The Los Angeles Lakers taking Anthony Davis off of Nikola Jokic and instead put a smaller yet sturdy forward on him, like LeBron James or Rui Hachimura, allowing AD to roam behind the play in help, created the perfect conditions for a storm of attention. For one, it is an obvious adjustment. Literally. You don’t have to be an assistant coach or blog boy to notice the best L.A. defender, an all-timer at that, no longer guarding the best Denver Nugget. The broadcast team shouts the adjustment out, it unfolds on nearly every possession, and it’s fairly easy to understand.
Taking AD off of Jokic is also the rare tactic that straddles the line between effective and overly simplistic. There are clear benefits to allowing Davis, a Hall-of-Fame rim protector, to, well, protect the rim. For stretches, it has absolutely worked in this series, keeping Davis out of foul trouble and stymieing Denver’s spacing. Combine that with its aforementioned obviousness, and you’re gonna get fans pleading for Darvin Ham to make the adjustment, then patting themselves on the back when he does. But not in the way that such fans (or even writers like myself) may plead for Steph Curry to run 50 pick-and-rolls a game, then celebrating when he runs a successful one. There are limits to reason.
So, you have an inherently noticeable tactic that the Lakers deployed towards the end of Game One and frequently went to in Game Two, occasionally to positive results. It’s easy to see why deploying AD as a roamer has been the story of the series so far; it’s easy to see why Michael Malone has made some quips about it too. But there’s something even more plain, even more significant happening on the court, perhaps the reason the team up 2-0 in the series has won those two games: The Lakers are not scoring against Nikola Jokic in the pick-and-roll.
Worse yet, the Lakers haven’t set themselves up to crash the offensive glass either, especially in Game Two. This hasn’t been a typical defensive series from Denver in regards to defending the PnR, with Jokic playing at the level. Instead, he’s largely bee playing drop, with aggressive, almost disrespectful gap help from his supporting Nuggs:
Some tactical analysis goes out the window here. Jamal Murray, Bruce Brown, and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope’s screen navigation thus far? Good! Lakers wings and guard shooting thus far? Bad! For the series, Los Angeles is shooting just over 30% on above-the-break 3-pointers, a mark they couldn’t even clear on Thursday night.
Denver employing this strategy to great success in Game 2 did more than just discourage L.A.’s guards from getting downhill, as they saw a see of blue when peering into the paint. The were able to keep Jokic nestled under the glass, ready to battle AD, which contributed to the Lakers rebounding just 11.1% of their misses. For context, that was L.A.’s second-lowest ORB% of the whole season, which has comprised 96 total games.
There were some glimpses of faulty gap help from various Nuggets, highlighting how imperative their early help is. Just as much as it is a physical battle, forcing the Lakers to drive through a crowd, it is a mental one too: Discourage them from trying altogether. Here, Murray is late to get to the nail, and LeBron revs it up for the easiest two he’s seen all series:
The simplest answer for L.A. would be to make some damn shots. #Analysis. But really, how else are you supposed to stop defenders cheating off you from just one pass away? Another answer would be to space closer to the arc, ‘stampeding’ on the catch, which is to say catching the swing pass already in motion towards the basket. In the first set of clips, LBJ is spacing about five feet behind the line with no hope of creating the downhill pressure a high ball-screen hopes to initiate. Look to see that as an early focus for the Lakers in Game Three.
Their immediate fixes to the heavy gap help Denver displayed in Game Two was to run fully spread-PnR from the top of the key, with a potential third spacer in the dunker spot. For a split second, this seemed to be a solution. Jokic reverted back to trapping the ball-handler, and Anthony Davis, now playing 4-on-3, got an And-1 bucket over the resultant help defense:
That panacea didn’t last long, however. Just as the Nuggets had disrespected the L.A.’s shooters, they continued to play Jokic in drop coverage, daring Davis to hit the shots off the short roll that turned Jokic into an MVP (first clip), or daring LeBron to, at age 38 on one foot, get all the way downhill, now having to navigate an extra defender parked near the dunker sport (second clip):
To me, this is the story for the (potentially short) remainder of this series. Hachimura guarding Jokic is cute and all, but the Serbian supernova is figuring out that he just has to shoot over Rui, and with each passing game, his surrounding Nuggets will figure out their spots on the floor. Even if they don’t, though, it won’t matter if Los Angeles’ half court offensive rating is around 90.
Attacking the two-time MVP in the pick-and-roll was supposed to be his kryptonite, Denver’s kryptonite. Even with Jokic’s gradual defensive improvements in his career, he was thought to be best suited playing at the level of the screen, trapping or aggressively hedging against ball-handlers. How, then, could Denver survive by scrambling all the time, often defending four players with three frantic dudes? And how valuable is defensive rebounding if you start every play 25 feet from the basket?
Well, in this Western Conference Finals, none of that appears to be an issue for the Nuggets. In Game Two, Mike Malone comfortably dropped his superstar back in the paint, watched him gobble up 17 rebounds, watched his guards fight viciously over screens, and enjoyed brick after brick from the Lakers. It’s up to the purple and gold to figure out how to attack what was supposed to be the exploitable weakness of the Wester Conference’s best team. They haven’t yet. And if they don’t, this may be a shorter series than we were all hoping for.
Tags:
Related Podcasts
No items foundRelated Articles
