Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Younger Brothers in the NBA

One of the more interesting things we studied in my psychology classes in college was birth order and the role being the oldest or the youngest in the family has on a child's life. Most presidents, for example, are first-born children. The oldest in the family is the natural leader, looking after and helping to take care of their younger siblings. They have much more experience being leaders than most kids their age.

The youngest child, conversely, tends to be more creative and artistic, as they try to create their own identity in the family. Google "comedians" and "younger brothers" and take a look at how many articles have those phrases in them. Younger children also tend to be better athletes, as they have the opportunity to practice against their older siblings all their lives. They test themselves every day against a bigger and faster player.


Once you start looking for the pattern, you can find it everywhere. Derrick Rose and Stephon Marbury were the youngest of four brothers. Peyton Manning was obsessed with being better at football than his older brother and they usually dragged youngest brother Eli along. Michael Jordan grew up playing in the shadow of his two older brothers. This SI article about Yadier Molina does a great job illustrating the point:

That meant that when the Cubs drafted Jose and the Angels signed Bengie as an amateur free agent in the late spring of '93, Yadi was suddenly alone. He had to make do with brief pay-phone calls from his brothers—six quarters would buy four minutes—and winter visits. He covered the room that was now his with newspaper clippings about Bengie and Jose. Over the next seven years Yadi's drive to do whatever it took to rejoin them only increased.

* There's also an interesting quote from Miguel Cabrera which touches on a lot of the things I talk about when it comes to valuing players: "On my list, he's at the top," says Miguel Cabrera, winner of the last two American League MVP awards. Above Cabrera himself? "The very top," the Tigers slugger confirms. "He can control everything—his pitchers, the games. I play first. I don't have any control, most of the time."

Younger brothers, as a rule, are "old for their age", which is really important in basketball. It's easy for the best young basketball players to get lazy, since they are so much taller than most of their peers. They don't need to push themselves to be the best player on the floor. A younger brother, though, is always pushing himself. No matter how good they are, they are always driven to supplant their older brother.

A guy who enters the league at the age of 19 has a chance to be really good. A guy who enters the league at the age of 19 AND he has an older brother who plays in the league? He has a chance to be a star. None of these guys are Blake Griffin, but he is the perfect example of this phenomenon - his older brother Taylor had a cup of coffee with the Phoenix Suns and now plays overseas.

Jrue Holiday (24)

Older brother - Justin (25), rookie for the Golden State Warriors

Even though Jrue is only a year younger than Justin, he is in his 6th season in the NBA and his brother is a rookie. After three years bouncing around the D-League, Justin just made the Golden State Warriors roster. At 6'6, he has the length to match-up with multiple positions on defense. As long as he can consistently knock down 3's, he has a chance to stick. He's 25, so he can still carve out a long career in the NBA.

They are both good athletes - the difference is Jrue is a PG and Justin is a SG. A 6'4 PG is incredibly valuable, so Jrue was accelerated his entire life. He graduated from high school at 17 and he was drafted at 19. He made the NBA at a really early age and played a small role on a good team. There were guys his age putting up much bigger stats at the college level, but that's not more impressive than what Jrue was doing.

Damian Lillard, who has played three seasons in the NBA, is the same exact age as Jrue, who has played six. Michael Carter-Williams, in his second season, is only a year younger! He doesn't get a chance to put up a bunch of stats - the Pellies slow the tempo and he shares a back-court with two ball-stoppers in Evan Gordon and Tyreke Evans - but he is really nice. Jrue is one of the most complete PG's in the league.

When the Pellies start making the playoffs, Jrue is going to be a real problem for a smaller PG in a seven-game series. He is a better two-way player than almost all of them and his ability to defend, score, shoot and pass at 6'4 200 will be tough to handle. I just like the way he plays the game - he's a very smooth player who is always under control. He is really taking care of the ball this season, with 7.2 assists on 1.8 turnovers.

Jrue Holiday is still so young that so much of his NBA future is unwritten. You don't say that very often for a six-year veteran, but not many six-year vets enter the NBA at 19. The number of seasons played in the NBA is a pretty good proxy for a guy's talent - Jrue will be a 10-year veteran at 28 and a 15-year veteran at 33. There's a reason for that and that's because he's doing a lot of things not captured by many statistics.

