieve their admittedly villainous quest of murdering the Princess Bride and framing Guilder. But when Westley replaces Vizzini, they achieve great heights in storming a castle, rescuing a princess, and escaping on four beautiful white horses. The Bucks are committed to Budenholzer. But perhaps if things go awry, The Princess Bride contains their roadmap to success.
Folk
A Battle of Wits
My favourite scene of the movie. Vizzini’s arrogance and flourish really make the scene what it is, and his lines are by far the most memorable, but the link between this and basketball lies with Westley. The ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ agrees to a battle where he can not lose, because either choice leaves him immune to the dangers of what might otherwise ruin someone else. To me, this is the equivalent of James Harden’s patented read/action floater lob.
“You’re that smart?”
“Let me put it this way: Have you heard of Beal? Curry? Lavine?”
“Yes.”
“Volume Scorers.”
Defenders can spend as much time trying to read James Harden’s body language while trying to discern whether or not the floater or the lob is coming. Some players elevate less on the lob. Some position their weak-hand differently. There’s always a sign to tell what the player has committed to, and a path to take out of the treacherous 2-on-1 situation. Only Harden isn’t ever caught in between, because he’ll always take what’s available.
“INCONCEIVABLE”
High level defenders like Draymond Green and Jakob Poeltl, mid-level defenders like Nikola Vucevic and Serge Ibaka, bad defenders of course - no one wins the split-second battle of wits against James Harden. And believe it or not, limiting Harden to two options when he’s mid-air is already a win of sorts. Perimeter defenders are in a much more difficult position, because the options Harden has off the bounce are almost infinite. The battle of wits between Harden and the big man typically comes after a guard has already lost theirs at the point of attack. It’s not that there’s no room for error. It’s that there’s no room for victory.
“FOR THE BUCKET? TO THE DEATH? I ACCEPT!”
“Good, then contest the shot.”
Since finding his rhythm with the Nets, Harden has been leaving many dead bodies in his wake. The close finish against the Spurs where Aldridge and Poeltl didn’t stand a chance, but 5-man units couldn’t come together to figure it out either. 15 of Brooklyn’s 27 points in the 4th quarter, 100-percent shooting in overtime, and an ever present danger that throws any NBA defense into a panic attack.
Harden is breaking teams down in all the ways we’ve come to admire from him, but he’s doing it with a little bit more selflessness and heaps more creativity. This Nets offense isn’t as regimented or heliocentric as the Rockets, and it’s providing viewers with the opportunity to watch a more diverse set of Harden’s interpretations of NBA defenses. Some of the passes he’s making throughout the game are mind melting for their ability to bend defenses well past their breaking point. So manipulative that it lends itself to not only the Nets advantage, but Harden’s amusement. Passes of the “I know something you don’t know. I am not left-handed”. It’s absurd.
This is open court mastery. Harden knows there’s no one to pressure him on-ball and the defense is playing him for the pass. An extra flick of the wrist and the ball bounces up to his head, signaling to Dejounte Murray that a pass with some heat on it is coming - and Murray suspects it’s headed to the streaking Brown. Murray points to the space he’s going to leave vacant so he can drop back and cover Brown, and Harris (one of the NBA’s best shooters) waltzes into a rhythm 3-pointer. All because Harden hung his dribble to see how the defense would react.
It’s hard to overstate how impressive Harden’s 15-assist, 0-turnover performance was. Especially when you consider the types of passes he makes could never be considered risk-averse. Harden continues to risk it all as a playmaker, and he’s rewarded with a brand of basketball that he really seems to enjoy, and some wins to go along with it.
Winning battles, enjoying himself, and servicing his Nets teammates with the shots they prefer and the tagline: “as you wish”.
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Like most everyone else in the world, I was first introduced to the phrase, ‘too big to fail’ in 2008. When people who play self-important video games and huff cocaine for a living robbed the entire world and got away with it. Were thanked. Took their million-dollar bonuses while millions lost their homes.
To say the event radicalized me is true and not. Not, in that I’m not a radical. True, in that I’ve never been an optimist again, not about the big stuff. I retain optimism at the personal level. The Lehmann brothers can’t rob me of that, too, at least not yet. But when I went to university, my Mom moved to where her living room window overlooked Victoria Park, where Occupy Halifax was evicted on Remembrance Day, 2011. The insidious tendrils of capital are long indeed.
And the banks got bigger as a result: too big to fail. An actual legislated fact, otherwise known as Systemically Important Financial Institutions.
The NBA has its Systemically Important Franchise-Institutions, too. The Lakers, as much as AIG, are too big to fail. Even their losses become their wins, given time.
So too are some players too big to fail. Joel Embiid is the Redwood of the NBA, 240 million years of evolution packed into a frame that doesn’t stop flying up. At that size, failure is relative.
This week in Minute Basketball: Too big to fail.
Folk - Purple and Gold, Baby
It wouldn’t be news to anyone for me to suggest that geography plays as big a role in the NBA as organizational competence. This phrase has been uttered millions of times, but: LeBron James joined an organization that couldn’t stop failing despite it’s inherent advantages - and the failing stopped once James was there. Compare that to teams like the Grizzlies, Raptors, or the Nuggets who could never expect to have a mega-star show up at their door by any means other than the draft. Nikola Jokic, Kyle Lowry, and Marc Gasol walked into basketball landscapes that were so barren they demanded men become legends. Forget your perceived reference point, they’ve become the reference point.
Paired with Kawhi Leonard, Pascal Siakam, and a host of other talented players - Gasol and Lowry did reach the mountaintop. Of course, the next season, James and Anthony Davis dominated in their own way in the regular season, and then in every way once the teams embarked for the Bubble. Opportunity emerged for a single postseason - sandwiched in between the dynastic Warriors and the impending duo of Davis and James, who could very well be dynastic as well - and local heroes Gasol & Lowry were granted the opportunity to ingratiate themselves to a wider base, as world champions. The Grizzlies and their fans celebrated the Raptors championship in their own way, knowing that someone they loved had reached the highest peak of their profession.
The Grizzlies and the Raptors can both look back on this past decade of basketball and rest easy knowing smart, shrewd basketball moves were made. Consistent attempts to build out the back end of a roster to make up for the fact that they couldn’t get the top end that was afforded to more luxurious franchises. The Raptors, obviously, lucky enough to get an opportunity to trade for Leonard and all the careful building, and drafting allowed for Leonard to walk into a set culture with a strong identity and dominate in his own way. When James joined the Lakers, without any cost to the franchise because he joined as a free agent and not via trade, the team was in disarray. One lost year later, and Davis joined the team via trade - a big package for what it’s worth - largely because of his desire to play with James, who wanted to play for the Lakers.
So, who is too big to fail? James or the Lakers? James has won a championship with three different franchises in the past decade and the consensus seems to be that he overrides the framework that he arrives at, good or bad. The Lakers struggled immensely in the years between their championships. Memes were made out of their front office, along with six straight years of under .500 basketball. However, James will retire eventually and the Lakers will assume his legacy into their own as a means to recruit all the greatest players of the new eras. And after all, James will never meet the type of incompetency that is couched into ‘too big to fail’ because he’s only ever succeeded on his merits. Even though the Lakers have turned the corner (and had a great offseason recently) they will continue to succeed whether they make good decisions or bad ones.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort! Friendo.
Zatzman - Joel Embiid, MVP
Joel Embiid is Frankenstein’s monster of big men. He has absorbed rips and chunks of NBA stars from years past. Embiid’s quickness is reminiscent of David Robinson, his footwork Hakeem Olajuwon, his jumper Yao Ming.
And oh man his size. Embiid’s size is Shaqian -- Shaq did have some 20-40 pounds on Embiid, depending on the year -- but less in terms of weight and more in relative mass compared to his peers. No one in the NBA has the size to bang with Embiid and come out alive on the other end.
Put all those skills together, and Embiid would probably dust a center like Shaq in a game of 1s. He’s big enough to hang and too skilled to contain. Teleport Embiid back 20 years, 40 years, and most opposing centers would drop dead just to see someone like Embiid doing the things he does on the court.
Offensively, the Sixers sometimes play an entirely different game from the rest of the NBA. They run league-low pick-and-rolls, though Embiid is more than capable there. They subsist almost entirely on ‘outdated’ postups. Why? Because Embiid alone makes them worth using, again and again, until opponents submit, battered and bruised and beaten. Leave him alone, and like centers of days gone by, Embiid will score with ease. Send a double, and he has become a fantastic passer, shredding defenses as they rotate.
Embiid is too big and strong and fast to fail. He is a star purely on the basis of his physical attributes, which are almost unrivaled in the NBA. Against the eventual champion Toronto Raptors in 2018-19, Embiid won his 237 minutes by 90 points, and the Sixers lost the other 99 minutes by 109 points. The Sixers, of course, lost the series in seven games.
Now Embiid is an MVP frontrunner. His impact this season has been as gargantuan as he is. When he plays, the Sixers are better by an outrageous 20.7 points per 100 possessions, which is the single best mark in the league, per Cleaning the Glass.
Of course, NBA big men can break down, no matter their size. As a matter of fact, it happens all the time. Sometimes because of their size. Greg Oden, Andrew Bynum, Sam Bowie. Human knees shouldn’t survive such weight pounding up and down on the ground, again and again. Sometimes they don’t. The superhighway of the NBA is built on the bones of fallen bigs.
After 2008, the United States government’s response was to allow banks and financial institutions to buy each other, to grow. As if they simply weren’t big enough before, as if that was the problem. In the NBA, big men keep on growing. Joel Embiid may be the greatest big in all the land today, but Bam Adebayo is hot on his heels for tomorrow, and Zion Williamson is coming for them all.
In truth, there’s no such thing as too big to fail. In life or in basketball.
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If you don’t have any regrets, then you haven’t actually lived.
I don’t know where I heard that first, but I do know that I hear it pretty regularly coming from inside my own head. It’s good to be positive!
It’s the same in the NBA. You’re supposed to have a short memory, in that if you make a mistake on one end, miss a shot or a blockout, you can’t let it affect your behavior on the other end. There’s no time in a basketball game to pout or remember. There’s no time for regrets. You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, as Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan were both reputed to have said.
At the same time, regrets are what differentiate the best from the role players in the NBA. It also differentiates normal basketball players from good ones, even if they don’t make the NBA. When I lived in Kingston, I met a friend who played pro ball in Germany and held a number of records at Queens University, since broken. He told me a story about scoring 40-odd points in a big game, but missing a free throw late in a close loss. He was still furious, a decade later. It was visceral.
Those same regrets in the NBA inspire greatness. Kyle Lowry still aches to talk about being blocked at the buzzer of game seven against the Brooklyn Nets. He hides as much of himself as possible from the media, but he can’t hide that.
Hiding emotion from the media is what inspires Kawhi Leonard to work out after games. (Does he still lift weights for hours after games in Los Angeles to duck the media? I don’t know) While most players hit the game court after emotional losses for the photo op, some truly do it because of their regrets. Those players, to be as dull as possible, are built different.
So regrets can be helpful, if painful. Or sometimes, in the case of the 1984 Houston Rockets, you can make a technical mistake but live happily ever after. On the other hand, a failure to even try, a lack of action, could be the most regrettable thing of all.
This week in Minute Basketball: Regrets.
Zatzman - Regretting the Draft
Do you think the Houston Rockets regret not picking Michael Jordan in the 1984 draft? Probably, in a sense, but in a much larger sense? No, not at all. Akeem Olajuwon (the ‘H’ would be added later) was dominant at the University of Houston, leading the nation in rebounding and blocks. He practically didn’t miss from the field. He was a unanimous home-run pick, akin to LeBron James in 2003. And ten years later, the Rockets won two consecutive championships with Olajuwon in the driver’s seat. That’s a larger-than-expected return for a first overall pick. You do it again, of course you pick Jordan. But you’re pretty happy with the returns on Olajuwon. The man was peerless in many ways, if not as many as Air Jordan.
Unfortunately, Jordan didn’t go second in that draft either. The Portland Trail Blazers picked before the Chicago Bulls, and they already rostered a young and promising shooting guard in Clyde Drexler (interestingly enough, Olajuwon’s teammate at the University of Houston). They decided to pick a big man in Sam Bowie. I will believe forever that, like Greg Oden over a decade later, if Bowie’s knees had held up, he would have been a star. But they didn’t hold up, and the Trail Blazers ended up passing on Jordan for a player who averaged 10.9 points per game in a 10-year career.
So there are mistakes you do not regret and mistakes you very much regret.
Which will it be for the Sacramento Kings in passing on Luka Doncic to select Marvin Bagley III?
The Kings are already on the wrong side of the regret tracks in the reason why they passed on Doncic. They made the choice because they already rostered De’Aaron Fox, a promising young guard (see the similarities to the Blazers in 1984?) who needed the ball in his hands. And like Bowie for the Blazers, Bagley has been unspectacular for the Kings. He may well end up with the best years of his career played elsewhere. But Fox. Oh my do the Kings have something magical in De’Aaron Fox.
My guy Samson wrote about Fox previously for Minute Basketball in our Your Own Worst Enemy episode. As always, he did a wonderful job. It’s worth checking in on Fox half a year later. This is what Samson wrote then:
He’s adventurous, pulling up off-the-dribble, as most talented point guards are, but perhaps it’s best that he continues to do what he’s best at, and allows for moderate progression from downtown… Of course it would be nice if Fox became a heat-pump from downtown, but that’s rarely the outcome of these situations… You have the roadrunner and a pogo stick packaged into one player, let him wreak havoc with those attributes. The Kings need to stop being their own worst enemy.
Clever, as Samson always is. But it seems Fox may have bucked the trend and progressed in exactly the area that Samson recognized was his greatest need: pull-up shooting. Fox has never shot above 35.9 percent on pull-up 3s, but over his last 10 games, he’s been scorching the twine at a 38.0 percent clip. That’s not Steph Curry level, but it’s enough to punish defenders who already live in terror of his drives. Fox has said that for the first time in his career, defenders are chasing him over screens. Thus his pull-up shooting buys him space to devour the paint like Godzilla. If he can keep hitting those shots, all the NBA will be his, like Simba claiming all the light touched in The Lion King.
Not coincidentally, the Kings are 7-3 over their last 10 games during an exceptionally tough stretch. Fox has turned into a legitimate superstar, as dominant on the offensive end as anyone else in the league during the last 10 games. If he can keep hitting those shots, then he could, in the perfect context, feasibly be the best player on a championship team.
You know who’s struggled over the last 10 games? Predestined superstar Luka Doncic. The Dallas Mavericks have gone 4-6 as Doncic continues to shoot clunkers on pull-up 3s, something that, for all his frequency in attempting the shot, he has never mastered.
I am, of course, being hyperbolic. One 10-game stretch does not a career make. But for the first time, the Kings have another perspective, a disembodied glimpse of their own fateful draft-day decision in 2018. And in this manic dream, the Kings may not have any regrets. Surely, like the Rockets, given another chance, they would pick differently. But for the first time, Fox may yet have them comfortable with their decisions regardless.
Folk - What If?
How many players are there in the NBA, currently, that could be the best player on a championship team? The list would vary depending on who you ask, of course, but it must be a bigger list than most people would think, right? Every once in a while someone comes out of nowhere, and surely there’s a few players in the league who can get to that level in sequence with their team. It’s true, success in the NBA is generally limited to certain players in certain eras, but anyone can crash the party and eat the cake in front of everybody. Pistons, Raptors, Mavericks - party crashers and cake eaters, the lot of them. Aside from eating cake, they’re shrewd team builders, and opportunistic sharks.
That’s what makes the NBA so fun, right? The Rockets had a generational talent, one of the best offensive players ever, and they went for it, and they lost. Facing off against one of the most impressive rosters ever assembled and coming inches short. As far as pure talent goes, that Rockets team might be one of the best of the past 15 years. And yet Chauncey Billups, Ben Wallace, Kyle Lowry, and Pascal Siakam all have a championship ring that James Harden and Chris Paul don’t have. The Raptors were very low risk for a long time, until they weren’t, and now they have a banner. It’s not just being willing to push the chips in, you have to do it at the right time and for the right pot. How do you even begin to look for what works if you don’t have Kevin Durant or LeBron James? Especially the latter.
This brings me to the Boston Celtics. Push. The. F*g. Chips. In.
Holding onto Jaylen Brown has (according to rumours) held up numerous blockbusters in Beantown. The reasoning? Well, they thought that Brown would become an absolute star, and he’s very much there right now. Brown paired with Jayson Tatum is the type of high-level talent that, quite frankly, puts you in a position where you have to get to a Finals appearance or two - and build the type of team that actually wins one. It’s lazy work on my end to point at a team and say “make it happen”, but if there was one team who you could point to for this type of executive action, it would be the Celtics. If Tatum wasn’t on your list of “guys who can win the chip as the #1 option” Brown has probably taken the requisite leap - I mean, he’s been one of the league’s best shot-creators, that’s a huge deal - that allows the Celtics to push earlier than they expected and to keep pushing year after year as they both grow.
They’re at the intersection of the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Houston Rockets. At least the Rockets did everything in their power to fight the Titans of their era. The Thunder didn’t realize that the opportunity was in their hands, and meant to be seized. Instead, they sacrificed the present for the future and by proxy of their lack of purpose for the young quartet of James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant, and Serge Ibaka, they helped create a dynasty elsewhere. They accomplished more than the Rockets, sure, but which team got closer to their ceiling?
Maybe it’s just me. But, when you zoom out, most people would rather regret action than indecision, at least opportunity is usually couched in with action.
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The sky was bluer yesterday in Toronto than I remembered it could be. That’s the thing about the winter; you forget things like the sharpness of the sky and the air. This winter, especially. It’s not just the month of February, with crusted black snow in every direction, and daylight only starting to creep back out of its hole. It’s also the pandemic, of course. That makes you forget, too. The pandemic gets into everything like the first frost gets into last summer’s garden. Everyone I know right now is feeling the same way: a universal synchronicity despite and because of our mutual isolation.
All that to say, it’s nice sometimes to notice the colour of the sky. It’s nice to have an outlet.
The NBA is that outlet for a large many of us. This year is a little different, yes. It’s popular to argue that the NBA shouldn’t be playing games right now, though for my money, it’s safer for players to be in their semi-bubbular environments than not. The NBA has always been a goliath, money-churning slaughterhouse, and if it took a global pandemic to dash your optimistic view of This League, well, then I don’t know what to tell you. Your outlets don’t have to be morally flawless, even in the stark light of day.
What fools we are at Minute Basketball to try to monetize our outlets. (Or, in the case of Minute Basketball specifically, very much not doing that.) An entire generation decided out of necessity, boredom, and the lust for purpose to monetize its hobbies. We’re like elderly sewers who sell our mittens at market, but instead of serging fabrics we have Google Docs and Twitter. We youths, too, get paid less than minimum wage as we scroll towards the ruin of our outlets. Fun!
Outlets are also an integral part of basketball itself. They’re types of passes, keys for single offensive possessions. Or to zoom out, keys to entire seasons; a knock out, a plug in.
This week in Minute Basketball: Outlets.
Folk - Plugging In
The building I live in is very old. So old, in fact, that I’ve had to purchase adapters for every single three-pronged electrical ‘pluggy thing’ that I own, because when the outlets were installed no one had yet conceived of a laptop charger that would be rendered useless in the face of two slits in a plastic casing, buried in cement. The lamps are wired directly into the wall. I wasn’t kidding my guy. So, anytime I get to plug something in that isn’t three-pronged, but instead the standard two, it is a small relief that I don’t have to locate my adapter. That made me think about how nice it is when things just fit, and by extension, that made me think of Nicolas Batum, the Clippers, and one of the NBA’s best offenses.