Cody Zeller (22)

Older brothers: Luke (27) had a few cups of coffee in the NBA. Tyler (24) is a third-year player for the Boston Celtics.

Between the Zellers and the Plumlees, two Indiana families of 7'0 produced five NBA players in recent years. At the college level, the Zellers (Luke, Tyler and Cody) were more skilled and the Plumlees (Miles, Mason and Marshall) were more athletic. Cody progressed much faster than his older brothers, who both needed four seasons in school. The youngest Zeller would have been a lottery pick after only one.

One of the reasons I think Cody is a little underrated is that it's really hard to put him in a box and compare him to another NBA player. Guys with his skill-set don't typically enter the league as young as he did. At 7'0 240, he is still physically underdeveloped in comparison to Tyler, who is closer to 250-255. As Cody adds more weight to his frame as he moves into his mid 20's, he should be a really difficult match-up for a lot of guys.

It's still early, but his numbers as a second-year player have improved across the board from his rookie season. With Josh McRoberts gone, there are a lot of minutes to be had in Charlotte and Cody is grabbing a lot of them. He's a power forward with the size of a center and the speed of a perimeter player. He has great ball-handling and passing ability for a 7'0 - you have to remember that most guys his size can barely catch a ball.

Like with most perimeter-oriented big men, Cody's ceiling will depend on his outside shot. I don't think he even needs to be a three-point shooter - as long as he can consistently knock down the 15-20 footer and force defenses to respect his shot, it will open up the rest of his game. He has the skill to play in the half-court with Al Jefferson and the speed to play in the open court with the rest of the Hornets young players.

Aaron Gordon (19)

Older brother: Drew (24) is a rookie on the Philadelphia 76ers.


Drew Gordon is a lot like Justin Holiday, in that he has bounced in and out of the NBA since graduating from college without ever finding a home. At 24, he still has time to make a name for himself in the league, but it is running out. If he doesn't make it soon, he will probably be better off making some money overseas. He is a decent athlete with a good amount of skill, but he's nowhere near as skilled or athletic as his younger brother.

Drew is a 6'9 240 PF while Aaron is a 6'9 215 SF who can swing between a number of positions on defense. He is an elite athlete with the ball-handling and passing ability of a PG who can defend every position but center. Maybe the best college game I saw all season was the Pac-12 CG between Arizona and UCLA, where AG had 11-8-8 and Kyle Anderson had 21-15-5. Those two guys were out there playing basketball.

People don't realize this because Arizona had a couple of quality guards, but you could have put Gordon in the Kyle Anderson role and UCLA wouldn't have missed much of a beat - he has the feel and unselfishness of a true PG. Unfortunately, you probably won't see too much of that in Orlando, as they have two ball-dominant guards - Victor Oladipo and Elfrid Payton - who are going to force AG to spend a lot of time off-the-ball.

When AG is 25 (which won't be until 2020!), he has the chance to be a 6'9 Andre Iguodala and I say that as someone who thinks AI has been one of the most underrated players in the league for awhile.* For now, though, you are only going to get rare flashes of that, as he will need to improve his outside shot to force defenses to guard him off the ball. If the D doesn't have to close-out on AG, it's going to be hard for him.

* Andre is also a younger brother - he had an older brother who played D1 ball at Dayton.

He's the perfect example of what I mean by a guy being young for his age. He just turned 19, so he should really be a freshman in college right now. However, he was already so good there was no point in holding him back. Either way, he should probably still be working on his scoring and shooting in college, but he's still good enough to be an NBA role player already, despite the holes in his game. The same general thing happened to MKG.

Here's a name to put in your back pocket - Utah PG Delon Wright, the younger brother of Dorrell. He's a 6'5 PG and he averages 17 points, 7.5 rebounds, 6 assists, 2.5 steals and 1.5 blocks a game on 56% shooting. You will be hearing a lot more about him this season.
Posted by at 1 comment:
Labels:

Monday, November 10, 2014

How to Beat the Mavs

After opening the season with home games against Boston and Utah, Dallas got a cold dose of reality on Sunday against Miami, who came into the AAC and administered an Old Testament style beating to the home-team. The Heat got out to a 9-point lead in the first quarter and never looked back from there. Everyone talks about how the NBA is a league of runs - the Mavs didn't make a run. It was a very un-competitive game.