I’ve been a hardcore fan of basketball long enough that I’ve been able to notice as players come in and out of vogue. Oh, the days when Kentavious Caldwell-Pope represented a good return for the unpopular DeMar DeRozan, or when Batum was everything DeRozan wasn’t - and for some strange reason (maybe because the Blazers were Raptors-west?) they were often juxtaposed. Then, Batum quietly plateaued with the Hornets over 5 years and eventually provided such a poor return that the countdown began until his contract was up. He just didn’t look like an NBA player anymore.
There’s a different version of this player every year. Last year it was Dwight Howard. Mentality, fitness, something breaks right, and a contender picks up a borderline top-100 player off the scrap heap. This year, it’s Batum. A slow, intelligent offensive player to slide into the Clippers slow and intelligent offense. Only the Knicks and their (somewhat successful) legion of power forwards play slower than the Clippers this year.
The simple per game numbers have Batum at 30mins/10pts/5rebs/2.5asts/1stl on 50/46/84 shooting splits. He’s started every game, on the Clippers who are currently tied for the league’s best record at 16-6.
Batum will get a pin-down every once in a while (93rd-percentile spotting up), or a side pick n’ roll, and he’s an excellent player to have indulge in some second-side action. However, the majority of his value lies in his ability to morph into whatever the Clippers need on a given possession, or a certain game. When the Nets overloaded on Kawhi Leonard and Paul George in what might be a Finals preview, Batum slid along the outside of the arc to maintain spacing and to hit from deep. When his shot started going, they used him as a screener to dissuade the Nets from dropping low or hedging. They ran pin-downs to lift the defense away from where they would eventually find Leonard in the post. And when his defender was complacent, he would mosey to the bucket, cool as you like, and grab himself a quick layup. The ultimate tertiary piece.
Like a Canadian in a grocery store: “Just gonna skoooooch right by ya there.”
Some games he’s the trigger man in a multitude of set actions, in others he fades into the background. If George is burning the other team down, get back on defense and make your rotations, creep in the passing lanes. The same goes for if Leonard is eviscerating the opposing team. An amorphous blob of competence. He’s provided major efficiency in a number of roles, and should continue to do it as we creep closer to the playoffs. Who wouldn’t want a wing who’s in the 95th percentile in points per shot attempt, 87th in assist-to-usage ratio, and 78th in turnover-percentage? A reliable decision maker for his own team, and dangerous to the opposition.
I’m not sure if he’s the convenient two-pronged plug-in that requires nothing and provides what I need at the time, or if he’s the adapter that allows me to start plugging in things that require more power - a skeleton key of electricity. He’s probably both. And being able to do a lot of things at once, the simple and the complex, makes for a dangerous team when the games matter the most, and the least.
Zatzman - Knocking out
Basketball as an outlet is meant, above all else, to be fun. And there is nothing more fun in basketball than the outlet pass.
It also happens to be some of the winningest basketball there is. The outlet pass sparks the fire of transition basketball. Per Cleaning the Glass, the average transition offense scores 124.4 points per 100 plays, while the average half-court offense scores 95.8 points per 100 plays. Thus like the holy grail unlocks eternal life, the outlet pass doubles as an incantation to find easy scoring.
Take LaMelo Ball. He’s not the best player on the Charlotte Hornets, but he is certainly the most fun. And his ability to jump-start Charlotte’s transition attack through the outlet pass is artful. Ball is like a pitcher with a bag full of tricks.
Ball has, of course, the fastball.
He can slow the pace with his curveball.
He can bend the ball the other way by twisting his release, otherwise known as the screwball.
He even has the rarely seen eephus, basically a curveball that doesn’t curve, known only for its slow pace and high arc.
Ball doesn’t have to go high, of course. He can throw a slider in the dirt, too.
Behind Ball’s tools, the Hornets have thrived this year. Per NBA Advanced Stats, no team from last season to this has improved the frequency of their transition looks as much as the Hornets, who have added approximately 4.4 transition shots a game. And the Hornets are also second in the improvement of the quality of their looks, scoring 1.15 points per transition attempts this season versus 1.05 last year.
You know what else the Hornets have improved at? Winning. Last season, their win percentage was 35.4. This year it has crept upwards to 45.5. Ball isn’t the only reason why, but his chapter is a turning part of the story. Helping a team win is as rare for a rookie in basketball as the eephus pitch is in baseball.
That’s the value of the outlet pass.
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Floating is different from flying. It’s more descriptive. Flying doesn’t connote grace. It’s absolute. That’s why so many people choose flight when describing a superpower they’d most want. Floating exists in the borderlands, in the space in between. You might be on the verge of flying. One more inch, one more fraction of a second, and you’ll take flight.
If you describe the difference in the aesthetics of action, flying is Goku hurtling through the air to save the world from Piccolo. Floating is Li Mu Bai bending treetops as he glides in trying to convince Jen Yu to become his student.
You can see the difference in the NBA, too. Flying would be unfair. It would break the game. But floating? That’s the sweet spot. The moment that players float is the moment that time vanishes like a popping bubble. Are they about to take flight? Logic says they won’t, but our senses are screaming at us that gravity doesn’t apply here.
They don’t land right away, either. There’s plenty that can happen in the sky above our heads before the possibility of flight dies. Games are won and lost during the float.
It’s where Ja Morant proves there’s no one like him, when he’s on the cusp of flying, like Li Mu Bai, effortless and immensely powerful at once. He gains an advantage in the air, where everyone else is on the verge of collapse. Floating, too, is how Tyrese Maxey has distinguished himself from all others, even though it’s his rookie year. Floating is the border between the rim and the ground, the sacred and profane. Winning in that No Man’s Land is where the fun comes into the game of basketball.
This week in Minute Basketball: floating.
Folk - Floating, Flying, and the Death-Defying Ja Morant
It isn’t easy to make passes or decisions in the air. The reason being? Well, your body is in motion, you’re tethered to checks nothing, and the amount of time you spend there is typically quite fleeting. When you leave your feet to pass your body language is now communicated at a 2nd grade level - everybody is reading it. Defenders can explode off of the hard court to reach your less than powerful passes that have been robbed of the power of your lower half and squirt harmlessly out of your arms.
What if you’re trying to finish over a big man? As your ability to levitate subsides and you move lower and lower beneath the bucket, you see him growing taller and taller in comparison. There’s a lot of players in the NBA who can hang and extend in-air, but teams can usually handle that. Truthfully, the more valuable currency in the NBA is balance and control from floor bound players. Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic, Kyle Lowry, Chris Paul - they all do their work on the ground and with their brain. However, every once in awhile the NBA finds a player who transcends one thing in particular, and Ja Morant is more dangerous in-air than maybe any player before him.
Against the Suns, Morant dished out 10 assists. Of those 10, 5 came after he left his feet. Morant’s incredible athleticism has allowed him to turn a cardinal sin in basketball, into a feature of his game - and a good one at that.
1 minute left in a tied game. This isn’t even a bad play from Booker. Given where Morant takes off from, Booker has the corner pass closed off - and the ability to crowd the cutting Clarke - but with Morant’s ability to hang he eventually gets the angle and fires it to Allen for the go-ahead triple.
As Morant continues to work on his jumper, he leans into the part of his game that is most intuitive, and that’s his unbelievable burst and athleticism. Players like the aforementioned Paul, and Lowry have worked for years figuring out how to engage the help-side defender. Changing feet, pump-fakes, drop-dribbles and the like. Sure, Morant is capable of those things too, but oftentimes Morant engages the help-side defender by attacking them relentlessly in-air. And it’s at the apex of his jump where Morant has more time than anyone else in the world to decide what he wants to do. Finishing touch, a basketball brain that makes decisions rapidly, and the ability to outlast anyone who wants to duel with him in the clouds. He is singular in this way. Truly, a flying-type Pokémon (floating type???) against a grass-type trainer.
This play, if done by most other players, would end up on their career highlight reel. For Morant, it’s just another bucket.
Strong-side help is in the air. Weak-side help is in the air. The ball? Out of Morant’s hands and into his teammates for a layup.
Something you might notice everywhere in the world - outside of those contesting the shot, a lot of defenses freeze when the player with the ball leaves his feet. The Grizzlies are well aware of Morant’s improvisational bent when he’s airborne, and Brandon Clarke in particular loves to time his cuts in sequence with Morant’s leaps. Perimeter defenders beware, the Grizzlies know Morant is freezing you and they’re sending their players toward the bucket.
It could be true that I’m romanticizing this a bit. And Morant himself would probably tell you that he needs to get better at manipulating defenders without (leaving), or before he leaves his feet. And to that I say: Let me enjoy this, and you should too. A man who would be considered large in every country of the world is launching himself with the type of reckless abandon and explosion that is reserved for fireworks, and he’s doing it against larger men. He is a marvel, and I will continue to marvel at him.
Zatzman - The Floater
It’s not just players who float. The ball, of course, can as well. And you know what? The floater is in the middle of a renaissance right now.
Last season, Friend Of The Program Joe Wolfond wrote a magnum opus on the floater. I was fortunate to see Joe multiple times a week during the multi-month process of his gathering data and quotes for the piece. It was a treat. Every game included something related to his piece. The Miami Heat came to town, and we chatted about whether Goran Dragic was a ‘floater guy.’ (We decided he wasn’t.) The Brooklyn Nets came to Scotiabank, and we discussed how Jarrett Allen defended floaters. CJ McCollum, Mike Conley, TJ Warren: I was blessed to speak with Joe about the differences between all their floater games.
So, one point: I miss when media members actually saw each other in person!
But more importantly for our purposes here: it was clear last season that the floater was still an integral part of the NBA’s offensive diet despite the analytics revolution. This year, even more so.
Tyrese Maxey is a joy to watch because of the way he’s been innovating the game backwards. Fashion is cyclical, but so too is the fashion of basketball aesthetics. And Maxey may be throwback, but he’s also as cool as they come. So far during the season, a full 46 percent of his shots have come from the mid-range, an 89th-percentile rate. Maxey has actually made more than half of those, connecting on 51 percent, an 83rd-percentile rate.
You know who else has reached those marks in both frequency and accuracy from the mid-range? Kevin Durant, Bradley Beal, Devin Booker, Luka Doncic, Jaylen Brown, Nikola Vucevic, and not a single other soul. Maxey being in the top-10 of such a difficult shot -- a shot that differentiates, by the way, playoff superstars, is extremely telling. And Maxey is about as good at that self-created, in-between-the-defense shot as anyone else in the league.
That floater is half fastball, half knuckleball. No one throws a floater with more force at the rim, but Maxey is just as comfortable wrong-footing himself as he is pulling up for an open jumper. He takes floaters from deep range, deeper than anyone else in the league. He’s already mastered the skill, and that has tangible benefits.
As NBA defenses shift more and more to prioritizing rim protection and turnover creation above all else, the competitive advantage no longer lies in three-point range. There’s money now to be made from the unassisted mid-range (there always has been), even if not at the team-wide level. Maxey is already taking long, confident strides down the road to pay-dirt. His floater is one lofty reason one.
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I spent last week in the woods, hiking through the tramped snowbanks of scattered sections of the Bruce Trail. It could not have been more distinct from Samson’s surroundings, with an iguana living in the waving palm tree outside of his apartment. It’s fresh in the woods, clear. You can sneak up on your thoughts, ones that wouldn’t be home otherwise, from directions you wouldn’t otherwise consider. All the time walking in past footsteps that have beaten the snow into something slick and intentional.
My dog, Millie, trod the trails with my wife Amanda and me. She’s a snow dog, and even though it’s her first time ever seeing drifts as tall as her, she knew exactly what to do. She bounded, burying herself up to her neck, leaping in and out of the fresh snow like an arrhythmic jack in the box, while we kept pace alongside. We’d stick to our paths, well defined, and she’d wander and romp and bury her head in every hole she found, trying to eat her way out.
Millie and I saw the paths differently. They directed me, told me the way home. She saw them as obstacles, things that got in the way of playing in the snow. She’s only a puppy and learning how to walk properly on lead. We’d have to leash her if we saw other people or dogs. And ordinarily, she’s quite good on a leash. But with mountains of snow in every direction, and forced to walk in the path alongside us, she was constrained beyond imagination. The injustice. She’d throw tantrums if we kept her on the path too long, writhing and pounding her paws into the beaten snow like a child at the grocery store.
Paths can be soothing. Yes, they tell you where to go, but that’s not always a bad thing. One day Amanda and I took a route that was unmaintained, and we ended up fighting through the mud, eventually giving up and returning to the prescribed path. It was a relief to see again. To Millie, though, paths were nothing but a nuisance. Perspective.
This week in Minute Basketball: path dependence.
Folk
Lu Dort is just like me
Straight-on, and above-the-break 3’s are typically dominated by superstars or wildly dynamic shooters. The corners of the court are these weird segmented planes teams nudge their non-shooters into, and request they learn to shoot at somewhere near the league average. Every once in a while, a real fire hydrant like PJ Tucker will take what is the NBA’s most static shot outside of free throws, and dominate it in their own way. Dedicate yourself to it. Hammer out the muscle memory, and suddenly you’re a weapon in the NBA. If you defend and you space the floor (albeit in a somewhat limited sense), you’ll find yourself on an NBA roster regardless of any ongoing trend league-wide. Tucker has been the NBA’s most prolific corner shooter for some time - above 90th-percentile in every one of the last 9 seasons - and has provided a bit of a blueprint.
Dort has followed the path, at least in part. In OKC’s heated playoff series with the Rockets he was undoubtedly the go-to option to defend James Harden on the Thunder roster (if not the league), but their offense was plagued by his lack of offensive punch. The skills that lined Dort’s offseason to-do list were obvious, and the only thing left was the work. What’s rare though, is to see a player incorporate new skills at game speed as rapidly as Dort did. Ten games into the season, and he’s the NBA’s best corner shooter (among wings) at an absurd 56-percent. And 44-percent across the board is nothing to sneeze at either. Quite frankly, the totality of his shooting profile this year is staggering.
A wrench has been thrown in the game plan (if there was one for him). He won’t playmake, at all, but if he’s attacking a closeout, or launching over one - he’s good as hell.
So, a staunch isolation defender adds high-quality spot-shooting to his resume, that sounds expensive. But is it? To you and I, yes, almost assuredly. To an NBA team? Not at all, as it turns out.
Dort came into the NBA through the backdoor. A two-way player who scraped and clawed his way onto the Thunder who loved his defense. As has been the case for some time, the Thunder had trouble sorting out their wing rotation, and Dort rose to the occasion. Prior to the bubble, Dort signed a four-year minimum salary contract that will see him paid less than two million every season until the contract ends, with the added kicker that next year is only partially guaranteed (300k) and 2022-23 is a team option.
A playoff starter at 155k. The guy who almost swung a game seven against the pseudo-contending Rockets, by pouring in six threes by way of his delayed, crossbow style, lock n’ load jumpshot. And now, a legitimate ‘3 and D’ player for way below market value. It’s so much less than he’s owed.
That’s why he’s like me, or you. Dort didn’t have the comfort or power to gamble with millions of dollars. Of course he’s worth so much more now, and will be for a few years at the very least, but he assured himself some comfort, and the Thunder feasted on that insecurity. I’m underpaid, you’re probably underpaid, Dort is underpaid, and the idea of striking out in a way that could potentially earn us more, but alternatively could bring chaos into our lives, is scary as hell. Not everyone has the iron-clad spirit to rock the ‘Bet on Yourself’ mantra like Fred VanVleet.
Here’s hoping all of us are making more money in a few years. Something closer to our worth. Whether that’s off the path, or on it.
Zatzman
The value of changing paths
Manu Ginobili changed basketball for the better. He didn’t invent the eurostep -- you can credit the hyper-talented Lithuanian Sarunas Marciulionis for that -- but Ginobili supercharged it. Turned it into a basketball move akin to the unbeatable Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.
There’s a reason people call Ginobili innovative. He makes it up on the fly. It’s like jazz. It’s all improvisation. There’s something to that, not in that it’s necessarily true, but in that it accidentally describes Ginobili’s great strength: defenders could not lock him into one path. He never committed, even after he picked up his dribble. Just when you thought Ginobili’s weight and momentum were ironclad, he would evaporate and appear a foot in the other direction.
Once upon a time, NBA players chose a direction and beat you to it. Through speed and strength, they couldn’t be stopped. Put another way, they walked the yellow brick road until they reached the emerald city, or not. Ginobili learned how to travel cross country. He changed the game, introducing the ability to change his mind. Guarding him was like playing chess with an opponent who could shift his light-squared bishop onto the dark squares and vice versa. Unbeatable. There’s a reason no defender could ever figure him out.
Since Ginobili, balance and flexibility are less NBA superpowers and more NBA requirements. Ginobili’s descendants are now as numerous as the stars in the sky (and more numerous than those on the courts). Every guard entering the league needs a passable eurostep, from Delon Wright to Ja Morant. They change direction in first gear, or with nitro boosts. Ginobili’s moves have extended to every area of the league.
But certain players are taking Ginobili’s monster and giving it powers beyond comprehension.
Pascal Siakam may not have evolved the eurostep beyond Ginobili, but no player is as boom or bust when committing to a path. When nobody knows what Siakam is about to do, he’s impossible to cover. He is the ultimate improvisation finisher, comfortable with any release angle from any body position, with the strength to get a shot up and the touch to drip it in off the backboard. His change of speed, spin, shoulder fake, and rip through are all excellent. But when he’s shifting his weight laterally, he unlocks his true form.
When Siakam is not unpredictable, though, he becomes an easy cover. Defenders sit on his spin back to his strong hand, and he remains static, backing opponents into the post, and firing identical shots, one after another. Siakam needs craft because he’s not capable of beating the same defender in the same way all game long.
But when he’s wily? He’s Ginobili but with a seven-foot extension and an equal range from which he can release his layups. Siakam, perhaps more than any player in the league, shows the value of dynamism over stasis.
James Harden has long been linked to Ginobili. He mastered the eurostep many moons ago, and he even recently started adding a change of direction preceding his pull-up triples. Perhaps his greatest innovation, though, is Harden’s ability to remain uncommitted to a singular path even after he goes into his shooting motion.
There’s nobody in the league with a floater and an alley-oop pass that look more similar.
Watch Harden’s arm motion. It’s identical, whether he’s passing or shooting. He keeps his body flush to the rim even as his momentum carries him in different directions. And even when the ball leaves his hand and arcs towards the rim, defenders still don’t know which path Harden has chosen. Harden’s ability to stay aloof and uncommitted may earn him ire off the court, but so too is it his greatest weapon on the court.
The greatest evolution of Ginobili, however, is not Harden but in fact another lefty. Siakam may be the physical evolution of Ginobili. And Harden may have learned to keep options open until the ball leaves his hand. But Zion Williamson has topped them both: he’s learned to do the impossible by remaining uncommitted seemingly even after his feet leave the floor.
Williamson is strong, and he is fast, and those in combination would make him dominant in another era of the league. But Williamson has added craft, too. He boasts elite agility despite his enormous strength. Williamson has body control that hasn’t been mirrored by a player his size since young Shaq.
Pick your jaw up and watch that play again. Williamson positions himself parallel to the baseline as he jumps into the air. Chris Boucher -- a great shotblocker, averaging 2.6 per game! -- is ready to meet Williamson at the summit, or, more likely, get pushed out of the way by Williamson’s chest. But none of that happens. Instead Williamson explodes sideways, avoiding Boucher entirely, and rotating so fast he may as well be teleporting. Jordan may have switched hands midair, but Williamson can switch directions.
There’s no path that can hold Williamson. And as a result, there’s no defense that can contain him, either.
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Inertia could be the most powerful force in human society. We take the path of least resistance for as long as it can lift our loping bodies. It’s not criticism. It’s the way we are. It’s true in sports, politics, romance, you name it. Humans can get used to practically anything. And when we’re used to something, we do nothing to change the way it is. Sometimes even fight to keep it the same.