That was the theme of Rick Carlisle's post-game press conference, where the coach made several remarks about the team's lack of competitiveness and willingness to fight. He was not in a very good mood, to say the least. The players all echoed him in the locker room, talking about the need to bring effort more consistently. Maybe it was just a case of a team playing their 3rd game in 4 nights, but it's never that simple in the NBA.

NBA guys are trying pretty hard on a nightly basis. There are the occasional exceptions, but for the most part, everyone is trying out there - they are professionals being paid large sums of money to maintain a certain baseline of performance. So before you start talking about effort and chemistry and intangibles, you want to look at the line-ups first. What match-ups were happening and why where they getting beaten so badly?

The way Miami played was designed almost perfectly to beat Dallas. They could (and did) exploit every weakness on this Mavs team. The game was the basic blueprint for how to beat Dallas:

1) A big man who can take Tyson Chandler away from the basket. 

Chris Bosh absolutely destroyed the Mavs - even Chandler didn't have much of a chance of guarding him. He went for 20-10-5 on 7-10 shooting. If you leave Bosh open on the perimeter, he's pretty much automatic, so you really can't put guys like Wright and Dirk on him. The problem is that even if Chandler can make Bosh work for points, playing him 20+ feet from the rim means there's no one to clean up other guy's mistakes.


Bosh got most of his assists picking apart the Mavs from the high post. It was almost laughable how easy it was. With Chandler on Bosh, it was only a matter of time before someone on Miami would have an open lane to the rim behind him.

2) Guards who can play out of the post and attack the rim. 

The way the Heat inverted their offense absolutely destroyed the Mavs - Dallas has absolutely no size on the perimeter, so they are really going to struggle against a team that can space their big men and force the guards to play 1-on-1 in the paint.

Dwyane Wade: 20 points, 10 assists, 9-18 shooting
Luol Deng: 30 points, 5 rebounds, 4 assists, 13-19 shooting
Mario Chalmers: 18 points, 4 assists, 6-9 shooting

This is kind of what it looked like all night. Notice how far apart Miami's players are from each other and how crisply they move the ball.

Dallas starts 2 under 6'3 guards in Monta Ellis and Jameer Nelson and they bring in two even smaller guys off the bench - Devin Harris and JJ Barea. There's nowhere to hide all these guys against a team like Miami which can attack you from multiple spots on the perimeter. When you put a guy who can't defend on a guy like Wade, Deng or Chalmers, they are going to light them up, especially with the amount of space Miami creates in the half-court.

3) Pack the paint to clog up the pick-and-roll

This is weird to say about a team with Dirk Nowitzki on it - Dallas doesn't do a great job of spacing the floor. They went 9-29 from 3 and a lot of those were open looks. Miami was conceding the outside shot in order to prevent the Mavs from living at the rim like they had in the first week of the season. When the guards are getting to the rim and throwing lobs to Chandler and Wright and creating shots for Dirk, the offense looks amazing.

The Celtics and the Jazz were respecting everyone's outside shot, which gave the Mavs way too much room to carve up the back-line of their defense. The Heat were like, let's make some of these guys beat us from the outside. They were sticking all over Dirk, obviously, but everyone else was given more room to fire away.

Here's how the first 6 guys in the Mavs perimeter rotation did from 3:

- Monta was 2-5, with both of his makes coming from the corner. He's a non shooter from 3.

- Jameer was 2-7. He can shoot 3's, but he has been really ineffective when you make him drive at the rim. He's shooting 4-15 from 2-point range this season. He's not a great spacer because you can always just run at him and make him put the ball on the floor. Being 5'10 doesn't help either - one of the things that made Calderon so great was his 6'4 release point.

- Parsons was 0-4. He is really struggling to play off-the-ball. You don't necessarily have to respect his catch-and-shoot game. More on him in a minute.

- Al-Farouq Aminu was 0-2. He is 3-7 from 3 on the season, but teams are more than willing to live with that shot.

- JJ Barea was 1-3. He has never been a great outside shooter. He uncorked a vicious airball off an off-the-dribble 3 - the thing must have missed the rim by 2 feet.

- Devin Harris was 1-2. He is 10-25 on the season but he is a career 32% three-point shooter who shot 31% last season. The 3 is a shot he will get all season. He had an airball of his own from 3 - as a defender, once you see a shot like that, you are not respecting the jumper any further.

The lack of shooting pretty much shut down Wright. He had 4 points on 2-2 shooting in 18 minutes, which is really low by his standards. He just had no room to operate in the paint.

Rick Carlisle made a few adjustments to his rotation in the second half, which you could start to see play out over the next few games. He brought in Richard Jefferson and Jae "The Beast" Crowder, the two guys on his bench who most closely resemble 3-and-D guys. At some point in the second quarter, it dawned on me that the Mavs would need both of those guys this season and I began to get worried.

- Jefferson was 0-2 in only 7 minutes, but he had 3 rebounds and 1 steal, so he was making an impact as a bigger body on the perimeter.

- Crowder might have been the player of the game, with 15 points on 5-6 shooting in 12 minutes. Carlisle went out of his way to praise The Beast in the presser, so expect to see more of him in the next few games. He's locked in on offense - he's clearly trying to prove a point about being benched. Whatever he can give them on that side of the ball is a bonus, because he's one of the only guys who can guard bigger wings at all.

Inserting Crowder and Jefferson into the rotation solves multiple problems - not only does it improve their overall perimeter size, it adds more spot-up shooting and allows Chandler Parsons to play with the ball in his hands more.

As it stands, the Mavs have way too many guys who replicate each other's skills. CP, Monta, Jameer, Devin, JJB - all these guys are inconsistent perimeter shooters who need the ball.

The underlying problem is that you have too many guys taking the ball out of Parsons hands. If you are giving him $15 million a year, you are expecting him to be more than a secondary play-maker who attacks close-outs. After six games, it's pretty obvious that you don't want him taking the ball away from Monta or Dirk, so there's really only a few other options in terms of getting Parsons more touches.

The idea would be to have Parsons in fewer 2 PG rotations. You want him in a second unit group where he can play as a point forward from the PF position, with some combination of Harris, AFA, Crowder and Jefferson on the perimeter and Wright or Greg Smith at 5. The basic idea is to put a lot of athletes who can shoot around Parsons and let him play in space.

That would also be the best way to leverage his abilities on defense. Here's my read on his D - if he's the worst defensive guy on the floor, you probably have a pretty good D. If he's one of the best defensive guys on the floor, you probably have a pretty bad one. That's why he was such a good fit in Houston, playing in space next to a bunch of really athletic guys.

The other possible adjustment is having Ray Felton take Barea's minutes as a back-up PG. He's bigger and he's a better outside shooter, so it's at least worth trying when he gets healthy and his four-game suspension ends.

The Mavs are going to need to do some line-up juggling, but the good news is that their coach is one of the best jugglers in the game. Carlisle usually does a pretty good job of finding line-ups that work - if there's an answer on his roster to the dilemma you give him, he will find it.

What I'm not sure about is whether there's an answer on hand. Maybe RJ and The Beast play well. Maybe they don't.

Let's take a look at the schedule and see what we can find out in the next few weeks.

Tuesday - Sacramento. Stopping Rudy Gay is one of the keys to beating these Kings. The good news is they don't have a second perimeter scorer who really scares you - although Darren Collison should be able to blow by most of the Mavs perimeter defenders. Foot-speed wise, only Aminu has a chance of staying in front of him.

Thursday - Philly. I want to live in a world where Tony Wroten can average 17 FGA's on an NBA team. He's certainly going to be able to dribble into open shots against Dallas. If he can just make them, he will score a lot of points.

Saturday - Minnesota. We'll see how they are doing without Ricky Rubio. Zach LaVine and Andrew Wiggins are in town, so that should be fun.

Then it goes at Hornets, at Wizards, Lakers, at Rockets, Pacers, Knicks, at Raptors, at 76ers. They have a real soft schedule coming up and not many of those teams can hurt you like the Heat can. The upcoming games that jump out are Houston, New York and Toronto. Those are the teams who can spread the floor and hurt you from multiple spots on the perimeter.