We see it in every level of the NBA. We see NBA teams like the New York Knicks trying desperately to sell the broken husks of Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah, or Andrea Bargnani, or Tracy McGrady, Rasheed Wallace, or Mike Bibby. It’s easier to sign a star with broken knees than build a team the right way. It’s a shortcut, but one that takes the better part of a decade to get to the other side and build a winner. The Knicks have been Knicksing for long that they’ve become a caricature of themselves, leaning into the dysfunction. It’s what they know.
It doesn’t just take hold of entire teams. We see NBA players subsumed by inertia. Kenneth Faried was once a star in the making, a Team USA player, who failed to adapt to a changing league and never fulfilled his promise. He was one of the aesthetically coolest players around, who lived on dunks, blocks, and locs, and even he couldn’t cut it after the league passed him by.
That’s part of inertia: losing, falling behind. When you hold the line and the world passes you by regardless. Some respond poorly, with violence. Others improve themselves.
Inertia can also be a powerful force on the court, when players make no choice at all and allow defenders to fly by, their overeagerness their undoing. Think Andre Miller or Kyle Anderson or sometimes even LeBron James.
This week in Minute Basketball, we’re diving into the successes and the failures of inertia.
Zatzman
The Raptors might not be the Raptors anymore
Inertia could be part of the problem with the Toronto Raptors. You can be so good for so long that you can believe it’ll last forever. But Toronto’s slowly bled talent over the years. DeMar DeRozan and Jakob Poeltl. Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol. All come and gone. They have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow.
And that’s not necessarily a problem! The team still has plenty of talent. Like, reigning All-NBA Second Team wing Pascal Siakam, or six-time All-Star Kyle Lowry, or soon-to-be first-time All-Star Fred VanVleet. (Calling my shot now.) OG Anunoby hasn’t had a great start to the season, but his defense is earth-shattering.
And beyond that? The team has been holding pat for what’s seemed like an eternity, but it’s left the cupboard barer than expected. Toronto’s brand new starting center seems a pale shadow of himself from past years. He clogs the offensive lanes rather than opening them for teammates, and he can’t catch a rebound if there’s even minimal competition.
Last year was a career year for approximately half the Toronto roster. That's an unprecedented improvement, but it’s not sustainable. So the team hired stopgap solutions coming into 2020-21, expected internal improvement, and hoped to sign Giannis Antetokounmpo in what was planned to be the only coup of 2021. None of that happened.
Instead Toronto seems subsumed by inertia. They remain exceptionally talented at the top end of the roster, but the bench doesn’t have enough two-way players to fill the cracks. And the team coasts along, now at 1-6, still sprinting towards a plan A that stopped existing the second Antetokounmpo re-signed in Milwaukee.
At the same time, the players themselves must be feeling some sort of inertia. Being traded is always hard for NBA players because they have to uproot their lives and move to a new city; imagine a team full of players facing that problem. They could feel lost, powerless. Without actionable choices. The Raptors aren’t doing nothing as much as having nothing foisted upon them.
That’s why Fred VanVleet told me, “I do worry about guys’ mental health as a brother and a teammate and a friend. It’s not an easy situation. I don’t want to discard that. But at the same time it’s a situation we’re in, and the season is not gonna stop. We can hang our hats on that. We’ve gotta find a way to get through it. It’s definitely different from being in Toronto, obviously, but here we are.”
The Raptors have plenty of time to make strides. Pascal Siakam exploded against the Phoenix Suns, and the Raptors would have won were it not for an unseasonably warm shooting night in Phoenix. That happens. But if you’re looking for one off-the-court reason why Toronto sits at 1-6, look no further than inertia.
Folk
Waiting patiently to win, and harmony in Minute Basketball
Be it Bowling Green (a real college) in the Mid-American Conference, the tragique 2015-16 Sixers - that had Elton Brand of course, but… as a player. Carl Landry was there, as was Tony Wroten, and get this, even Sonny Weems - an underperforming Phoenix Suns team, or these Sacramento Kings, Richaun Holmes has held up his end of the bargain. He comes in, and provides winning basketball at the Center position.
Holmes is a borderline top-60 player hiding in plain sight. He hasn’t dipped below 85th percentile in points-per-shot-attempt since his rookie year, flexing a remarkable short-roll pedigree that features one of the NBA’s most unique and potent floaters. He’s rugged at the rim and finishes above it. He’s got active hands to swat away and steal interior passes, he contests well at the rim, and he improves your rebounding on both sides of the floor. If that sounds like an extremely well-rounded big man to you, it’s because it is. And if the Kings don’t fancy themselves contenders this year, it would be wise to trade him because they likely won’t be able to match the offers he’ll receive in free agency this year due to cap restrictions.
The Sacramento Kings, despite all of their dysfunction, are actually a winning team with him on the floor, and they were last year, too. He’s one of my favourite players in the league because he can oscillate between a cog in the machine and the machine. He can provide real punctuation to an offensive possession as a high-flyer, or grease the wheels as a screener. Of his 8 games this year, he’s made over 10 shots in 3 of them at an absurd efficiency (10-13, 10-13, 10-11). He will mash you. Contest him at the rim? Catch a poster. Drop too low defending the short-roll? Watch as his feathery touch guides the ball in over your head repeatedly. He does the “Charlie Work” on most teams, only without the rapidly declining mental health.
The harmony? Holmes is a picture perfect fit alongside the Toronto starting lineup. A stimulus check for the bankrupt economy that Louis described as the Raptors front-court. Ideally, Holmes will continue to do his thing, and eventually we’ll see him on a team that can maximize his talents.
My inertia
A pal of mine, and friend of the newsletter, Joe Wolfond messaged me at 2 in the morning roughly 3 weeks ago to talk about hypothetical Richaun Holmes trades to the Raptors. Strange? Not at all. We talk basketball all the time, it doesn’t matter if it’s 2am. The strange part was that while I was messaging back and forth with Joe, drawing up hypotheticals, there was a shootout within 500-feet of me. Handguns, machine guns, the whole deal. The ex-governor of Jalisco was assassinated in a restaurant very close to where I live. Followed into the bathroom and shot in the back. When his body guards attempted to escort him to the hospital they were met with gunfire from their foes (the cartel). Loud, intruding bangs crackling everywhere. Cars peeling away in reverse to get away. And me, on my balcony with my view obstructed by a large tree - that I know an iguana lives in - telling Joe what I thought of his hypothetical trade.
I wish I had been clever enough to make some comment about inertia. It was my insistence to go on talking basketball no matter the circumstance. Instead I settled on:
“Quarreling gangs shoot each other, Joe and I shoot the s**t.”
Anyway, Inertia.
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We don’t usually realize truths until long after they become true. That’s a fact, even if you never realized it (see what I did there?). It’s broad, generalizable; the frog in a soon-to-be-boiling pot of water. It’s specific to your own life, too. You can sit beside the same person in class every day for a month before asking their name. When you’re too hungry, you don’t taste the first bite of food. And then you don’t feel full until 20 minutes after your stomach should take no more.
That sense of delay is glaringly evident in the NBA. The general conception of players is often a year or two behind their actual impact on the court. Fred VanVleet was an elite defender, damnit, long before he earned the reputation in the NBA Finals. Kawhi Leonard was among the best defenders in basketball even before LeBron James cursed at seeing him re-enter a Finals game. Reactions go both way, slow to realize the good and the bad; Leonard has waned as a regular season defender, but his reputation remains immaculate.
We see delay in the big picture, of course, but so too do we see it on the court every night. A good fake leaves defenders moving the wrong direction for an eternity. A hungry shot-blocker will leap for an opponent’s shot far too long after it has left his hands. Delay is part of the game, and the way we cover it.
Ball is life, as they say.
Folk - No Country for Old Men
“Things happen to you they happen. They don’t ask first. They don’t require your permission.”
To succeed as a protagonist in the harsh and unfeeling world that Cormac McCarthy creates in ‘No Country for Old Men’ you have to be preemptive, calculating, and tough as nails. Even then, you probably won’t make it. There is no room for indecision, and if you aren’t actively working towards an end goal of your own you’re probably working towards someone else’s. You apply the pressure, lest it be applied to you.
Whether or not you view Kyrie Irving as righteous in his decision to deny media access to kick this season off, he put everyone on the back-foot. For a player who never seems to lose control on the court, be it his body, the ball, whatever - Irving has been irked by the media taking his words and twisting them. Peddling snippets to the masses, and representing him as something he isn’t. Perhaps the most egregious example was the painting of him as the “disruptor” prior to the NBA’s bubble.
So, he assumed control. The game of cat and mouse began, with Irving proving more evasive than most expected. Off the court, Irving is closer to Llewelyn Moss. An imperfect protagonist trying to get Chigurh (the media) off of his trail, in pursuit of peace and a better life. Chigurh does get his man, though. Irving is back talking to the media.
On the court, Irving is Chigurh, always. With the ball in his hands he is perpetually the apex predator. Cold, calculated, and possessing an improvisational bent and weaponry that shreds any who stand in his way. When you guard Irving everything is a delayed reaction. He might be the greatest non-dunking finisher that the NBA has ever seen. Delayed reactions are baked into his game. Or, it might be more accurate to say that he dresses up counters as delayed reaction. While his finishes can look last-ditch as he fades away from the basket, they never are.
Miles Bridges, you sweet summer child. Irving was never passing to Jordan in the crammed paint. He was just waiting for you to jump the lane - and you did.
Fast players going slow. LaMelo Ball is most dangerous when he’s moving toward Irving, so he simply waits until he’s… moving away. Core strength, balance, finishing flair earned through countless hours of work, and the mind to break it out night after night in the world’s best league.
No words here, quite frankly. The leg strength it takes to stabilize like this? Insane.
The intersection of Chigurh and Moss. Elusive and cunning when avoiding the big bad, and world-shattering in pursuit. With great forethought, Irving and Durant planned out their gambit. You could see it in small, stolen conversations at the All-Star game. Working toward an end goal, naturally.
Zatzman
Here is a list of my favourite delayed reactions in the NBA:
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Closeouts against James Hardens’ stepback.
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Everything about Kyrie Irving’s game, but Samson beat me to the punch.
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Nikola Jokic’s slow realization that any possible manipulation of the ball can reach a cutter’s hands.
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CJ McCollum’s realization this year that he could and should shoot as many triples as possible.
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Chris Boucher’s attempt to block shots that no human could possibly block.
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This, possibly the best and strongest movement undertaken by the human leg since we grew them and crawled out of the primordial soup. Jamal Murray’s defender’s reaction wasn’t delayed, but in fact absent entirely.
Kyle Lowry, Chris Paul, LeBron James: the NBA’s ageless wonders
Time is supposed to be undefeated. Surely it will be, at some point. But that’s a point that time is going to have to prove against these guys. As it is, there is a core of superstars in the NBA who refuse to age. Talk about a delay.
Lowry has always been the heart and core of the Toronto Raptors, but this season has been the most pronounced example yet. In fact, the numbers are laughable. Through three games, the team has outscored opponents by 14 points with Lowry on the floor and lost the other 33 minutes by 40 (!) points. Forty. Points. Put another way, the team’s net rating with Lowry on the court has been a respectable plus-6.4 and without him a net rating of negative-49.7. Like I said, laughable. It’s possible that Lowry is Dorian Gray, but with all his teammates concurrently aging instead of him.
And Chris Paul is simply a winning machine, no matter the background. He went to Oklahoma last year and turned a franchise full of new players into one of the best clutch rosters in the NBA. Now in Phoenix, the youngsters are 3-1 with a massive point differential despite not shooting particularly well from 3. Paul has ceded the foreground to the marvelous Devin Booker, but the former is still an engine of destruction. Paul is averaging a ho-hum 9.5 assists per game to only 1.8 turnovers. Age? Paul doesn’t know how.
And LeBron James? What else needs saying? The Los Angeles Lakers are only 2-2 on the season, but they’re like a leviathan car with an engine out of a spaceship. Those old boats are slow to rev, but when they go they fly. James remains the best player in the world until Kevin Durant snatches the title back, For now, enjoy the show. But don’t stress. It’s not like it’s going to end anytime soon.
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Are holidays a reprieve from other on goings in life? Perhaps not, as a lot of people work through them. A chance to see family? Under normal circumstances, probably, but I’m not sure how viable that is this year. Holidays are both universal, and not. Most everyone in the world has gone through some form of holiday, but it often looks different. For me? Family, and NBA basketball. For you? Who knows, it might not even come at this time of year. They’re a vessel important things are packaged into, or not. This newsletter is a vessel unimportant things are packaged into. Holidays, baby.
Folk
Little left-handed presents for me, a lefty
James Harden has been on a rampage to ruin this holiday season for lefties, but we have our redeemers.
Canadian!
It’s been a few years in a row now, that Canada has had the second most players in the NBA to the United States. Still, we’re searching for superstars north of the border and RJ Barrett’s first year in the NBA did more to reinforce the negatives in his game than the positives. It didn’t help in the slightest that the New York Knicks put together a roster that seemed specifically designed to mitigate Barrett’s strengths.
If the Knicks opening game is any indication of the negatives Barrett has converted into positives re: team building, then we’re looking at a version of the young Canadian that has adopted the mental fortitude to thrive as an opportunistic scorer. And that’s really all you can do on these Knicks. Julius Randle eats up possessions with the sole purpose of self-creation, Elfrid Payton cramps spacing, and while Mitchell Robinson is as bouncy and fun as they come he doesn’t open lanes for teammates. Reggie Bullock is the only shooter in the Knicks starting lineup, and Barrett did well to find him rotating around the 3-point line when defenses collapsed on him.
If Barrett emulates the spirit of his opening night performance going forward - I say ‘spirit’ because he’s not going to start every game shooting 8-8 from the field - then the Knicks will have at least one positive thing going for them.
He was excellent at sniffing out gaps to punch, and his balance and strength allow him to grind down on wings and guards as he makes his way to the bucket. He even has the rare quality that all great finishers have (even if he’s not there yet) with the ‘bump and pivot’. It’s useful to players of all heights - Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kyle Lowry, Talen Horton-Tucker - throw your weight, gather and finish. You have to be able to take account of where the defense is around you to make the move confidently, lest you become trapped under a helping big man at the rim. I’m not sure how repeatable Barrett’s jump shooting is, we’ll see with time, but I loved his downhill decision making.
Moonshots off the bench
Unless the Wolves are remarkably good this year, it seems reasonable to expect that conversations will be had amongst the fanbase about who is better suited to lead the team at point guard, D’Angelo Russell or Ricky Rubio. Rubio represents the defensive side of the spectrum as a really good point-of-attack defender and a consummate pro on offense to progress through his reads. ‘D-Lo’ represents the ceiling of it all. An absolute gunslinger who, if optimized, should rain hell-fire on opponents as they send help towards Karl-Anthony Towns. And provided that he gets to handle in the spread pick n’ roll, he should spray an assortment of elite passes all over the floor.
I will never feel obligated to only like the players who drive winning. Let me deep dive into Barrett bumping and swiveling and Russell letting it fly. That’s the NBA’s gift to me, and I’ll revel in it.
Zatzman
Make your own holiday
I don’t celebrate Christmas. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a Christmas tradition. Every year since the league started doing the full-day-of-games thing in 2008, I’ve hunkered down at noon on varying couches or floors and watched basketball. For the first year or two, I’d have to fight my sisters for the remote. I’d miss parts of some games, but I remember the important bits. I remember LeBron James and his new-look Heat walloping Kobe Bryant’s Lakers on Christmas Day in 2010. James had a triple double, and he dominated every second of the game even though I don’t really remember him shooting the ball. I remember James beating all the up and comers and former champs alike: Antwan Jamison’s Wizards, after Gilbert Arenas’ knees gave out; Dirk Nowitzki’s defending champion Mavs that eventually got swept in the playoffs; Dwyane Wade’s Heat after James left them to go back to Cleveland. They all fell before James on Christmas Day. There were other definitive-to-their-era teams that James never got a chance to beat, like DeMar DeRozan’s Raptors or Paul George’s Pacers, but they too would have lost to James on Christmas Day.
I don’t really remember LeBron James ever losing on Christmas Day. At least until the Warriors added Kevin Durant. James isn’t my only memory, though.
In the late slots, out West, I remember watching the most exciting teams on Earth play the fastest basketball games I’d ever seen. Chauncey Billups’ (then Ty Lawson’s!) Nuggets, Steph Curry’s Warriors, Kevin Durant’s Thunder. The late games were worth staying up for. I remember Steve Nash and Tim Duncan doing battle one last time before their rivalry faded as the decade turned. Later, the Warriors played slugfest after slugfest against Chris Paul’s Clippers.
Christmas Day basketball was the holy grail to me. Better than the NBA Finals, at least when I was a teenager. If I’m being honest, still better, in several meaningful ways. I’d watch basketball until my eyes bled, and then I’d eat dinner, and then I’d watch some more. I had another non-Christian friend, and when we were in high school we’d watch the games together while everyone else we knew, the suckers, was with their families. Sometimes we’d skip a game, if the Knicks were playing, usually, to play a game of 2k ourselves. I couldn’t miss with Danny Granger.
Tomorrow is Christmas Day, 2020. The lineup of games will be eviscerating. Zion Williamson, Luka Doncic, and Jayson Tatum are the future. The established stars, Kawhi Leonard, Nikola Jokic, Jimmy Butler, are the present. Kevin Durant will be back on the hardwood doing things no human should possibly be able to do. And of course, as has been true for my entire adult life, LeBron James will once again take the court on Christmas Day.
That’s not to be taken for granted, working on Christmas Day. I was able to do it once, last year when the Raptors hosted the Boston Celtics. I took the subway down to Scotiabank Arena and watched the Celtics annihilate a disinterested team of defending champions. The day was still spectacular. I can’t imagine the experience James has every year. Yes, he has missed over a decade of Christmas Days with his family. But he’s made his own holiday tradition: wiping the floor with the popular NBA elite of the day. They have changed, but James has remained inevitable.
We all have our own holidays. Tomorrow will once again be mine. Right now, there’s nothing in the world for which I’m more excited.
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Here in Toronto, daylight is about to return to our lives. Dusk now comes at five o’clock, give or take. But in a few weeks, days will lengthen. We will start to feel less dreary, less achy. More focused.
It’s only fitting that against this backdrop, NBA basketball is returning. We’ve become accustomed to summer offseasons, but winter makes more inherent sense. And as the holidays come to a close, and the New Year rolls around, the season will begin again.
Beginnings are times of promise. Not in the sense of the season of spring, as budding. Instead, the promise that comes before growth, in the idea of openness. Think of the phrase, ‘in the beginning.’ You don’t know what’s coming next; anything can happen. That’s the appeal.
And this season anything can happen. Sure, there’s seeming equality at the top again, with any of a half-dozen teams capable of finishing atop the pack. But so too are the middling teams hopeful of rising, the tankers hopeful in their new draft picks. Nothing has yet been proven wrong. Beginnings are, at heart, hopeful. With no evidence to the contrary, at least on the basketball front. There’s no disappointment, no frustration. You can talk yourself into anything in the beginning.
FOLK
Climbing Old Mountains, Getting Older, Getting Better
Even though I haven’t been in school (high, or post-secondary) for quite some time, my brain maintains the idea that a new year starts in September, not January. The NBA underwent a rapid change of schedule in the past year, and is now attempting demarcation between themselves and other professional sports leagues. Everything is up in the air, all the time, until it isn’t. So, when most everyone in the world is still hunkered down and waiting for this motions to everything going on in the world to end, the NBA has once again decided to start something.
This makes me think of Jimmy Butler, whose star rose during the bubble. A man who wants everyone to know that he will stop at nothing to reach the top of the mountain (and is beloved for that mindset), and additionally, a man who loves the climb. It’s been four years since Butler has enjoyed familiarity in an offseason that bleeds into the regular season. Trades, legendary flameouts, free agency drama, and now this -- a return to Miami, his ideal fit, and doing so after a Finals appearance. An expert at beginnings and navigating them, but still in search of the most satisfying ending.