If all goes according to plan (and even if it doesn't), the Mavs should win a lot of games in November. However, if you want to know how they are going to stack up as a playoff contender, look at how their perimeter D fares in those three games.
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, November 7, 2014

Marcus Lattimore

There was a good story in Grantland about Marcus Lattimore, the former South Carolina RB who just retired from the NFL after never recovering from a devastating knee injury he suffered in college. Michael Baumann did a good job laying out the quid-pro-quo - Lattimore made a ton of money for South Carolina and not only was he not directly compensated, he ended up losing any chance of making real money in the pro ranks.

He is, however, missing a few steps in the process. I can't speak for what happens at South Carolina, but as someone who went to Texas, I do have some experience with the ways in which players are compensated by big-time state schools. I'm not talking about under the table payments either - I'm talking about the amount of money you can make from your association with the school after you retire from playing.

Former UT players are all over Austin. They have their own restaurants, they work for the school in a ton of various goodwill jobs, they work in the media covering the team. I know Vince Young has a job in the PR department and has done stuff with The Longhorn Network, as has Ricky Williams. Earl Campbell has worked with the athletic department for years. My guess is Marcus Lattimore will be able to eat off USC football for as long as he wants.


Does that make it OK that he's not getting paid cash money for all the revenue he generated for the school? Probably not, but it is something to take into account when you start talking about the relationship between players and the schools. It really is different than playing for a pro sports franchise - when done correctly, it is a life-long connection that pays off for both player and school for the next 40+ years.

You see it all the time at UT. Guys come back to get their degrees after a few years in school and they don't have a lot of money left. NFL money is fast money - it comes at you real quickly, you have a hundred different hands in your pocket trying to get a piece and it's hard to hold on to for too long. The main problem is the structure in which you are paid as a pro athlete, which doesn't tend to encourage solid financial decisions.

In most professions, you start out with a small amount of money and you gradually increase your salary over time, as you move up the ranks and are given more and more responsibility. For the most part, you don't really start to come into money until you are in your 30's, when you are more likely to have a family to support as opposed to supporting a drinking habit in your 20's. It's a career arc that makes sense psychologically.


Me personally, I didn't begin saving money until I was 25. That was about the time I made the connection that just because I made money didn't mean I had to spend all of it. When you have money and you go out a lot, you can always just go out more. Next thing you know, you don't have any more money. I look back on it now and me trying to save money was like trying to keep sand from going through my fingers.

Saving money isn't about the money you make - it's about the money you spend. It doesn't matter how much money you make if you spend it as quickly as you make it. You can make a few million dollars and live a multi-million dollar lifestyle and not have anything in the bank to show for it. If you're a pro athlete, it's hard to keep up with the Joneses when the Joneses are making hundreds of millions of dollars.

The good thing about going to a school like UT, though, is that you always have a place to come home too where people still know your name. Whatever happens to RG3 in the NFL, he will always get love in Waco. It's the same with Vince and Ricky and Colt McCoy and a ton of other guys who made a name for themselves in Austin. Even if you weren't a big name guy, if you played football at UT and you have a degree, you aren't going to starve.

The money you get in your 30's and your 40's - that's slow money. That's the money you build wealth with and save for retirement. A former D1 football or basketball player with a degree can always coach somewhere. It's pretty easy for former athletes to get a job in business, especially in sales and dealing with clients. Media is always an option, although that can be a pretty crowded lane to get into. Point being, the money doesn't stop when you leave school.

None of this makes the NCAA's current business model any more morally defensible, especially with TV contracts in the billions of dollars that are going to force kids to cram extra games into a season for a playoff. They make huge sums of money off these players and then slide that revenue into all sorts of random places that really don't need it. D1 basketball and football subsidizes a cornucopia of Olympic sports that no one cares about.

Nevertheless, there is another side to this story beyond the NCAA is the big, bad wolf. Marcus Lattimore is never going to make the tens of millions that he could have made in an alternative universe where he entered the NFL at 18, but he is going to be made whole. That's a huge element of recruiting too - letting the prospects know they are entering a family that extends way beyond the playing field.

There is something qualitatively different about the relationship between a "student-athlete" and a school and an employee and a pro sports team. When I was younger, I was all for giving these guys as much money as they deserve. As I get older, I'm starting to think the real problem is the NFL and the NBA. If they would stop being Scrooge McDuck-level cheap, they would create their own minor leagues and stop trying to pawn it off on the colleges.

How much money does an NFL team make, really? If you could look beyond their undoubtedly crooked books, I'm guessing it's a positively ungodly sum on an annual basis. They could easily afford to have 2-3 levels of minor leagues for 18-21 years olds, just like they do in baseball. NFL teams are always bitching about how hard it is to develop QB's - how about you do it yourselves? The NCAA isn't stopping you.

The reality of the situation, though, is that Pandora has already opened the Box and there's too much revenue flowing into the college game for them to realistically expect to keep a Chinese Wall up forever between the players and the money. You are not going to see me here crying about how college players getting paid market value is some great crime against humanity, but I do worry that something will be lost in translation.

Here's a good story about this.

I was two years ahead of Kevin Durant at UT, so I didn't know him personally or anything. I did see him around from time to time, though, as it's hard to miss a 6'11 guy walking around campus. The athletic dorm was right in the middle of campus, so no matter where you were, you often ended up walking through Gregory and Jester at some point in the day. For the most part, he was just kind of like any other student.

People knew who he was, sure, but UT is really not a big basketball school at all. Until football season ends, the average student, even if they are a sports fan, isn't paying much attention. I remember going to non-conference games in November and December and paying $15-20 for lower bowl tickets. It wasn't until conference play started to get going that he became a bonafide celebrity and the games became events.

I remember it was sometime in April, after the season had ended, that I was grabbing some food at Jester and I saw him walking around to a few different tables in the cafeteria, saying bye to people. And then I realized that he has to go train for the draft, he can't stay until the end of the semester. Once he leaves here and gets on a plane, his life is never going to be the same. It could have been some shit out of a movie.

What was weird was that the next time he would see most of these people (if he ever saw them again), the relationship would be so different. Instead of being relative equals - they knew of a few of the same girls, they saw it each other at some parties - he would be this worldwide celebrity and the other guy would be some college student. Once he left UT, no one was ever going to treat him like a normal person for a very, very long time.

When he was walking around campus in the fall, people knew who he was, but it was more like in the sense that he was one of the popular kids whom everyone knew. It wasn't like walking down a city street in Seattle or OKC when you are worth tens of millions of dollars and everyone is counting on you to carry the franchise. That's my guess as to why he reps UT so hard so many years later - it's his last connection to a normal life.

Does that mean UT didn't come out way, way, way ahead in that relationship? Of course not. At the same time, I can't say that his one year of college didn't have some value. Nor do I know that throwing a bunch of cash at a bunch of 18-year olds is going to solve all of their problems. There's more to the amateurism discussion than what's typically presented in the media, though I guess that can be said about any topic.

Posted by at No comments:

Antawn Jamison

At RealGM, putting his career into perspective.
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Texas Basketball Draft Talk

At Barking Carnival, a look at the NBA prospects of the Longhorns players.
Posted by at No comments:

Cavs Interior Defense

As much fun as it is to psycho-analyze LeBron, throw shade at Kyrie and enjoy everything about Dion Waiters, we shouldn't let it all overshadow the fundamental problem the Cavs have right now - they can't protect the rim. If another team gets the ball into the lane, it's too easy to score.


Here's a nice trend that is starting to develop on this West Coast road trip:

Robin Lopez: 19 points, 8-11 shooting
Derrick Favors: 21 points, 9-13 shooting
Enes Kanter: 18 points on 8-13 shooting.

They better thank the basketball gods they don't have to swing through Sacramento right now. Matching up with Timofey Mozgov and Jusuf Nurkic in Denver will be tough enough.


I would be a lot more worried about the Portland loss than the Utah one, which came in altitude on the second night of a back-to-back against one of the biggest front-lines in the league. No offense to my man Ro Lo, but if he's going to big boy you out of the game, you could be in trouble. If you are a C worth your salt, you are looking at Cleveland's front-line and getting excited. As Shaq would say - BBQ chicken! The good news for Kevin Love is that not many NBA teams start two guys who can score with their back to the basket.