“We feel a great responsibility for Jimmy to win now, instead of pushing this thing down the line.” - Erik Spoelstra
On the court, few are better at the process of beginning or ending a possession as Butler. A double-rip through before gliding toward a rotating big man, and Butler has a deep bag of tricks to choose from. Last year he was most partial to goading defenders into free throws -- and I’d expect a similar trend this year -- but the amount of jump hooks, push shots, floaters, bankers, and baby fadeaways Butler pulls out keep defenses on their heels at all times. He’s also one of the league’s best passers at his position (28.3 AST%). The improvisational bent in Butler’s game makes him one of the most entertaining players to watch in the NBA. And better yet, he might pull out the finger guns and his s**t-eating grin after a highlight play.
You’d be hard pressed to find another player in the league who would snake a pick n’ roll, jump-stop in front of Brook Lopez and rise up for a push shot over top, and he did it all series. That’s not a shot that’s drawn up, it’s just Jimmy working downhill. (You can also find a glorious 6-minute video of these shots here.)
Over a quarter of his shots come in that 3-10 foot range, and does the 42-percent he shoots there make it an efficient shot? Not as a stand alone, but it’s great when you consider how many free throws he draws in that area (99th percentile, fouled on 24-percent of his shot attempts!!!) and how many big men will chase or contest him out there leaving wide open duck-ins for Butler’s teammates.
Butler’s unique melding of all the traits of a hard-ass, prankster, workaholic, entrepreneur, classic action hero, and gunslinging vagabond have helped create what I would call a well-deserved cult of personality. Reinforced by the clear fondness he engenders in the people around him, Butler looks primed for his best beginning in awhile.
ZATZMAN
New beginnings in Milwaukee
Though the rest of the league pined for Giannis Antetokounmpo, it was not to be. His re-signing in Milwaukee is an anchor splashing into the league’s ocean, causing ripples that echo into tsunamis on distant shores. Those flooded shores are of course Toronto, Dallas, Miami, Golden State. Perhaps others, although those four were the teams most blatantly angling to pursue him this coming off-season.
Instead, Milwaukee wins its own prize. Jon Horst and the Bucks have earned a reprieve.
It’s probably a good thing that a superstar has chosen to remain with the small market team that drafted him. Not good in the big versus small market battle; that story has been written too many times. No, this is a positive for Antetokounmpo’s own agency against the domineering forces of will that make even titanic reigning MVPs seem puny in comparison. ESPN and other league partners have spent the better part of a half decade trying to weasel Antetokounmpo out of Milwaukee. For every dunk he had in the highlight package, there were three segments theorizing where and why Antetokounmpo should run in free agency.
He chose instead to stay. He’s subtly spitting in the eye of the traditional power-brokers of the league. He’s spitting on the analysts who’ve long predicted the demise of the Bucks. He’s spitting on superstars like LeBron James and Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, all of whom decided for one reason or another they couldn’t win alone. People will call Antetokounmpo old school, but he’s gone beyond that. When did old school superstars have constant, every-day segments breaking down their decisions years in advance? Antetokounmpo faced a uniquely modern path, and he’s blazing a route that hasn’t been chosen since the days of Dirk Nowitzki, Tim Duncan, and Kobe Bryant. (Damian Lillard, of course, made the same choice, though with far less fanfare about his impending and eventually nonexistent exit.)
And that’s hopeful for the Bucks! No longer are they playing with an albatross around their necks, making every move with sights set on the short term to desperately convince a superstar of their worth. Now they can build forward with confidence.
The Bucks still have to see how Jrue Holiday fits with the core. They will have to learn how to play offense in the playoffs. There’s plenty to figure out, and that’s the fun of the season. But for the first time, the Bucks have to be hopeful. That’s the power of new beginnings.
Springtime in Atlanta
The Hawks have been bad for a long time. They’ve been fun, yes, but they’ve not been good since the days of Al Horford and Paul Millsap. And the Hawks have finally decided enough is enough, pulled up their spurs, and said it’s finally time to win basketball games again.
Last year, Atlanta showed immense promise. John Collins emerged as an offensive stud, more Amare Stoudemire than perhaps anyone since the great STAT. And he’s shown promise as a shooter. He could pop into a player that drives winning in the future, but in reality, everything rested on Trae Young’s shoulders. Young emerged as a 30-10 guy, which is not normal. Coming into the NBA, he was compared to Steph Curry. But Young is his own star. His greatest skill is his passing, not his shooting; he creates unbelievable looks for anyone and everyone, at all times. Young is speedy enough to slice past anyone, and he’s willing to try any pass. Lobs, bounces, no-looks, sprays, wraparounds: it’s all on the menu.
Part of that meant Young committed a lot of turnovers. Like, most in the league, at 4.8 per game. (He’s committed 7.0 per in the preseason so far, but ignore that. Preseasons mean nothing, at least for already established players.) Furthermore, Young has never been an efficient shooter. Taking easier shots should help. Finally, his defense leaves much to be desired.
Those are the negatives. But Atlanta decided to address those not by demanding even more of Young, but instead by taking the weight off his shoulders with a variety of recent moves. Last season, Atlanta traded for Clint Capela, a solid defender and rim-running center. He’s far and away the best center on the roster. Then in the offseason, the team added Bogdan Bogdanovic and Danillo Gallinari, two elite spot-up shooters who can create for themselves, too.
The Hawks now have enough talent to compete. That can only be a good thing. The pain of long-term tanking can easily result in nothing but protracted pain. Cough Sixers cough Atlanta is no longer going to be painfully bad. Young can now develop in peace without carrying the weight of a franchise on his 22-year-old shoulders. Don’t get it wrong; the Hawks will only go as far as Young improves on his deficiencies. But they’ll no longer be so glaring. He’ll take easier shots. His miraculous passes will hit the hands of better shooters. Atlanta has a new lease on life. It’s time we start appreciating when teams make an investment in better basketball.
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Before the British Expeditionary Force fought its initial battle in World War One at Mons, Belgium, the soldiers thought they’d be home within a matter of months. Half a year, at most. Instead, those few who survived the initial contact at Mons ended up living, on and off, for the next four years in almost total isolation from the rest of the world.
On a small scale, that’s sort of what this NBA season was like.
The NBA season began an eternity ago, as the Toronto Raptors beat the New Orleans Pelicans in overtime after receiving their championship rings in a long, heartfelt ceremony. Now, 352 days later, perhaps 100 days longer than initially expected, the NBA season continues in an overtime period of its own. The season limps forward, still, dragging itself to the finish line like a proud, ancient heavyweight battling long after the final bell was supposed to toll.
In a normal time, NBA basketball is supposed to start again within the next week or two. That’s not happening.
This will be the last Minute Basketball before the end of the endless 2019-20 NBA season. This may not be the ending we envisioned: Jimmy Butler and LeBron James trading body blows in a dystopian compound, unaffected by a global plague that has claimed over a million lives, telling us to vote in between possessions of basketball played in an empty and deafening arena. But it’s the ending we’re getting.
The NBA season isn’t the only thing that’s ending. This week in Minute Basketball, we’re diving into conclusions. How they all blend together in a whir, and how we got here in the first place.
Zatzman
Interconnectedness
All things end. It’s a law, perhaps the law when you zoom out. We’re in the middle of several endings right now. Not just basketball. The summer is ending -- fall never really happened, it seems, at least not in Toronto. The cold is starting to eat under the skin, burrow and nestle in you the same as you do inside of blankets. If it’s not winter yet, I can see it fogging up the mirror and hear it creaking in the floorboards.
It’s possible that four years of uncut, malicious chaos could be ending in the United States. Then again, it could just be beginning.
Plenty in the NBA has changed, too. Vince Carter, now mostly groundbound, retired after a record 22 seasons played. He’s been a fixture in the league for almost my entire life, and it will be strange to watch basketball without him next season. The Milwaukee Bucks may have missed their best chance at a championship, swallowed by the weirdness of the bubble. Kobe Bryant, David Stern, John Thompson: the year 2020 has been cruel to the ranks of basketball legends. Beyond the pandemic, the basketball world is very different now than it was a year ago.
The world is very different now. That’s maybe why these things can’t be separated. It was the NBA that first triggered pandemic panic, at least in North America. The virus didn’t seem real until Rudy Gobert was diagnosed with Coronavirus, and the game between the Thunder and the Jazz was canceled, then the NBA season suspended. It happened quickly. The Jazz had hosted the Toronto Raptors a few nights before. I reached out to friends who had traveled to Utah to cover the game, made sure they were okay.
That’s why basketball can’t be separated from the world. Why else would they be playing in an arena in front of a hundred celebrities watching the game through their computers, beamed into the stadium like a socially distanced Star Trek? The NBA has truly become the panopticon, a hive of one-way observation, all safe and snug and protected from the virus for our viewing pleasure.
And the train, leaking and rattling and chugging down the line, is about to hit the last stop. The NBA bubble is coming to an end.
I think about these things, the weather and the virus and the American election, all linked together, as I watch Black Mirror Basketball every other night on television. Sometimes it feels like the world is ending. And then LeBron James drives to the rim, overpowers his opponents, and jumps higher than time while laying in the ball. He’s probably about to win his fourth championship and, less certainly, his fourth Finals MVP. James is endless, his dominance a barometer or hallucination of normality, depending on the night. These players have been locked away in sterile comfort for over three months. Their hotels have emptied around them as fallen foes have left, grateful, for home and family. The Disney Resort is barren now, yawning towards its own end.
What a long, strange trip it’s been. It’s time to let NBA basketball, or whatever this has become, sleep.
Folk
Predetermined or Earned?
There are very few living things outside of humans (that we know of) that actively trade the present for the future. The idea is that the work you put in today will manifest in reward down the road. Initially that was food, shelter etc. for humans, and now we’ve created an extremely abstract - often at the expense of a large subset of the population - system that incorporates money, the 40-hour work week that now creeps towards 50 or 60 for many, and increasingly specialized job markets. Regardless, the work is put in by many. Be it the 9-5 job, the offseason for NBA players, or a free newsletter by Louis Zatzman and Samson Folk - they’re all, hopefully, precursors to more success.
We’re wired to chase success that permeates beyond the present. A type that assures us a comfortable walk to the finish line at the end of all things. And that really is it - as humans we are cursed with the knowledge that all things end. Death anxiety puts the onus on us to produce, create, and dominate the many aspects of our life before it’s all over, and knowing that these things end makes everything matter that much more. It’s romantic in a sense. However (comma) before the finish line, it’s fair to question how many people are running the 100m dash from the starting blocks, and how many are starting with only 10m to go. How much of our destiny is predetermined and how much is earned? Generational wealth, race, nepotism, and the genepool are all ever present in our lives as both mitigating and aggravating factors.
The 5th seed (Heat) vs. the 1 seed (Lakers). Jimmy Butler (pick 30) and Bam Adebayo (pick 14) vs. LeBron James (pick 1) and Anthony Davis (pick 1). Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who had been an afterthought in L.A. before reclaiming his career with vigor - even he was drafted higher at 8th than any single player on the Heat.
This isn’t to say the Lakers didn’t earn their way to the Finals and won’t earn the chip, provided they get it. Only that most NBA viewers weren’t expecting the Heat to be here, and if you had given every player on the Heat truth serum, they might not have foreseen this either. Within the framework of the NBA and what we’re accustomed to seeing, the Heat have achieved something very unique.
The talent gap in this series - and talent is the predetermined part of it - is staggering. And yet, the Heat continue to hang around because of all the different machinations they utilize to try and leap the gap. A furious and fast-moving offense that creates advantages by making the other team account for 3 simultaneous actions, wherein one breakdown leads to a bucket. If they deny the action, there’s a counter designed to take advantage of how they denied the play. The Lakers have far less going on, but James and Davis are walking advantages. Everything they do makes defenses uncomfortable, as they stretch the floor vertically and horizontally, and punch through gaps with force. It requires more from them and less from the team, and that’s the benefit of talent.
On the defensive end, Davis, James, and Dwight Howard (all #1 picks) make incredible reads that are backed up by world-ending athleticism, and they form the most potent level of the Lakers defense. The Heat are a symbiotic 5-man unit that can transition in and out of zone on a single possession, and are all seemingly calculating the spaces on the floor and the players they’re guarding. On one end, Davis and James make show stopping singular defensive plays where they envelop the offensive player. On the other, 3 Heat players converge on James in the paint while the other 2 carefully measure the passing angles that are left to him. The mad scramble the Heat perform to front and deny something as simple as a Davis post-up (and caused a lot of turnovers in game 4) is well-rehearsed choreography.
The Heat have this incredible story, and it probably won’t be enough against these Lakers who have played a few different styles in these playoffs and succeeded at all of them. A LeBron-led team that was underrated by a lot of people (myself included), and has taken care of business in the bubble.
All this to say: the ending you want isn’t always assured, no matter what you put into it. But, maybe for you in your life, or mine, or the Heat - the work that has been put in is a precursor to something more, it’s just not here yet. For now, it looks like the Lakers are getting the ending they were chasing.
Thanks for reading Minute Basketball this season. I’ve really enjoyed all the different themes I’ve been able to touch on, and partnering with Louis has not only made me a better writer, but party to genius ideas every week.
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Unsung Heroes instill in us the belief that ordinary people can be agents of change. They provide us with reference points and road maps to accomplishments that are larger in scope than we might have imagined. We're all spectacular in that way. The heroes of our own story, and unsung in the stories of others. This week in Minute Basketball, we're showing love to the Finals participants who didn't get enough love on the way up.
Zatzman
The rest of the Lakers
What’s a song to the most storied franchise in the NBA? A song can be made to mean little, a throwaway price -- it’ll only cost you a song and a dance. That’s how the Lakers view love and affection. The Hollywood Lakers have an embarrassment of riches of adoration. Even the most unsung Lakers have vast amounts more press than better players in smaller markets. Entire marketing industries built around their glorification.
So how can a Laker be unsung?
It’s a fair question. But when you look at the details, zoom in to the Lakers’ reality on the ground, you see a more complicated picture.
LeBron James and Anthony Davis are as celebrated as two players in the NBA could be. For good reason, particularly after watching them dismantle the Miami Heat in game one of the Finals. This is not a diatribe to salute or scorn the big two, but instead about the other guys. They only exist in the framework created by James and Davis. James is the NBA’s definition of the Sun King. L’état c’est moi (lui, I suppose).
Where does that leave the other guys? Rightly or wrongly, they live to serve, unsung in the wins and condemned in the losses. That’s always been true of teammates of James. But these ones deserve their flowers. Let’s sing a song to their acclaim, win or lose. Probably win.
Dwight Howard is a surefire Hall of Famer. It’s a little bizarre that a player of his ilk can’t even average 20 minutes a game on the top-heavy Lakers. But age and injuries have harvested a toll on Howard, and he’s not the player he was once. But he remains a defensive plus in certain situations, and he’s game to wrestle with anyone. Anyone includes the Herculean Bam Adebayo this round, so Howard deserves some respect for that alone.
The Lakers are worse with Howard at center rather than Davis, but Howard dunks lobs, chases rebounds, and tosses fouls around like candy. It’s hard for Hall of Famers to accept that role. Howard didn’t for half a decade, even though it would have benefited him. His last tenure in Los Angeles was a disaster for that very reason. Yet Howard has accepted it now. He’s a small positive, but that’s what championship teams need: small positives across the roster.
For his part, Rajon Rondo has been one of the most confounding players of the 2020 playoffs. Long derided by the analytical crowd -- myself included -- as a huge negative because of his lack of shooting and defensive freestyling, he’s had some massive games for the Lakers. People begrudgingly admit that his basketball IQ (an ethereal concept, sure) is off the charts, yet that hasn’t manifested in him actually helping a basketball team for a long time; he hasn’t had a regular season with a positive on-off net rating since 2011-2012. Yet playoff Rondo seems to have once again come to roost. (It helps when you shoot over 40 percent from deep, even if his attempts are disrespectfully open shots.)
But Rondo’s creative passing helps the Lakers when their enormous size clutters the offensive end, and his nifty arsenal of scoops are a solid late-clock bailout. He played connector in game one against Miami from the middle of the zone. Rondo hasn’t gone a single playoff game without attempting a triple, and he’s made one in every game but one. His usage rate goes up to nearly 21 percent when James is off the floor. Rondo has emerged, for the first time in years, as a useful rotation piece. Who knows if that will continue when his hot shooting streak ends, but those are lyrics for another song.
That leaves us with the most complicated celebrity in all of basketball: Alex Caruso. If you listen to a random TNT broadcast on any given evening, you may mistake him for Larry Bird, Gary Payton, Dominique Wilkens. The myth of Caruso’s greatness is spread by broadcasters and even James himself, who calls Caruso GOAT, for greatest of all time.
They’re all in on the joke. White and balding, Caruso doesn’t look like an NBA player, let alone one who can rise up and dunk on most players. There are lots of people who take the joke seriously, who think Caruso is a star. He isn’t.
But the thing is, Caruso has actually been good! He’s one of four Lakers -- James, Davis, and Danny Green are the others -- to have positive on-off net ratings over these playoffs. Caruso’s defense is solid, and even though he’s shot poorly over the playoffs, he’s one of the few Lakers who can create for himself with the dribble. He can hit open jumpers, dribble, pass, and jump over help defenders. That’s enough to be a positive. His traditional numbers evoke a yawn, below Rondo’s over the playoffs in every category but blocks. But no matter the opponent, the Lakers are at their best with Caruso on the floor.
Does that make him Larry Bird? Not even a little bit. Caruso has plenty of songs sung about him. They’re just the wrong ones.
Folk
Super Gario
It’s strange really, how many teams let top-tier talent slip through their fingers. Russell Westbrook and Chris Paul have been at the forefront of the point guard conversation in the NBA for some time now. They both, famously, slotted in next to former MVP James Harden, with wide ranging potency. Two of the most impressive point guards of these playoffs also played for the Rockets in this decade - Kyle Lowry and Goran Dragic. Both with endless vitality and guile that prolongs their careers. In Lowry’s case, he’s carved out what should be a sure-fire HOF career with one of the greatest final acts we’ve ever seen from a point guard. In Dragic’s case, he’s recaptured his form from earlier in his career and is now the 3rd best player (and was all season, but a better version of himself now) on a team in the NBA Finals.
It’s fitting that a player who’s never been elevated to a true star’s role has found a place in a team that calls upon so many different players at different times in order to reach their greatest heights.
Heat Scoring Leaders By Round
RD1 - Dragic (22.8), Butler (19.8), Herro (16.5), Adebayo (15)
RD2 - Butler (23.4), Dragic (19.8), Adebayo (17.2), Herro (13.2)
RD3 - Adebayo (21.8), Dragic (20.5), Herro (19.2), Butler (19)
Playoffs - Dragic (20.9), Butler (20.7), Adebayo (18.5), Herro (16.5)
That’s right, Dragic is the leading scorer on an NBA Finals team. I won’t repeat it, but that sentence might need to be read a second time. So, why in the hell have we heard so little about him? I get it - Butler is a loveable leading man, Adebayo was the best player in an ECF (!!!), and Herro deserves his shine for a remarkable pick n’ roll game and a truly unique level of confidence. Dragic is at the heart of this thing, though. The Heat have been impressive defensively, of course, but it’s their ability to manufacture buckets that’s sustained them to this point. He’s in the 80th percentile in points per shot attempt at his position, and in the 92nd percentile at the rim - the Heat love that dependability.
How is Dragic doing this? Firstly, he has an undeniable slither to his game that few other players possess, and big men have never been able to figure out how to match his pacing. He herks and he jerks, embodying the herky-jerky guards who came before him, and he consistently makes fools of any team that switches a big onto him. Let him get a step on the guard and go 2-on-1 into the paint with Adebayo or Kelly Olynyk? You won’t like your chances either. He reads the game exceptionally well. The days of his career spent with Steve Nash aren’t just a fun anecdote, their shared time helped shape the rest of Dragic’s career and that’s evident anytime you see him ‘Nash’ the pick n’ roll, or walk a big man under his own basket before gently laying the ball in.
Nothing like a two-man game that isn’t afraid to improvise. These two play off each other beautifully, and it’s no wonder why Adebayo is shooting 67-percent from the floor on passes from Dragic.
Dragic has also worked really hard (#HeatCulture) to maintain his viability from downtown. The Heat run a heap of intelligent actions and they have a bunch of good decision makers to make the reads off of them. Dragic’s ability to space the floor not only allows his teammates more room to operate in, but it allows him an increasing number of angles to interpret his own offense with as a scorer or a passer.
The Heat don’t have Kawhi Leonard, Giannis Antetokounmpo or LeBron James. However (comma) they can put the ball in the hands of Adebayo in the high-post, run a split-action with Dragic and Duncan Robinson that flips into a DHO for Dragic, with Robinson spacing to the weak-side (and preventing anyone from tagging the rolling Adebayo) and oh look, a picture perfect lob for Adebayo! Clever plays for clever players, what a novel idea.
Dragic suits up next to the NBA’s true free throw and grift king, Jimmy Butler. Now, you might be thinking Butler ends up there all on his own, but he doesn’t. It’s not reflected in his free throw numbers, but Dragic has been putting opposing teams in foul trouble all postseason long. Few players get fouled on the floor more often than our pal ‘Super Gario’, and if you’ve seen (or see) the Heat in the bonus with 5 minutes left in a quarter, you should know that Dragic has already drawn two blocking fouls on big men that can’t hang with him.
The Heat succeed because there’s so much to watch out for when they’re on the court, and other teams get caught up or caught behind. Even though Dragic might not return to the NBA Finals (but here’s hoping), he deserves love for getting to this spot.
Stats are from Cleaning the Glass & NBA.com/stats
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Have you seen Stars Wars Episode Four? Remember the part where all the heroes are trapped in a trash compactor, with the walls closing in, and some strange creature lurking in the depths? That’s supposed to be what the NBA playoffs feel like.
The playoffs are supposed to be a crucible wherein the fraudulent are burned away and only the hardened emerge. Only obvious superstars like LeBron James (2020), Kawhi Leonard (2019) or Kevin Durant (2018) are supposed to dominate with ease. Yet there’s another archetype of player who quietly thrives in the playoffs.
There are stars who aren’t as complete, aren’t as dominant as some of the greatest players of this generation, yet still see improvement in the playoffs. They’re flexible, able to mold their games to fit the situation. They’re shot-makers, able to create something out of nothing at relatively efficient rates. They’re good at pretty much everything on the court: passing, shooting, screening, cutting. You name it. And as a result they rise above, play better than they do in the regular season.
Let’s call them the under-the-radar superstars. They’re strong enough not only to keep the walls from closing in, but also to emerge better in such cramped scenarios. In a double feature this week on Minute Basketball, we’re highlighting two of the best such stars: Jamal Murray and Jimmy Butler.
We’re getting as nuanced as possible in describing just how these guys rise to the occasion: deceleration, jump passes, and defensive chaos. If you’re here, you’re reading or hearing about Jamal Murray. You can find our Jimmy Butler feature here. But for Murray, read on, and discover the minute yet major angles of his game.
Folk
Slamming on the Brakes
You hang on with gritted teeth through a defensive possession. Your shoes grip, your quads flex, and you keep your feet active to try and keep the gate closed to your opponent. Then it happens. They slam on the brakes and you catch the whiplash. Against Jamal Murray, you careen backwards with limbs flailing like an inverted Scooby-Doo villain. Murray’s body tilts and jerks aggressively, but he remains in control. He’s horizontal, for a moment, and an instant later he’s squared up for a jumper. His behind the back dribble stays perfectly in place, representing a save point. He returns to the ball after he sheds his defender, and does it with remarkable consistency. Murray has shown improvements in every area of the game this year and in these playoffs. However (comma) the jumper is still his most dangerous weapon. The brake check he unleashes is the precursor to a bomb from downtown. A force to be reckoned with.
And this isn’t meant to be taken lightly, either. No matter how many ESPN employees insinuate that the Nuggets have remained in the WCF because the Lakers “forgot to take them seriously”, remember, they’re here because they play an incredibly unique brand of basketball that the Lakers haven’t figured out how to dominate. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t. But, the duo of Jokic and Murray is dangerous as hell. Jokic is the league’s largest offensive hub, and Murray’s shot-making has been unrivalled so far in these playoffs. He is at the heart of every single late game bucket, be it as a threat in relocation, making an incredibly creative pass, or pulling out showstopping shot-making.
For the record, this is exactly how you keep a defense on its toes. Murray lets Caruso fly by and calmly hits a triple. Then on the next DHO he uses the same setup with a drastically different finish. That change of pace move isn’t against some scrub either - Dwight Howard has been a radically affecting defender this year and he’s not easy to shake. Murray put the Lakers defense in the mixer. When talent and decision making coalesce like this you can’t do anything except for marvel at it.
In the NBA we see lots of different types of players. It’s rare though, to see players who combine the efficiency of classic spot-up shooters with the unhinged pull-up game of the Dion Waiters and Mike James’ of the world. Jamal Murray is that combination as a shot-maker. The balance he possesses in that body of his allows him to transport himself all over the floor and rise up for a jumper at the drop of a hat.
We’ve seen teams falter in these playoffs, the Bucks for example, because they don’t possess a guy who can take a pick n’ roll possession and score with regularity from the three different levels of defense. The Raptors, who were great and fun, were flummoxed by the Celtics defense because they didn't really ask their guards to score in the pick n’ roll and when that became necessary, Kyle Lowry was the only player capable and the load to carry was immense. Murray has always been a shot-maker, he’s built for it, but these playoffs have necessitated more offensive punch from him and he’s responded by burning this thing to the ground. A rogue shot-maker who can bail out any possession, but is also symbiotic with his incredible running mate, Nikola Jokic. A lead guard, engulfed in flames, and ready to counterpunch against Kawhi Leonard, LeBron James and the rest of the league’s best. And it’s all built on balance, brakes, and shooting touch. Murray has flipped the script.
Zatzman
Jump Passes
If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: don’t get caught in the air. Well for Murray, what is usually a weakness for most players is actually a weapon. He uses jump passes as a tool to manipulate the defense in the same way that he decelerates; by slowing and creating space, he opens windows and angles not available to traditional passers.
He jumps, knowing what will open as a result.
Despite receiving career-long criticism from old heads for his passing, Murray has always been better than advertised. Sure, he’s never averaged 5.0 assists per game in a regular season. But in the playoffs his assists per game have jumped to 6.5, which is middling for a point guard, but extremely good for a shoot-first player of Murray’s ilk. Teammate Nikola Jokic has actually led the league in passes per game in the playoffs, and his work in the high post is Denver’s base offense.
More of Murray’s passes actually end up as assists than those of Jokic, however. Murray has always been a funky passer, and he’s become adept at every angle, beat, and release with either hand. The majority of his assists are full-fat dishes; he’s a gourmet, not a gourmand, at passing the basketball.
He’s able to leverage those spaces because he’s so adept at shooting from any angle. His release is a clap of lightning. His legs are exceptionally strong, meaning he’s always a threat to twist his hips towards the rim and launch, on-balance no matter the circumstance. Over the playoffs, he’s been devilish in the midrange, shooting 52.3 percent from the field within the 10-14 foot range. He’s shot over 50 percent from 2-point range no matter the number of dribbles he takes leading into the shot. As Samson noted, balance is the key to everything. As a result, defenders must respect him no matter where he is. And when he jumps, defenders show their hand, allowing him to win the pot time and again.
Chaos Redux
This isn’t the first time we’ve written about chaos here at Minute Basketball. Samson used chaos -- whether calming it or creating it -- as a line of demarcation between Kyle Lowry and LeBron James. Clever stuff, certainly. And Lowry’s ability to manufacture insanity is a skill well represented in Jamal Murray.
He’s an off-ball terror, always humming and screening and cutting and moving. Like Steph Curry, he sets screens to manufacture cracks into which he launches himself, drawing help, and then creating for others.
He runs off screens as well as anyone in the game.
But he is most underrated at leveraging chaos, perhaps, on the defensive end.
Look, Murray makes defensive mistakes. It’s often because of his propensity to jump around, trying to confuse offenders. He fakes stunting too often, which has resulted in LeBron James finding easy layups when Murray has recovered to the corner too early rather than fully committing to stopping the drive. Murray gets caught on screens sometimes, though he’s much improved at dancing around them this year.
But Murray has great size for a guard, and the Nuggets trust him against almost any matchup in a switch. He can last against centers for a few beats until help arrives, and his willingness to cheat and improvise often leads to pick sixes going the other way.
Murray is a high-ceiling low-floor defender, but he’s been raising that floor with every game in the playoffs. He is a plus-defender at this point in his career, reputation be damned.
Murray has been critical to Denver. He has the highest net rating of the starters, and the largest gap between the team’s offensive rating with him on versus off the court. Murray has emerged during these playoffs, raising his stats and efficiency while dropping his turnovers. That’s the value of big, flexible shot-makers in the playoffs. As long as Murray plays like this, the Nuggets have a chance against anyone. In game two against the Lakers, the Nuggets won Murray’s 44 minutes by 16 points. They lost the other four minutes by 18 points.
Behind Murray, the upstart Nuggets are behind the Los Angeles Lakers two games to one. They have a chance in a series that no one believed they would win. Murray may not currently have the reputation of a superstar, but on the largest of stages, he’s offering the impact of one.
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Have you seen Stars Wars episode four? Remember the part where all the heroes are trapped in a trash compactor, with the walls closing in, and some strange creature lurking in the depths? That’s supposed to be what the NBA playoffs feel like.
The playoffs are supposed to be a crucible wherein the fraudulent are burned away and only the hardened emerge. Only obvious superstars like LeBron James (2020), Kawhi Leonard (2019) or Kevin Durant (2018) are supposed to dominate with ease. Yet there’s another archetype of player who quietly thrives in the playoffs.
There are stars who aren’t as complete, aren’t as dominant as some of the greatest players of this generation, yet still see improvement in the playoffs. They’re flexible, able to mold their games to fit the situation. They’re shot-makers, able to create something out of nothing at relatively efficient rates. They’re good at pretty much everything on the court: passing, shooting, screening, cutting. You name it. And as a result they rise above, play better than they do in the regular season.
Let’s call them the under-the-radar superstars. They’re strong enough not only to keep the walls from closing in, but also to emerge better in such cramped scenarios. In a double feature this week on Minute Basketball, we’re highlighting two of the best such stars: Jamal Murray and Jimmy Butler.
We’re getting as nuanced as possible in describing just how these guys rise to the occasion: deceleration, fourth-quarter mentality, passing, and defensive chaos. If you’re here, you’re reading (or hearing!) about Jimmy Butler. You can find our Jamal Murray feature here. But for Butler, read on, and discover the minute yet major angles of his game.
Folk
Slamming on the Brakes
You hang on with gritted teeth through a defensive possession. Your shoes grip, your quads flex, and you keep your feet active to try and keep the gate closed to your opponent. Then it happens. They slam on the brakes and you catch the whiplash. Against Jimmy Butler, your body crumples against his. Butler senses your desperation to catch up and waits, under control, for you to send him to the free throw line. The Grift: Jimmy Butler’s greatest instrument of destruction, and one he wields with supreme confidence.
Since NBA basketball is this flowing and changing game (a game of runs, as it were) players remember what works and doesn’t. Kemba Walker has a reputation as a pretty good charge-taker, and he’s pretty quick to his spots. However (comma) it only takes a few plays of marching Butler to the line, and we’ll see players grant him extra space in everything he does. I mean, Walker tags an already tagged roll man instead of guarding Butler body to body in this clip. Butler lives in the minds of opponents. He sets the terms of engagement.
Butler’s historically great grift (check out that free throw rate) makes defenders hesitant to clamp him in the middle of the floor. And when defenders are hesitant, players like Butler, who dabble in passing to all corners of the court, floaters, eating ORBS, and rock-steady jumpers from below the free throw line, well, they kill you from the middle of the floor. It’s how Butler has given teams headaches all year with hardly any threat from beyond the three point line. He is simultaneously the finisher in the Heat offense and the connective tissue between so many players on the floor.
Cut from marble and quick on the draw, Butler hunts every advantage he can. The middle of the floor is hectic and rough, but nothing changes Butler’s timing. Becoming comfortable with physicality is an underrated aspect of becoming a Superstar. Role players have used it to stick in the league for years. The smartest players in the league (Harden, Lowry, James, Butler) notice the slightest shift in balance and attack it. Maybe the shot falls in, maybe it doesn’t, but they’ll stroll to the free throw line regardless.
A Closer’s Legacy
Striking the balance between taking the game into your own hands and responding naturally to it’s stimuli is tough. Do you rise up over a double and become a shot-maker? Is it about achieving the best shot on the floor, or the best shot for you? A glut of championships won by players like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant have skewed the public perception towards: “Shoot the f** ball”. Since LeBron James’ entry into the league he’s been subjected to harsh criticisms for delivering the ball to wide-open role players in the clutch. His success since has helped sway public opinion. So what does Jimmy do? Well, despite the fact that he isn’t as great as any of the aforementioned players, his decision making has been on their collective level.
Butler, especially in the past couple years, has been one of the league’s very best at taking stock of the current in-game situations and making the right call. In the clutch, Jimmy keeps it simple for the most part. If the defense gives him room, he’ll shoot the jumper. If the defense collapses, find a shooter. It sounds simplistic, yes, but it isn’t in the heat of the game. Butler’s cool as you like demeanour and disinterest in the optics surrounding him fuel his role as a pure basketball player. He’ll take what the defense gives, and his talent level allows him to deliver a high percentage of the time.
Having a wing who can punish a defense via the post or the from the top is a surefire way to give a defense fits. Butler slithers into the middle of the floor late in games and wreaks havoc. When he’s attacking off the top he’s a fantastic finisher and isn’t scared to go to the line late in games. When he sinks the defense in the post, they get picked apart. It’s a playoff blueprint for Pascal Siakam to emulate going forward, and Butler has fine tuned that approach to an impressive degree. With him at the helm, the Heat have looked endlessly dangerous in 4th quarters.
And it never hurts to hit big shots.
Zatzman
Jump Passes
Okay, I’m going to cheat a little bit here in the name of parallelism between the double features. Butler does make some jump passes, but it’s not as integral to his creation game as it is for Murray. Instead, this section will be about the jump in passing that Butler has made (get it!?).
Butler’s passing is a symbol of the overall shift in his game. He represents the Heat in general, not just because of the anachronism of his personal brand combining hard work and glamour, but also because his variability on both ends unlocks the very way the Heat play. Butler pivots from center to point guard multiple times per play, on both ends. As his jumper has slowly decayed over the years, he’s made up for it by becoming an elite passer, screener, and finisher. He’s become the maximally evolved version of Ricky Rubio. Think Russell Westbrook who always makes the right decision. Butler’s passing is the lodestone bearing the weight of his offensive dominance.
Here Butler combines the job of smalls and bigs; he dishes a nifty pocket pass in the pick-and-roll and later in the play holds off the larger Jayson Tatum to draw a foul by chasing the offensive rebound.
His assist rate this year jumped to a career-high 28.3, which is 97th percentile for his position, and more in line with numbers for a traditional point guard than a huge, defensive-minded wing. He passes up his own looks, often to the detriment of his personal numbers; the guy loves to pass.
Those skills and tendencies unlock the rest of the Heat. His willingness to shift to a smaller role and set screens allows Bam Adebayo to shift into primary creator mode. His ability to shift away from the spotlight and let Goran Dragic or Tyler Herro feast as the primary scorer, is what makes the Heat so versatile on the offensive end. His pass-first mentality lets the shooters -- Duncan Robinson, especially -- rain fire. He makes quick decisions. He’s a three-tiered scorer -- at least he has been in the playoffs, as he’s found the range from deep. He could average far larger numbers, but that doesn’t interest him. He may not play like a traditional superstar, but he wins like one.
Chaos Redux
As calm and stabilizing as Butler has become on the offensive end, he’s exactly the opposite as a defender. He’s a random event generator, sometimes following the script, sometimes shredding it and tossing it into his opponent’s eyes to steal the ball. Butler may quietly control the offensive end, but he’s as loud as they come the other way.
Butler’s steal and block rates were massive this year, and they only jumped in the playoffs. He’s led the league in deflections in the playoffs. He hawks lanes without jumping himself out of position. And when he is out of position, he snaps his fingers like magic and ends up in a better spot than before.
Butler is able to be in two places at once because of his body control, which Samson noted is also the basis of his offensive game.
But he’s a wild man on the defensive end, making jarring decisions that shock even the viewer; I couldn’t imagine how an offensive player must feel when Butler freelances with force and intuition.
There aren’t many players who can sow such chaos defensively. Those who can mostly play for the Toronto Raptors. Butler would fit in well on the Raptors, but that would be true of any scheme. The Heat trust him to guard any position, even centers. And it’s not a late-clock thing, or a switch that the Heat will live with, grumpily. No, the Heat want Butler guarding centers. He’ll jam the gears, front the post, and probably force a turnover. Similarly, the Heat want Butler guarding initiators, and wings, and, well, everyone and anyone. The point is he’s a defensive weapon no matter where he is.
Remember the 538 article that said a steal is worth -- in terms of predictive ability -- the same as nine points? Butler is the type of guy who makes research like that possible. There are few players who are able to dominate entire games without shooting the ball more than a handful of times. His abilities to create free throws by hitting the breaks, take over late, pass like a point guard, and punish opponents defensive are exactly why.
Largely as a result of Butler’s varied and minute talents, the Heat are one game away from eliminating the favourite Celtics and going to the NBA Finals.
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Reports of the death of the NBA big man have been greatly exaggerated.
Look, for example, at the current NBA playoffs. Four teams remain, and four centers will see the bulk of the important minutes. But each of those players is vastly different from the next. That’s rare in basketball context; many NBA champions have followed a similar blueprint. But as Detroit Pistons Head Coach Dwane Casey is fond of saying, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Change ‘cat’ to ‘NBA big men’ and ‘skin’ to ‘build an NBA team around’ and he’s got it exactly right.
In the East, Daniel Theis is the glue guy, the consummate pro, who does whatever is asked of him, as long as it’s not too difficult to do. Bam Adebayo does that, too, plus the hard stuff. He’s the All-Around Big, the Herculean Hero, the Atlas Rugged.
In the West, Nikola Jokic, a man who helps redefine what we think athleticism looks like on a basketball court. Bulging biceps and vertical leap are as present in Jokic’s game as Jacob Wohl is in hipster coffee shops. Balance, mindfulness, creativity, and a remarkable touch drive Jokic’s game. With the Lakers, Anthony Davis was always supposed to be here. A first overall pick who has flirted with MVP votes for a large portion of his career and has the biceps, length, vertical leap, and touch all put together. Both Davis and Jokic have active defenses around them and a couple of star shotmakers (Jamal Murray, LeBron James) but hell, this is a big man renaissance. So, let’s focus on them.
The NBA has whittled its remaining competitors to four. And those four teams have approached the big position from seemingly kitty-cornered angles. The ideas that NBA big men are extinct, unimportant, or homogenous are ridiculous. Let’s dive into what the four remaining bigs offer, how they differ, and what to expect from the Semi-Final matchups, approaching the two battles from the trenches.
Looking West - Folk
A Litmus Test
Montrezl Harrell, recently minted as the NBA’s 6th man of the year and a player who is correctly celebrated for an improved defensive presence, some serious punch as a roll man, and a lot of value provided to the Clippers this regular season. Unfortunately for Harrell, he underwent Jokic’s litmus test. Jokic’s litmus test doesn’t test for acidity though, it determines how viable an option you are against traditional big men attributes. There are other big men who can bang around in the post, of course, but Jokic’s exceptional passing talent dictates that you guard him 1-on-1 or you die as you double him, just as the Clippers did.
Jokic can operate in the high-post or low-post. He can read the double from the top or bottom and pass accordingly. And hell, just for fun, he can space from 3-point land and make insane foot shuffling, bastardized Dirk fadeaways. That’s why he’s led the entire NBA playoffs in touches per game. He is the definitive offensive hub of a Western Conference Finalist who just beat the team that was considered the favourites by bettors and analysts. Listen motherfucker, nothing is going to stop you from getting this work in the post. So, put your knee under his butt, take away some of the weight, make him do everything up top instead of backing you under the basket, and hope to god your teammates don’t get back cut. For these reasons, it’s not particularly surprising that the Clippers were much better with Zubac on the floor (+33) than Harrell (-36). I understand the Clippers value Harrell, but they signed their death note when they decided they wanted his offense instead of Zubac’s defense. Frantically doubling Jokic, and allowing him to eviscerate your defense with the pass - not the best look. Harrell took the litmus test and ended up much closer to “micro-ball” than the Clippers wanted.
That’s what makes Jokic so special. His ability to punish teams with old school, beat em’ up post-up basketball. Only, it’s packaged together with a 3-point shot, the NBA’s best floater, and a passing pedigree that very few players at his size have ever possessed. We see passing angles that players don’t with our birds eye view from the broadcast, but Jokic is closer to us than most and he can throw passes on a frozen rope. He’s a superstar, and if his old school yet futuristic game becomes a model for NBA bigs in the future, we’ll all be the luckier for such an unlikely outcome. Jokic will catch the ball on the short-roll and sell 2 different passes to the defense before he receives the ball, 2 more once he catches it, and the death stroke will come in the form of a gobsmacking floater. Every pass he fakes is a pass he can make, and teams are left vibrating in place. How else would one of the NBA’s slowest players so casually march to the rim?
You can consider me one of the people who was duped by Game 1 of the Lakers-Rockets series. However (comma) the Rockets did succeed in one very specific way: they played Dwight Howard and Javale McGee off the floor almost completely, after both of those players were a massive part of the Lakers regular season defensive identity.
Play Big
The bad news? Anthony Davis absolutely killed it on the defensive end. He’s been resistant to minutes at the ‘5’ his whole career despite many asking it of him. Many have wondered if he dislikes the physical toll that position takes on him. Luckily, that wasn’t the case with the Houston Rockets, who played maybe the smallest type of basketball in the NBA’s history. Davis dominated inside the arc against Houston’s rendition of micro-ball. Was Russell Westbrook disappointing as a 4-on-3 decision maker? Yes. Did Davis dominate in rotation, stunt towards players with genius reads, and cover immense ground defensively? Yes. I’ve spent too much of my life wondering if Westbrook will do certain things and too little appreciating Davis’ defense.
Offensively, Davis should be prepared for the many swipes and digs that Gary Harris, Torrey Craig and Jerami Grant will throw at him. After all, he just played the always swipe-y Rockets, a definitive crash course in that type of defense. 4 turnovers a game was ugly to see, but at least he’s seen it before. Ideally, the wheels are turning and the adjustments will come. The impetus for change is rarely welcome when it makes its presence known, and fans of Davis’ have long lamented his shot selection. In the second round he ranked in the 100th percentile at the rim and the short mid-range. 70-percent is a great percentage at the rim, and Davis shot 72-percent from the paint as a whole. Hopefully that success brings him a little bit closer to the rim, but nobody else in the playoffs took a higher percentage of their shots from the long mid-range (or mid-range as a whole) than Davis did. It’s a read and react game, of course, but Davis settling for long jumpers against Jokic is a recipe for disaster.
Davis is a do-everything superstar on both ends of the court. His size and skill are infinite, and if typical NBA bigs look like him in the future, the league will be almost impossible to imagine. “Unicorn” as a term has become somewhat commonplace, but Davis’ is more deserving than most who wear that moniker.
Quite frankly, I can’t wait to see how these two match up in the present day. Or, if the Lakers will even allow for that, because they can always bring Howard and McGee back into the fold. How does Jokic’s lack of verticality on defense fare when he’s facing off against the greatest lob threat of all time in Davis? Is there a possibility that this series goes jumbo? Are we in for Plumlee vs. Davis and Jokic vs. Howard or McGee? It’s certainly possible, and would probably be fun.
Either way, this series has a good chance at being the first time the Western Conference Finalist has been determined by centers since Pau Gasol and Tim Duncan battled in 2008.
Looking East - Zatzman
The Glue Guy
For a man who doubles as a battleground, Daniel Theis really isn’t all that interesting. He’s solid, yes, and other than being apparently a magnet for the bad whistle -- which resulted in him fouling out of game one against the Miami Heat -- Theis isn’t notable for too much else.
Except for the fact that he helps the team so damn much. In the smallest ways possible.
Theis averaged more or less 9.5 points, 6.5 rebounds, 1.5 assists, and 1.5 blocks per game in the regular season, and those numbers have carried over to the playoffs. He can finish well when others create for him. He’s not a shooter, per say, but he’ll step back and hit the triple when unguarded. He’s not a traditional rim protector, standing only six-foot-eight, but he’s long and strong and tracks shots with the best of them, especially from behind. He’s switchable enough to deter opposing guards or wings, particularly in late clock situations.
He’s not a visionary passer, but he hits the open man and rattles through quick decisions.
The quick-decision thing, by the way, could be the most important part. You don’t have to make the value-added choice with every opportunity as long as you make the value-sustained choice immediately. Few of his plays are highlights, but he doesn’t diminish advantages, and he’ll carry them side-to-side, offering his more talented teammates space in which to thrive.
Perhaps Theis’s best skill is his screen-setting. Not exciting, sure, but pretty pretty useful. And he’s by no means just average when it comes to screens. He was one of only 11 players to average 10.0 screen assist points per game or more in the regular season. He makes great contact, and he has a nose for angles. With Kemba Walker as Boston’s most frequent pick-and-roll handler, even a spare inch is enough for the speedy Walker to wreak havoc. And Theis creates more than an inch with his screens.
He’s not just physical, but he’s also a creative screener. Theis has repopularized the ‘Gortat screen,’ wherein he slips the original screen and seals his own man in the lane, allowing the guard to waltz to the rim with no second line of defense to speak of.
Theis’s sealing is supposed to significantly boost Boston’s ceiling. (Samson made me include that joke.) But in game one, Boston’s guards weren’t ready to use the space Theis created for them.
That’s not Theis’ fault, though. What he offered in game one was enough!
Theis doesn’t hurt the Celtics anywhere, and he helps in the cracks. That’s a viable future for the big man. For Boston, it’s enough to let the isolation wizards in Jayson Tatum, Kemba Walker, and eventually Gordon Hayward thrive; in game one, Theis finished a team-high plus-12 in the three-point loss. Pretty effective for a glue guy.
You know who else finished a plus-12, accomplishing that identical number in a very different way? Bam Adebayo.
Atlas Rugged
Consider the Rapture. It’s a religious event wherein all the goodness in the world ascends. It’s the explicit making of a thing into its Platonic ideal; the angelic on Earth become literal angels. The spirit transcends the earthly form. Also inherent to the Rapture, though, is violence. The act of choosing, even self-inflicted choice, and the violence of the wicked left behind. Rapture as portrayed in film is much more often about those left behind than those chosen. It’s why there’s so often flames, flood, famine occuring off-screen; Armageddon follows Rapture, at least for those unworthy souls. They transform into their symbolic collective purpose of evil.
That’s basically what happened when Bam Adebayo rose to block Jayson Tatum at the rim and saved the game for the Heat.
The rim seemed unprotected, Tatum the worthy chosen to tie the game. But Adebayo rose, late, transcended gravity, and met Tatum inches above the cylinder. He ascended. But violence wasn’t far behind. Adebayo’s hand then wrist then entire arm bent at a sickly angle. For a moment it seemed like something might snap. Adebayo was, after all, trapped between the forward force of Tatum and the cold steel of the rim. A weaker man, any man lesser than a Greek God, really, would have suffered serious injury.
When you combine the speed required to close the gap so late, the length necessary to reach the ball, and the strength to keep the ball from entering the rim, let alone not snapping the defender’s wrist, the block was a play that only one player in the NBA could make. The Miami Heat are joyous to employ him as their starting center.
In building a team around the center spot, Boston went one way, and Miami went another way completely.
I’m on record as being a big fan of Bam Adebayo’s aesthetic and poetic purpose in the NBA, but he’s not such a bad basketball player, either. Correction: He is the future of the center spot in the NBA. One possible vision of it, that is. He averaged roughly 16 points, 10 rebounds, 5 assists, 1 blocks, and 1 steal per game in the regular season, and that stayed true in the playoffs. But that’s just the start of Adebayo’s value.
Adebayo contains Theis within him, and a whole lot more, besides. Adebayo is a better passer, finisher, shooter, rim protector, perimeter defender.
Think Theis is a good screener? Adebayo was third in the league in screen assist points per game, averaging 12.1. He creates acres of space with every mammoth hip swivel. However, in game one, Adebayo finished with zero screen assists; you may think that’s a failure of execution, but in fact, the Heat shifted Adebayo into a creator out of the high post, and he responded with a game-high nine assists.
The Heat gave Adebayo the ball and ran around him like kids in the playground, letting Adebayo sniff where the advantage was greatest. His ability to hit the home run with value-added plays gives Miami one of its biggest advantages in the series.
That changeability, ability to pivot from screen-setter to play-initiator, is what makes Adebayo so deadly.
Defensively, he can swallow almost any player in the league, guard, wing, or big. According to nba dot com’s data, he was a 90th percentile or better defender in static events like isolation or post-ups. Guards can’t get around him and can’t shoot over him. He’s a meaty rebounder, leading the league in defensive box outs in the regular season, snatching anything in his realm of orbit.
In game one, his hulking presence in the middle of Miami’s 2-3 zone didn’t actively defend the rim as much as passively deter opponents from ranging near. The Celtics attempted only 19 shots at the rim in the game. Adebayo, by the way, still defended the rim pretty well, contesting a game-high 18 shots. He wreaked havoc.
On that play, Adebayo did this, in order: switched, blitzed a screen, recovered to interrupt a pass, walled off a drive, rotated, walled off another drive, and tipped a pass for the steal. That shouldn’t be possible for a player who also doubles as one of the strongest, move immovable centers in the league. Adebayo is the future of the big position in that he combines every skill, with ferocious intent, into one deific frame.
While Boston went for comfort with Theis, Miami went for control with Adebayo. Boston makes up for Theis’ limits with a cadre of star wings. For Miami to win, Adebayo has to fully and completely dominate Theis, up and down. He did that in game one. But Theis was no slouch; if he didn’t foul out, it’s possible the game ended differently.
Goes to show, there are still vastly different ways to build a winning team in the modern NBA.
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Innovation often breeds contempt.
For Galileo Galilei’s claim that the Earth revolved around the sun (correctly, as it turned out), the Catholic Church wanted to burn him at the stake. instead he was imprisoned indefinitely. For just generally being annoying and asking lots of questions, Socrates was forced to drink hemlock, which was his death. Partly for his belief in natural virtue, and partly because Roman emperor Nero was a crazy person, politician and philosopher Seneca the Younger was forced to take his own life.
Now, Galileo, Socrates, and Seneca the Younger are all philosophers, but so too are James Harden, Daryl Morey, and Mike D’Antoni. They are innovating the game of basketball before our very eyes. And, like the Greek and Italian philosophers of antiquity, so too are the Houston Rockets despised for their labours.
Part of the derision is because the Rockets are innovating away from aesthetics. Free throws are not fun to watch. Contested triples are not fun to watch. Uncontested layups are not fun to watch. Houston leverages the threat of each category to create points in the others, like a twisted bank robber who alternately uses rocks and papers and scissors to manipulate his way into the vault.
Houston uses very little ball or player movement. There is no concern with imagery inherent to Houston’s approach. There is no consideration with popularity. Similarly, the Rockets don’t care a whit about how playstyle might affect player morale; most teams want bit players involved, touching the ball here and there, so as to keep defensive effort engaged. The Rockets ask their players to do nothing on offense: stand still, shoot if you’re open, and you still better try as hard as you can on defense. By and large, Houston has collected players who do that.
The Rockets want to play ugly. They want to play slow, static basketball, because they will create better shots than their opponents in such inhospitable environments.
Houston may be hated, but the Rockets still win. They are a cold, calculating machine. Gary Kasparov may have beaten Deep Blue three times in 1996, perhaps the first time man faced machine, at least in the chess world, but now computers annihilate human opponents, toy with them, eat them from the inside out. Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer, Paul Morphy: all at their peaks would be reduced to sweating misery in a full, televised match against the synthetic brilliance of AlphaZero.
The Rockets play the Berlin opening, a famous system designed for passivity and defensiveness. Houston defangs its opponents by trading the queens early in the opening. Play slow, switch everything, who can create the best shots now? Yet through Harden, the Rox retain their tactical brilliance. Harden can dig inside the Berlin with the sharpness of the Scotch, and as a result Houston is almost unbeatable at their own game.
(Also, as with the Rockets in basketball, the synthetics of chess computers is not popular to watch: no one but the most hardcore chess fanatics watches chess computers play one another, although in terms of FIDE rating the gap between AlphaZero and the highest rating a human has ever achieved is about the same as the gap between that human peak and me.)
And, like chess computers, so too do the Rockets terminate their all-too-human opponents. They innovate, they earn contempt and disinterest, and they win.
Looking defense - Zatzman
Math, chess, and dehydration
Have you ever tried working out the math that connects quantum mechanics with Newtonian physics? Probably not, that’s an unfair question, and I haven’t done it either. In fact, no one can. The math unravels, falls apart like a sand castle in the tide. They can’t be related, at least not yet. Quantum mechanics, like basketball, is defined by leaps, probability. Newtonian certainties like gravity make no sense. That’s how the Los Angeles Lakers must feel trying to match the Rockets, at times.
Houston’s best fivesome, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Eric Gordon, Robert Covington, and PJ Tucker, features five players who are all, defensively, unstoppable forces and immovable objects. Try moving them. I dare you. Houston’s Rockets may not be tall, but they’re extremely, uhh, sturdy, and each player is stronger than the next. All five have strong hands, thick torsos, long arms, and they’re not afraid to rip the ball away at the slightest provocation. Their defensive innovation is to play five un-post-able players and demand that opponents beat you in the post.
But just try entering the ball there.
Houston’s defenders always front the post, and Tucker and Covington are un-seal-able, as energetic as water mills, ever-moving. Plus, their defensive positioning on the weak-side is always meant to take away post entries over the top as much as skip passes to the corner. Covington in particular is a turnover magnet, with hands like suction cups that find every loose ball. Thus far in the playoffs, Covington, Tucker, and Harden have steal rates above the 80th percentile, and Covington, Gordon, and Harden have block rates above the 80th percentile. The Rockets will create deflections in the chaos.
The Rockets are at their best switching everything one through five. Offenses can’t play quickly against switches without forcing turnovers, and turnovers are juicy lines of cocaine for Houston; drop the ball and watch how fast Houston revs its engines. They switch, jam the paint with thick, if short, bodies, grind the shot-clock away, and let teams run into the wall over and again. The Rockets stunt into the lane to close gaps and turn opposing offenses into the muds of Passchendaele.
Really, the Rockets don’t need cocaine to be hyperactive on defense. They’ve already got that part downpat.
What can you create, Lakers? the Rockets asked in game one, and the Lakers answered with a Danny Green pull-up, or an Anthony Davis post-up, or a LeBron James step-back triple. If every offensive possession you run against Houston is trying to post up one of their stout defenders, they will grind your bones to make their bread. The Lakers even made one or even two of those looks, but it was not a self-sustaining offensive system. Los Angeles’ offensive choices in game one were between dying of thirst and choosing, being forced, to drink ocean water:
Points, points everywhere, but not a point to score.
That was the Rockets at their peak. At their nadir -- for example, the Rockets for the majority of games two and three -- Houston’s defense is less an ocean and more a kiddy pool. The Rockets don’t always maintain the peak effort required to close every gap. They let opponents drive, stunts only half-hearted. Swiping at the ball, instead of moving your feet, when you’re supposed to close off the drive and then hustle back to the shooter, is always a cardinal defense sin. But against LeBron James, it’s certain death.
When the stunts are faked, James and even Rajon Rondo waltzed unchecked to the rim. It’s ironic that for all Houston’s innovation, the simple drive is Houston’s kryptonite. When feet touch the paint, and Houston has to sell out to stop the layup, the Rockets have no chance to recover. Covington is an excellent rim protector, but not when larger, stronger opponents see him coming. Tucker can protect the rim when opponents have to play through his chest, not when he has to sprint to meet James or Davis in the paint. For all his strength and girth and happy feet, he can’t bother those chiseled superstars in the air.
Even when Houston’s half-court defense was firing, the Lakers ran in transition and created shots that way. Then in game three, Rondo started hitting triples, and the Rockets drowned in their own sea of mathematics.
And so Houston’s defense is an all-or-nothing affair. They either dehydrate opponents or casually offer them water to drink. They play the Berlin, either positional stranglers or patzers, hanging pieces, forging ahead without cohesive planning.
The Rockets could beat the Lakers if they return the game to the simple repetition of Houston’s ideal; slow, grindy, post play from their opponents. If Houston’s games remind you of Groundhog Day, pick the Rox. They can do it again against the Lakers, but it requires the type of sustained focus that we haven’t yet seen from all of Houston’s defenders, beyond Tucker.
But even if the Rockets do advance, Kawhi Leonard should be the hemlock to Houston’s innovations. Leonard is a mudder, more capable of generating buckets in the grime than anyone not named Kevin Durant. Force him to play in the post, and he will thank you. The Berlin may be able to beat the Lakers if the Rockets keep their focus, but Leonard is the AlphaZero of the basketball world. The Rockets may be cold and calculating, but peak Leonard will always be colder.
Looking Offense - Folk
The Rockets have interested me so much because how they’re perceived and talked about seems, to my eye, to be continuously wrong. There’s this idea that they’re playing some hyper futuristic version of basketball. A soulless husk that creates corner threes, layups, and nothing else. However (comma) as in the simple complexity of a pawn endgame, the Rockets have stripped the game down to it’s very essence. Everything they’ve built is dependent on one thing: James Harden’s defender can’t really guard him 1-on-1.
Since Harden is a hulking, vibrant offensive system all to himself, teams double him. When that happens, he passes out, and the Rockets try to make things work in 4-on-3 situations. In this case, it’s against a rapidly stunting Lakers team that considers anything outside of a layup or a corner 3 a win.
For the most part, the Rockets are outfoxing the Lakers. It’s the end of games, where the Lakers eagerly help against Harden if he has the ball, furiously work to deny him the ball, and properly vex the rest of the Rockets (save for Covington, perhaps) when they have to make decisions. That’s where the imbalance has reared its ugly head for the Rockets. It might seem lazy to describe it as such, and it’s not everything that’s wrong, but Russell Westbrook isn’t really holding up his end of the superstar deal. When Westbrook is posting higher USG% than Harden over these games -- and astronomically higher in 4th quarters (42.9% vs. 28.6%) -- that’s typically where the Lakers are winning. And the thing is, Westbrook is operating in situations that are generally advantageous by proxy of how they’re created - an absurd amount of attention on Harden.
And don’t get me wrong, there’s an idealized version of this. Harden operates in the pick n’ roll like few other players in league history, leaving teams in the vicious circle of allowing him to march to the rim, drop in floaters, or throw lobs. The fact that him at a standstill above the break sends teams into a frenzy is all you need to know. His stepback 3 is as daunting a weapon as any in the league. He goes on month-long tears where he’s virtually unstoppable. When teams adjust, former MVP Russell Westbrook is supposed to eviscerate teams in 4-on-3 situations. It’s Westbrook downhill. The man has made his career on that tagline. For Houston, that’s akin to trading all major pieces and racing to the endgame with a material advantage. Yet somehow they haven’t converted those advantages into wins.
These Houston Rockets are not built to win with Westbrook operating as an up-and-down “other.” We can all appreciate Eric Gordon for what he is -- an 8-ball that oscillates between ‘Bricklayer’ and ‘Flamethrower’. The slow, steady calm of Harden’s ocean of offense allows for the Rockets to load up with high variance shooters around him, because he generally can carry them through the tough spurts. If the Lakers continue to successfully move possessions from Harden’s hands to Westbrook’s there’s only one person who can move the wins successfully from the Lakers column to the Rockets, and it’s the Brodie.
There are minor adjustments to be made from Harden as well. The mid-range is more available to him than he might think, and he’s a good shooter from that area. Houston asked him to do away with the 12-17 foot jumpers and turn them into floaters below the free throw line. It’s much easier to cloak a lob pass as a floater and vice versa, but since the Rockets did away with a lot of their packages that service roll men, perhaps Harden can seek out a bit of space in the middle of the floor.
As for the oscillating Gordon, he’s part and parcel of what makes the Rockets so identifiable for their style of play. One of the most underrated driving guards of the last decade, who despite having chubby cheeks is rapid, quick, and brutally strong. The more correct decisions that are made by Harden and Westbrook, the more available gaps to punch through with vigor for Gordon. And man, keep letting it fly from downtown. PJ Tucker is going to create extra possessions, defend like hell, and hit corner threes. Jeff Green is going to make plays on the short roll and occasionally knock in jumpers. Covington and Gordon are there to unload from above-the-break with reckless abandon.
When it works, it seems unbeatable. It’s a simple machine, but it’s tight-fitting. When it doesn’t work, pieces fly haywire in every direction, and players look out of place in new roles. Harden is called lazy for allowing his teammates to attack 4-on-3. But he created the advantage in the first place, even if the other Rockets aren’t doing anything with it.
This is the Houston Rockets offense, and man is it interesting.
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There are lots of different kinds of magic, but alchemy has to be right at the top of the least comprehensible forms of wizardry. It’s magic to be able to convert one thing into another. A substance into another, a feeling, a memory. It’s always been magic.
To turn thought into action.
Last week showed how incredible this collective group of NBA players is. On the heels of the murder of George Floyd, the players came to Orlando, aceded to the bubble on the premise that it would help inspire change, help convert our society into something better. They wore Black Lives Matter shirts, masks, pins, shoes, gave media appearances behind Black Lives Matter backdrops. They tried to keep the conversation going. Then Jacob Blake was almost murdered, and players felt like they hadn’t accomplished very much at all. A short wildcat strike ensued as, likely George Hill, then the Milwaukee Bucks, then the other teams in the league refused to play. Soon, team owners gave some political concessions and the players returned to work.
Partially as a cause, and partially as an effect, NBA players are leaders of the social justice movement. They are currently two things at once. They play games, care desperately, and then have to shower, dress, and face the camera to talk about social justice and Black Lives Matter. Whether they won or lost. It’s difficult compartmentalization, but it surely doesn’t mean we should blend the lines.
Or, on the smaller scale, the basketball scale, to convert an advantage into points. What does it mean to be a team that can change? Or the opposite, a team that is always itself, no matter what, for better or for worse?
NBA players have held those two tensions inside themselves, basketball and life, for a long time, longer than the duration of this bubble. They build schools and community centers, funding them with their basketball paychecks. They’ve always known which matters more. This week, we’re trying to hold those two tensions inside one newsletter. What can convert, what should convert, and what shouldn’t. This week in Minute Basketball: Conversion.
Looking Back - Zatzman
Inconvertible
Like lead into gold, some things should not be made the same. Like social justice and basketball. There’s no ratio at which they convert, no direct comparison to be made. And writers who have tried to conflate the two have been, at best, exploitative.
Right now, NBA players are two things at once. Those edges can’t be blurred, lines can’t be crossed. The picture is messier when you try to superimpose one slide on the other.
NBA players are allowed to hold that tension inside of them, painful though it may be, anachronistic, bizarre, innovative. Allowed is the wrong word. They deserve praise for it. But writers are not allowed to pretend that the dual motivations of NBA players in the bubble -- winning basketball games and inspiring meaningful social change -- don’t both exist, or can be merged. Carrying the burden of inspiring change does not make a team’s victory more inspiring, does not make the Lakers’ emotional burden unrivaled, another angle of their basketball dominance. Re-purposing, converting the tragic death of Kobe Bryant into a for-sale narrative of the current Lakers’ championship hunt is ghoulish.
Asking questions to prompt emotional interviews -- why is this personal to you, how are you feeling, walk me through your emotions -- is a form of exploitation, certainly. That doesn’t necessarily make it wrong, particularly if players want to broadcast their emotions to the world. Want that to be an avenue of the fight for social justice. But a camera following a crying Jamal Murray off the court, through the hallway: that is the raw conversion of tears to cash.
It’s easy for players to recognize that exploitation. Fred VanVleet turned the question around, recognized that “[players] are the ones always with the microphones in our face… At what point do we not have to speak about it anymore? Are we going to hold everybody accountable, or are we just going to put the spotlight on black people?”
And that’s why NBA players’ burden of inspiring change is not self-imposed. They’re asked daily how they feel about George Floyd and Jacob Blake and Breonna Taylor and a thousand others, how they make sense of it, what it means to them. That converts tragedy to responsibility. And to their credit, they’ve taken that responsibility and run with it, forced real change. George Hill, Jaylen Brown, VanVleet are all inspiring. But they shouldn’t be tasked with the job in the first place. And circling that task, that burden back to basketball, making it one more narrative in the greatness of the Lakers or Jamal Murray or any team or player is gross.
There’s an indirect line between social justice and basketball, sure. The same individuals are community organizers, wealthy black men, and elite athletes. But converting one to the other is simplistic and flat-out wrong. Lead is not gold, can’t be made into it. Social justice is not basketball and most of all can’t be made to serve it for the purposes of content. It can be uncomfortable for writers to focus on basketball and social justice separately. We are out of our depths, our fields of specialization. But converting players and their actions into something that is more comfortable for us, easier and more profitable for our jobs, is an incorrect use of the magic of conversion. Some things can and should be different.
Looking Ahead - Folk
Converting and Converting
1: There’s an almost infinite amount of advantages (ranging from miniscule to massive) that can be gained on a basketball court.
2: Some advantages are so massive, that they are unilaterally hunted by every single NBA team. Length, and shooting ability (I guess the Knicks don’t count hehe) for example.
- Creating advantages, and converting on advantages created are two different things.
The Miami Heat and the Milwaukee Bucks are diametrically opposed in basketball. The Heat, converting their roster into whatever it needs to be in the moment. Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo assume roles that are atypical but advantageous at the drop of a hat. In Miami they’ve collected a hodgepodge of talent that is both ill-fitting and wonderfully coalesced. They’re intelligent and changeable.
Milwaukee maximizes the advantages that are necessitated by Giannis Antetokounmpo’s presence on their squad. He is the central force on both ends of the floor, one of the most impressive players we’ve seen in years, and a battering ram on the way to the bucket. The team is built to accentuate those skills in a specific way, and they’re hard pressed to move from that position. That fortitude and belief in what they’re doing has led to historically great regular seasons, wherein teams rarely stray from their base packages and the Bucks power their way through unimaginative regular season basketball with their dominant and regimented style.
I think that’s what makes this series between the two teams one of the most interesting we’ll see in the playoffs. The Heat, inventive and filled with effort, wore a lot of different hats this season in an attempt to win as many games as possible. Typically, changeability is a good thing in the playoffs, especially when it comes with a high ceiling. Against the Bucks we’ll get to see how high the ceiling really is for the Heat and whether or not the advantages they create are only good enough to outclass a certain level of teams. 2 games up, so far. Can two malleable All-Stars + some specialists take down the league’s MVP, DPOY, and a cache of complementary pieces? That was the case in Game 1 & 2. Butler assumed the role of scorer supreme to close out the Bucks. Antetokounmpo and his teammates were hapless against the Heat’s intelligent defense late, and Butler’s incredible close to the game left the #1 seed in the dust.
Despite the rickety start to the playoffs for the Bucks, they are still very much a contender. An idea has taken hold in the NBA that they are close to a pseudo-contender rather than a full fledged one. The critiques are fair, because they highlight Eric Bledsoe’s offensive shortcomings, Malcolm Brogdon’s departure for Indiana (who is very good), and Mike Budenholzer’s shocking lack of prowess as an in-series coach. While Antetokounmpo is a world ending presence on the court, he doesn’t possess the type of game that is typically advantageous in the pressure cooker of clutch time. The Raptors preyed on the Bucks’ linear play last year, and their historically great and adaptive defense outfoxed the Eastern Conference’s best team. However (comma) they also had Kawhi Leonard, who was the NBA’s very best player in the postseason last year.
The level of basketball needed to beat these Bucks should be really high. And for the Heat to continue punching up against them successfully, they’ll need several things to go right, and often.
Adebayo and Duncan Robinson form what might be the NBA’s most potent dribble hand-off game. Adebayo’s quick twitch athleticism and body carved from granite operates as not only a great means of conveyance to the rim if teams overplay Robinson, but a rock-steady screen to shake his partner loose as well. Of course, the Bucks play drop defense and Bledsoe, Divincenzo, and Matthews all chase over the top exceptionally well, so Robinson might be squeezed into the middle of the court. I’m most interested to see how high Lopez plays on the ‘DHO’ actions. If Lopez drops low, Adebayo should be able to free Robinson up a little more. If Lopez plays really high, Adebayo might be able to scoop to the rim on occasion.
The Heat averaged 33 3-point attempts per game in the first round, and hit 39-percent of them. Very good. Those numbers track pretty well with what they did during the regular season, and they highlight another possible (perhaps certain?) advantage for the Heat. The Heat can punish the Bucks' proclivity towards allowing 3-point shots in a way that many other teams can’t, and they’ll be looking to attack them with a flurry of shots over the course of this series the same way the Magic did in Game 1. It remains to be seen if the Bucks can direct the surplus of 3-point looks to shooters like Kendrick Nunn, Jae Crowder (despite a good game 1), and Andre Iguodala, rather than Robinson, Tyler Herro, and Goran Dragic. The distribution of 3-point shots looms large in games 3-7.
Lastly, and despite game 1 indicating otherwise, the Heat probably won’t have the best player in this series, but if things break correctly, they can have #2 and #3. Butler has been trying to game the system from the outset. His incredibly disruptive brand of basketball that puts bigs in foul trouble, escorts him to the free throw line at an absurd rate, and allows him to play-make remarkably well from the middle of the floor, can quite conceivably outdo what Khris Middleton is bringing to the floor. Adebayo is still in the process of trying to figure out how to properly utilize all of his talents on offense and in what order, but his defense is for real. He’s strong, mobile, and intelligent. The Heat didn’t put Adebayo on Antetokounmpo to start, because Lopez is a very capable post-bully, but he’s always floating around his vicinity.
Stan Van Gundy’s “FORM A F*G WALL!” Comes to mind, of course.
Basically, the series comes down to each team's ability to emulate the other. The Bucks have been told (through cupped hands) to adjust and stop playing some version of an NBA team that will ideally succumb to their foolproof gameplan, and instead match up with the team in front of them. The Heat, needing to remain changeable, but steal away some of the gobsmacking efficiency that the Bucks are known for.
Right now, the Heat are converting and converting. Successful conversion, or something like that.
Game on, and god speed.
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As people, we lie a lot. Multiple times per day. Slip lies into conversation for small social gains, sometimes for no reason. The difference between a truth and a lie is thin. Often fictitious. Think George Costanza: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Or the fact that human beings are extremely poor at telling when another is lying, even professionals whose job it is to recognize a lie. We come up with strategies to tell when someone is lying. Eyes darting, furtive. Sweating. Looking through their phone. Or if you’re Shakira, reading the truth in someone’s hips.
Well, if you’re in the NBA, Shakira isn’t far off. There’s a lot you can read in someone’s hips. They can’t change direction as quickly as feet, eyes, shoulders. Hips are the hardest body-part to manipulate into a lie. They can also be attacked. Offenders try to brush a shoulder past defenders’ hips. They can be a tool used to bump opponents, hold them off, fight for space without extending an arm.
There’s much more to hips. They’re vital, life-giving. A fall, a broken hip, often also means the opposite. We don’t think about them, in life or in basketball, as much as we should. Let’s fix that. This week in Minute Basketball: hips.
Looking back - Folk
Hey, I was right!
It’s not particularly hard to highlight what makes Damian Lillard good at basketball, because he does so much. But, I highlighted his gorgeous pick n’ roll play in last weeks “look ahead” and suggested that we haven’t yet reached the fever pitch of his game. I posited that he could potentially unleash hell on the Lakers bigs. This culminated in a drag screen + logo triple for Lillard as he put the Blazers up 92-89 over the Lakers on their way to stealing game 1 from the Western Conference’s top seed.
LeVert Don’t Lie
When we play basketball, there are certain tells our body gives up to defenders. A sign of what we want to do and where we want to go. It’s why so many players who dominate the ball with a mix of speed and balance have so much success getting to the free throw line. There’s a constant exchange of fakes and tells that are transferred back and forth between the offensive and defensive players, and the best players are always a step, head fake, or crossover ahead. Want to disrupt an offensive player? Keep one hand up and stay in front of their chest. Want to creep by a defender with regularity? Attack the feet, and attack the hips.
Some players are remarkably good at reading an opponent's body language. Like a hunter notices the slightest shift in the wind, players like Caris LeVert see the slightest shift in body language and immediately punch the gap. His particularly shifty brand of play sends players off tilt with regularity. This can even extend to the second level of defense - either as a playmaker or a rim-runner - he can diagnose the moving rotations with pace, and that’s in large part why he was able to dish out 15 assists against one of the NBA’s best defenses in Game 1.
Credit to the Nets for organizing these possessions with Joe Harris on the weak side so Kyle Lowry couldn’t tag the roll man. However (comma) the special stuff comes from LeVert who does a fantastic job of making Gasol commit into no man’s land, and pops two easy lobs up to Allen. As soon as Gasol swivels those hips sideways, he’s dead in the water. The margin for error goes way up for LeVert because Gasol goes sideways, decreasing the amount of air space he can cover as Allen streaks to the rim behind him. If those passes go up a little faster, Gasol just has to drop his right foot back and he’s on Allen’s tail. This way, the two points are all but assured. High level reads for LeVert, who’s getting his first taste as a go-to guy in the playoffs.
Here’s a read from both LeVert and Luwawu-Cabarrot (who was excellent in Game 1). To this point, Siakam has watched LeVert abuse Gasol on the hedge a couple times and steps in for a moment to stall LeVert out. Only, Luwawu Cabarrot recognizes this and makes a swift basket cut. A pass fake to where Siakam thought his check was, and the passing lane opens right up. LeVert, who is elastic, rotates his hips and violently swings his arms from the right side of his body to the left before whipping a pass into the bucket-bound Luwawu-Cabarrot. Awesome stuff.
LeVert was so dangerous with space to create that the Raptors started blitzing every screen action he was involved in, in Game 2. To LeVert’s credit, he still made great plays as a playmaker, but to the Raptors credit, sticking Siakam on him really limited his scoring ability. A nice game of chess. Punch and counterpunch, as it were.
It is that control, though. The attention to detail, while remaining the human version of a Danny Brown song. A rapid, herky-jerky, syncopated joy ride, that fuels everything special that LeVert brings to the basketball court. Funky two hand floaters through contact, a head that drops as low as hips, and an out of control dribble that’s never truly out of control. And in the middle of it all sits those god damn hips.
Looking forward - Zatzman
Luka Doncic
The Dallas Mavericks - Los Angeles Clippers series, currently 1-1, will swivel on Doncic’s hips. The Clippers opened the first game with Pat Beverly guarding Doncic. The Clippers could have used Kawhi Leonard, one of the greatest defensive players of all time, but Doc Rivers has thus far saved Leonard as a counter. The Clippers do switch aplenty, so Leonard still saw plenty of time on Doncic in both games, but Beverly was the main defender, at least to start.
Beverly is small, but the appeal of Beverley was that his lateral movement on defense is fantastic. Sure, Doncic can shoot over Beverley, but Doncic shot only 31.6 percent on pull-up 3s in the regular season, meaning the Clips are happy to concede the shot. Doncic shot one-of-five on pull-ups in game one.
As another plus, Beverley attacks offenders, taking away space to dribble close to the body. And it worked initially. Doncic committed five turnovers in the first two minutes. He was unable to fool Beverly with his hips.
Watch the slow motion again; Doncic’s hips offer no subtlety. He is always clearly attacking forward, with no threat of a side-to-side move or stepback. The Clippers key in on his drive and strip him, beating Doncic to his spot.
Later, Doncic discovered his advantage over Beverley. The smaller defender was overly aggressive, trying to beat Doncic to his spots, and Doncic took advantage of that. In this clip, Doncic uses his entire body -- body, not his hips! -- to effectively lie to Beverly, convincing him that he’s going right-to-left. Watch the slow motion: Doncic has his whole body facing in the direction of the screen, other than his hips. Beverly jumps out to ice the screen, denying Doncic access, but the ball-handler shifts direction immediately forward; he never stopped facing the rim with his hips. Look at the arrows; his feet face the screen, but his hips never stop facing the rim. His momentum shift from side-to-side to forward is fluid and leaves Beverley in the dust.
In the second half of the first game, as well as the second game, the Clippers used Paul George and especially Marcus Morris to guard Doncic. They are both the same size as Doncic, or close enough, so the appeal was obvious. And in the first game, Doncic struggled to trick Morris. His bevy of moves, hip tricks, and crosses couldn’t create easy looks. Yes, he scored 42 points. Not all of them were easy.
That possession, by the way, ended in a Doncic triple. So he can still score even when his hips ain’t foolin’ anyone. But he’s at his best freezing opponents who are unable to differentiate the truth from the lie because of Doncic’s refusal to commit his hips.
In game two, Doncic eliminated any and all competitors by remaining a threat at all times. His hips drew three fouls on his primary defender, Paul George, in the first quarter. (Samson wrote that joke, unless you find it funny, in which case I wrote that joke.) The Clippers used a ton of zone following to limit the screening actions that freed Doncic in the lane. The Mavs responded by hitting 13 triples on only 29 attempts, as Kristaps Porzingis and Tim Hardaway Jr. were phenomenal. Dallas’ bench was solid and efficient. Supporting them all, though, was Doncic, who finished with 28 points, 7 assists, and only 1 turnover and 17 shot attempts. The Clippers could stop neither him nor his hips.
The Clips probably won’t use Beverly or, as happened here and there in the second game, Reggie Jackson, on Doncic again. Doncic, by the way, vaporized Lou Williams in a switch late in the fourth of game two. He’s figured out all of LA’s guards, and it did not take him long. More likely is that Morris, George, and Leonard will see the majority of possessions going forward. For the Clippers to have some chance at stopping Doncic, Rivers should employ his Leonard counter immediately. Only Leonard has the strength to hold off Doncic’s hips in the lane and the length and speed to bother his dribble and his shot. However, the Mavericks use an endless carousel of ball screens to free Doncic from any specific defender. That’s smart, and they can continue to magnify the complexity, adding Spain screens behind the initial actions, or even moving pick-and-rolls to the side or wing to attack softer spots in a zone. Dallas has counters to keep Doncic’s hips firmly attacking. If the Clippers play any guard in crunch time of future games, he will be a target.
Doncic is particularly good at keeping himself a threat in multiple ways during complex actions. That ability is limited in straight isolations; there’s no second threat to manifest. But during ball screens, Doncic can sell using and rejecting the screen at the same time. His hips are that good, and they’re strong enough to hold off anyone to get off his short-range and deadly accurate floater. He can snake, step-back, or pull back and isolate against a new defender. There are plenty of options. Only his hips will whisper the truth of his intent. The Clippers need to start listening to those bad boys. But Doncic will keep defenders guessing, hips swiveling in all directions yet always facing the rim, preparing to fillet the defense. Doncic’s hips tell the truth to his defenders, but so too will they hint honesty to you, the viewer, going forward. Make sure you pay attention.
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Physics is incomprehensible in big spaces. Nothing, really, makes sense when you zoom out far enough. But that’s especially true in outer space. There are forces like gravity that push and pull with more horsepower than there are horses on Earth. There are all sorts of bizarre objects: asteroids, and comets, which are really just icy asteroids, but so cold that you’d freeze just to touch one, if you didn’t burn up from the force of impact. There is space weather, like solar flares, which are so hot that you’d melt just to see one in yawning raw space.
Those things don’t make sense on Earth. If we’re lucky, we live in cozy houses and apartments where temperature fluctuates by a matter of degrees; the space for change is ten degrees rather than ten million. Anything outside of 65-75 Fahrenheit, and, hey, it’s mildly uncomfortable. We so associate astronomy with unthinkable numbers that the word ‘astronomical’ doesn’t even mean ‘having to do with outer space,’ or anything to do with astronomy at all. It just means big.
But sometimes the grand physics of outer space and the mundane forces that govern our tiny habitable sphere of rock collide. Take the Chicxulub crater, for example, which was created when an asteroid several kilometres wide smashed into Earth hard enough to kill 75 percent of life on the planet. That happened, by the way, 66 million years ago. Like I said, the numbers involved don’t seem like they could apply to us.
There are other times when astronomical forces do impact us mortals, and the results can be gory. Or, at least, it can seem that way. This week we’re talking astronomy on the hardwood. We have the Suns, the Moon, and the Star.
Looking back - Zatzman
Suns
As in, the Phoenix Suns. See the connection! I’d bring astronomy into basketball eventually. Gotta trust.
The Phoenix Suns are also 7-0 in the bubble. And those seven haven’t been cheap wins, either. No, The Suns have been a proper juggernaut. The team boasts the best net rating in the bubble, with wins over the Los Angeles Clippers, Dallas Mavericks, and Miami Heat. They’ve won with offense, and they’ve won with -- well, mostly just offense. But when you score over 110 points in every bubble game, it’s not that hard to put opponents away.
The secret, of course, has been Devin Booker.
Go to the nearest gym and see how many attempts it takes you to hit that shot. Add in some defenders, like, say, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. Odds are, it’ll take you an astronomical amount of time. Maybe you’ll still be going when the next asteroid crashes into Earth.
Booker’s secrets are manifold and mystical. He has some of the best balance and footwork in the league, so he’s always upright and facing the rim. He never dribbles or fakes himself away from a position in which he is a shooting threat. On top of that, he’s one of the best shooters in the league, both pull-up and off the catch. Throw in much improved passing, a handle with an eye for the kill, and the size and strength to overpower almost any guard, and it’s not hard to see the primordial origins of this breakout.
And Booker has indeed formed craters in his wake. The force of outer space contained in a small gym. He’s averaged 31.0 points and 6.1 assists per game in the bubble, and much of what he’s done is replicable. He’s shot well from the field but only adhered to his career average from deep; this is a hot streak but not just a hot streak. This is who Booker is.
The Suns are riding a few hilariously favourable flukes. Jevon Carter, a defensive non-shooter the team plays at point guard, is shooting 54.2 percent from deep on more than three attempts per game. Ricky Rubio, Cam Payne, and Dario Saric are all shooting over 40 percent from range. Opponents, meanwhile, are shooting only 32.4 percent from deep and even worse from the corners. There are elements of Phoenix’s dominance that won’t continue too much longer, if at all. Zoom out, though, to the distance from which giant balls of gas appear as mere twinkles in the sky, and this Phoenix roster is starting to make sense.
The stars are beginning to align. Booker, for one. But also the breakouts of Cam Johnson and Mikal Bridges, both of whom are flashing much expanded offensive arsenals. Deandre Ayton is turning into an offensive powerhouse. The Suns have been a force, as properly unheralded as their namesake. Outer space doesn’t make sense when imagined on Earth, and that’s been true of the Suns in the bubble, too.
Phoenix is a half-game out of the play-in for the eighth seed. All four contenders for the final seed, the Blazers (against the Nets), the Grizzlies (against the Bucks), the Spurs (against the Jazz) and the Suns (against the Mavericks) play their seeding game tonight. To make the seeding game, the Suns need to win and have one of the Blazers or Grizzlies lose. That means the Suns don’t control their destiny, despite a 7-0 bubble record. That’s a shame. But we’re not looking forward here, we’re looking back. And the Suns have collided with the league and won. Phoenix’s bubble performance has been a molten flash of light so bright that you might want to look away.
Xavier Moon
Another astronomy name, but for those of you who aren’t in the know about the Canadian Elite Basketball League, Moon is probably about to win his second consecutive league MVP. He already secured a finals MVP after dominating the championship game to the tune of 31 points, the most scored by a single player in a game all year. It only took him 14 shots.
After the 25-year-old Moon won MVP in the 2019 CEBL season, he tried out for the Raptors 905 and was cut. Not because of talent -- where he absolutely fit in, according to assistant coach Ryan Schmidt -- but because the 905 had a glut of amazing point guards. It was a shock to me (and some 905 staff) that no other G League team reached out to Moon. But after winning another CEBL championship this year and improving his game in a bevy of areas, that should change.
It’s difficult but worthwhile to try to project talent at lower levels to the NBA. Moon has always been fast. He’s too fast for the CEBL, and he would be fast even in the NBA. His speed is his greatest weapon, and best of all, he’s able to shift from second to fifth gear in the half-court without burning up his clutch. He can leave the second line of defense as bewildered as Wile E. Coyote.
Moon is so fast that opponents who try to get into his body can end up grasping at air. He told me that he sees offense, at times, as trying to escape physical defenders, and then when he has that freedom of movement, defenses have no chance.
That’s a high-level bucket. Moon catches Junior Cadougan trying to ice the screen, shifting his weight and giving away his plan too early. So Moon rejects the screen and apparates his hips past Cadougan’s, meaning Cadougan is left nowhere on the defensive end, and the second line of the defense can’t ever catch up. That type of skill translates to the NBA.
Moon’s jumper is, at times, wonderful, but it’s not consistent game to game. His passing is improving, and he is better at kicking the ball around the arc than fitting dimes into the paint. He’s already good enough to get rotation minutes in the G League, and if his jumper serves him well, that could turn into a cup of coffee in the NBA. Moon is only 25, and there’s plenty of improvement left in him.
Of course, all that being said, Moon’s dominance is worthwhile on its own. Winning a CEBL championship is an end in itself, not just a stepping stone to higher levels. We’re looking back, and over 16 days, Moon played a brilliant CEBL tournament. He hoops like his namesake, smooth at all times, omnipresent, calm. He’s learning to draw the other nine players to and from him, like breathing, like tides. He knows how to dominate with his scoring, and he’s learning to do it in other ways, too. Watching Moon is a joy, and if you haven’t heard his name before this newsletter, be sure to track the next decade of his career.
Looking forward - Folk
Dame Time and where it comes from
It’s firmly entrenched in the mind of most anybody who watches basketball. Hell, it’s so popular that the term might catch someone's ear who’s never watched a Trailblazers game: “Dame Time.”
Damian Lillard is extrinsically connected to what we consider outer space, if only because of what he commands on the court. He is the Sun of the Trailblazers. The team rotates around him, and his gravitational pull is mighty. Not only that, but since the dawn of time, we’ve measured that very thing, time, with elements that exist beyond the atmosphere. The Sun, dependable and powerful, indicates to us where we stand on a given day, and at what time. Lillard’s performances have become something his teammates, coaches, and fans can set their watches to. A cursory glance at his wrist, the source from which he launches copious amounts of 3-pointers, and everyone knows it’s Dame Time.
It’s true that the Blazers have been enjoying the returns of Jusuf Nurkic and Zach Collins, but Lillard drives this team forward. With regards to the last seeding game, the looming play-in tournament, and the possible playoff series that follows, Lillard dictates his team’s floor and to some extent the ceiling. The unbelievable takeover ability that he has, that isn’t in fact reserved for the fourth quarter, but exudes from his core like nuclear fusion, starts at the opening tip.
What unlocks this success for Lillard and what is no doubt the key going forward, is the pick n’ roll. His quickly rising draft stock was intrinsically attached to his pedigree as a pick n’ roll ball handler at Weber State. This year marks his 4th, maybe 5th year in a row as the NBA’s very best pick n’ roll player. He benefits from a great screening partner; Nurkic and Collins certainly fit the bill, but Lillard’s bag of tricks and counters is so deep you might be able to find student loan debt in there. Even when Meyers Leonard was his pick n’ roll partner, Lillard was near league-best. Reject the screen. One-dribble pull-up. Snake it and pop out on the other side for three. Get wide and slide the pocket pass in. Those choices orbit Lillard at all times, never out of reach, like the Sun always casting out for its reliable planets in revolution.
He has combined all of these skills to exact his revenge on a league that wanted Zion Williamson in the playoffs instead of him. (This is conjecture hahah.) 37 points per game in the bubble and ratcheting up as we go. It’s tough to tell if we’ve reached the fever pitch of his season, because the games only get more important from this point on. A potential series vs. the Lakers could provide a platform for Lillard to put current DPOY finalist Anthony Davis and multiple DPOY winner Dwight Howard, in the mixer.
Lillard has rarely given time to anything except his game. He’s sharpened his playmaking, shooting, and decision making in a league that tosses away those it deems dull (Carmelo Anthony being a good example of this). He’s become the avatar for basketball in Portland. The Sun’s orientation in its solar system sets the terms for how its inhabitants exist. How important it is to create an inhabitable, and stable environment isn’t lost on Lillard. As the NBA has become a league of movement, Lillard has cultivated a home and carefully curated his game into one of the league’s most potent. There’s always potential for more when you have a superstar, and Lillard continues to sustain life in Portland.
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There’s depth to the idea that we are our own worst enemies. It’s inherently appealing, in the sense that we are in control of our own destinies, the protagonists of our own realities. Nothing can stop us but us, context be damned. It’s akin to the Protestant ethic, of course, that tangible manifestations of our success reflect our internal compasses. But it goes deeper in the religious context; the Devil’s greatest weapon is deception. In other words, the Devil doesn’t wreck you unless you fail to check you. Perhaps a tad too deep in theology (Samson may need to check me at some point in this editing process), but you get the point.
But given that we are our own worst enemies, what if we … stop making life difficult for ourselves?
For a number of players in the NBA bubble, that’s become the new normal. At times, they make the game so hard on themselves that opponents really can’t change it one way or the other. But with this new fanless, dystopian, pure form of basketball, some players have emerged victorious so far.
In the first week of the bubble, we’ve seen De’Aaron Fox and the Kings remain their own worst enemies. For wing scorers like DeMar DeRozan and TJ Warren, though, bubble basketball has been simple. Put the ball in the net. No one can stop them but them, and it appears they’re not going to do that.
Time for some basketball talk. This week: your own worst enemy.
Looking Back - Folk
Hey! I was right!
Last week I talked about LeBron James eliminating chaos and exercising control on his march to success. On the same day we published, James closed out the Clippers with a game winning shot (on a rebound of his own miss) before locking down both Kawhi Leonard and Paul George on the game’s last possession. Now, it’s not very brave to predict that James will be good, but his last offensive and defensive stands of the game were creations of his own making, and the Lakers won on the strength of his control - so, pretty good.
I also talked about Kyle Lowry and the whirlwind of chaos in which he drowns opponents. He was a man possessed against the Lakers, cannonballing into the lane with reckless abandon. At least for one night, his chaos overpowered James’ control. Versus the Heat the Raptors flipped the Bam Adebayo matchup on it’s head with OG Anunoby. Not all Lowry, but enough to make me feel good about it.
Saved for a Later Date
I was going to write about the boundless and limitless Jaren Jackson Jr., who high-steps through the lane and around defenders with far too much grace for his size. A giant of a man with an unsightly jump-shot that he heaves at the rim with the same unhinged trigger-finger for which we’ve come to know Steph Curry. However (comma) ‘JJJ’ suffered a torn meniscus, so we’ll have to table these topics for when he comes back stronger than ever. But, you the reader, you are missing out on what would have been my magnum opus.
De’Aaron Fox
We’ve seen it many times before, and we’ll continue to see it as long as the NBA and the world continue to exist. There’s an uber-athletic point guard trying to strike the balance between driving and shooting jumpers, and his name is John Wa-, wait no, it’s Ja Mora-, no no wait, it’s Russell Wes-, wait, yes I’ve got it now - it’s De’Aaron Fox.
For maybe the first time in history, the NBA’s fastest player is not a heavily contested topic. The fastest player in the NBA is Fox, and quite frankly it isn’t close. He’s also huge for a point guard (6’5”) and his athleticism isn’t reserved for straight lines or starting blocks. Fox is rapid in every sense of the word.
Fox has had to deal with the inevitable walls that defenses put up, and those necessitate change, but he’s also had to navigate changes in playstyle because of front office decisions. Most recently, the move away from a fast paced style that thrived on transition under Dave Joerger, in favour of a slower pace that could prioritize defense. But here’s the thing - most good coaches and front offices tailor the team’s playstyle to maximize their best players, especially when those players are as promising as Fox. And the other thing, despite picking up better defensive players, the Kings still under-achieved on that end of the floor as a team. The Kings genuinely upgraded their roster: Richaun Holmes and Alex Len make for a very solid center rotation, Buddy Hield, Harrison Barnes and Bogdan Bogdanovic fill the wings with high quality spot-up shotmaking with the capacity for more creation, and Fox made major strides as a pick n’ roll decision maker. And yet, no meaningful change. It’s not easy to make the jump to the playoffs, but the Kings made things way harder than they had to.
Taking away a chunk of Fox’s transition opportunities has left him with more agency in the minefield that is half-court decision making. As viewers we’ve been treated to a truly up and down experience. His shot chart receives unexpected spikes every other game, and he’s always willing to try out the most difficult shot available to him. Thankfully, he’s improved immensely at getting to the free throw line, and his change of speed and overall guile in the lane is oftentimes jaw-dropping. He’s near unstoppable at times. A physically imposing and lightning quick guard who shoots 66-percent at the rim, and above league average everywhere else, save for the 3-point line.
For a point of comparison, Westbrook recaptured so much of his “Russ-ness” in Houston when they traded Clint Capela and told Westbrook: “It’s okay, you can run at the rim. It’s what you do. You don’t have to shoot threes like this anymore.”
Westbrook is attempting 2 less 3-pointers per game since the trade, and bumped his shooting from 23% to 35% from downtown.
There’s wisdom in what the Rockets did, and perhaps something to glean from it when it comes to Fox. He’s adventurous, pulling up off-the-dribble, as most talented point guards are, but perhaps it’s best that he continues to do what he’s best at, and allows for moderate progression from downtown. After all, he’s surrounded by a bevy of talented shooters that help him space the floor, and Holmes is a dynamite roll man. It’s certainly not a bad thing to give the defense panic attacks when you go downhill, and to then let the offensive pieces around you thrive in the positions you’ve allowed them to play.
Of course it would be nice if Fox became a heat-pump from downtown, but that’s rarely the outcome of these situations. Not everyone treats progression as expeditiously as Pascal Siakam.
Watching Fox do what he’s good at, the things he can do that 99-percent of NBA players can’t, that’s what I’d like to see the Kings supercharge. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You have the roadrunner and a pogo stick packaged into one player, let him wreak havoc with those attributes. The Kings need to stop being their own worst enemy.
Looking Forward - Zatzman
DeMar DeRozan
DeMar DeRozan has a bag. It’s one of those bags from Harry Potter that fits anything and everything inside. Need a eurostep to floater? Spin-counter-spin pull-up? Free throw line jumper? Drop step in the post? Change of clothes? Your weekly medicine all laid out in a container labeled by day of the week? Who knows, but I’m not discounting anything. Kyrie Irving excepted, DeRozan has the most diverse collection of moves in the NBA, and when his shot is falling, there’s nothing defenders can do but marvel aghast, like earthbound onlookers gaping at Superman as he flies past, arms outstretched in feeble worship masquerading as defense.
So far through the first week of Bubble Basketball, DeRozan has been on a binge. He’s thrown up 23 non-heave pull-up jumpers, and none of those have been 3s. (Fun fact: the only players to remotely come close to that level of quantity and refusal to shoot triples are both also Spurs: Dejounte Murray - 23 pull-ups and only one 3 - and Rudy Gay - 16 pull-ups and zero 3s.) But DeRozan has connected on 13 of the 23 shots, and he’s led the Spurs to a 2-2 record with one loss coming on a late triple by super Shake Milton.
So where does that leave DeRozan and the Spurs? They have three games upcoming this week, and they’ll have to win even more to have a chance at the playoffs. The Spurs are in a dogfight 2.0 games out of the eighth seed.
The Spurs will face the Utah Jazz, New Orleans Pelicans, and Houston Rockets. Yes, those teams employ very good wing defenders. No, it won’t really matter for DeRozan. He either will have more exceptional games, or he won’t, but the quality and style of defense won’t matter. DeRozan alone determines his reality, at least on the hardwood.
In that sense, it’s a quixotic quest to predict players like DeRozan. He may continue to dominate, or he may fizzle. But the only one determining which adventure he’ll choose is DeRozan himself.
TJ Warren
Introducing your 2020-2021 NBA Most Valuable Player TJ Waaaarrrrren! I can hear it now. He has bedeviled opponents in the bubble, scoring 19 points in his opening quarter against the Philadelphia 76ers and not slowing down from there. Because of his lavic hand, the Pacers are 3-0 in the bubble, ahead of the 76ers and closing fast on the Miami Heat.
As with DeRozan, Warren is hitting his pull-up jumpers. In fact, he’s been among the best players in the whole league there; he’s connected on 14 of 28 pull-ups, with the tenth-best effective field goal percentage, at 57.1 percent, among high-volume players in the whole NBA.
What are you supposed to do about a player who can reliably be both bull and china shop?
Warren is less grace and more force. While DeRozan hits the breaks before a pull-up, Warren throws the ball at the rim while maintaining his forward momentum. If a person is in his way, well, then a person gets knocked over.
The Pacers have four games this week. Three opponents will be from the West, but Warren will face the Heat on August 10. Miami’s defense offers no quarter. They keep you off the glass, get back in transition, and contest everything. Bam Adebayo is one of the best centers in the league at switching onto wings, and if Warren rains fire against drop coverage, Adebayo can happily switch and try to wrastle with Warren, holding him by the horns and forcing fadeaways.
Warren cares not. Like DeRozan, Warren will either score, or he won’t. Adebayo will have little to say in the matter. Warren won’t remain the best scorer in the bubble, averaging over 30 points a game. But he could lift Indiana’s surprisingly competent half-court offense past opponents this week, moving Indiana into the fourth seed. With the advantage derived from home court dwindling to nothing in the bubble, that wouldn’t matter. The Pacers will win, or they won’t, largely behind the results of Warren’s unflappable game. Thus earning meaningless home court advantage would be a fitting reward for the heroics of Warren, one of the last true nihilistic NBA gunslingers roaming the hardwood.
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Listen now | If I’ve learned anything since March 13, it’s that life is unpredictable. We all know that theoretically, of course. But the last 139 days of, mostly, unceasing and unfamiliar sameness, have hammered that lesson into my brain. Unpredictability is tangible, now. We create routine as an adaptation, a response. So basketball is back now, and with it again comes an old routine. I will try to remember that chaos runs deeper.
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The audio version of the world famous Minute Basketball Newsletter, from Louis Zatzman and Samson Folk. Discussing Dennis Schroder, the Denver Nuggets, LeBron James, and Kyle Lowry in this episode.
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