When they play Memphis, tho.

This was always going to be a problem with Cleveland's roster. None of Anderson Varejao, Kevin Love and Tristan Thompson have averaged over a block a game in their career. Take a look at this Trevor Booker dunk and notice what Thompson is (not) doing.



For whatever reason, it appears that LeBron doesn't have too much respect for the C position. I guess he just figures he'll get enough scoring around him that he can blow bigger teams off the floor because that's twice he assembled a super-team without any concern for acquiring a big man who can control the paint. It eventually worked in Miami, but it's hard to watch what's going on in Cleveland and not think - didn't we just leave this party?

The Heat made up for their lack of size by trapping very aggressively and trying to overwhelm teams with their length and athleticism. LeBron and D Wade were defensive terrors in Miami's small-ball scheme, protecting the rim, turning other teams over and getting the game going up-and-down, where their superior athleticism could take over. The Big Three in Miami averaged 2.3 blocks a game in their first season together.

Even with all that, though, they were constantly having to make up for a lack of size upfront - Roy Hibbert pretty much made his reputation on three playoff series against Miami. Yet, somehow, Cleveland is even smaller. Chris Bosh is WAY longer, more athletic and capable of playing interior defense than Kevin Love. The Cavs don't even have someone like Chris "Birdman" Anderson on their roster right now - the Heat don't win a second ring without him.

** Javale McGee to Cleveland has to happen, for so many different reasons.

There are ways to overcome such a deficiency, but they require everyone working together and playing on a string on both sides of the ball. It's going to take some time for it all to sort out. My guess is Cleveland is going to have to out-score other teams because I don't see the personnel on hand to dictate tempo on the defensive end of the floor, especially as LeBron's athletic ability slips as he goes deeper into his 30's.

In essence, the Cavs are a boxer with a weak chin. They have got a really strong over-hand right, but they got to protect that chin and any guy with enough power can take them down.

Looking over the rest of the month, they don't face a ton of imposing front-lines. The one opponent that jumps out in their next few games is Anthony Davis, as they don't have anyone on the roster who can challenge his shot and prevent him from living at the rim. If David Blatt can figure out a way for this team to defend AD, he really is a basketball genius.

We should get a glimpse of how much they have improved their interior defense in the middle of November, when they go SA (Duncan), at WAS (Nene/Gortat), TOR (Jonas), ORL (Vucevic), WAS. They should be glad they aren't in the West - imagine if they had to run a gauntlet like the Kings do at the end of November, when they play 8 Southwest Division games in a little over 2 weeks.

The toughest stretch of games they have in the near future probably comes in the middle of December:

12/12 - at New Orleans (Davis)
12/15 - Charlotte (Al Jefferson)
12/17 - Atlanta (Al Horford)
12/19 - Brooklyn (Brook Lopez)
12/21 - Memphis (Z-Bo and Marc Gasol)
12/23 - Minnesota (Nik Pekovic)

They better be guarding those guys as a team, because they don't have anyone on hand who can guard them individually.

The stuff about sharing the ball and figuring out roles on the offense - that will get settled eventually. An inability to protect the rim and match-up with bigger front-lines, though, could be their Achilles heel all season.
Posted by at 2 comments:

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Portland's Bench

With the season still only a little over a week old, it is still way too early to jump to many conclusions about any team. As a general rule, schedules will even out, guys will cool off or heat up and things will regress to the mean. At this point, most of the stuff that jumps out to me is eye test stuff that may or may not hold up over a longer time period. All that said, there are a few things to worry about already. Here's one - Portland's bench.

Sometimes, all it takes is one play to throw up the red flags. For me, it came in the second quarter of Portland's loss to Golden State on Monday, when Steve Blake was matched up against Klay Thompson and Thompson blew past him on the base-line as if he wasn't even there. Thompson ended up going for 29 points on 11-22 shooting and all I could think was, I don't know if the Blazers second unit is good enough to contend.

Blake is the perfect example of the problem. This is a guy the Warriors traded for at the deadline, although they didn't have to give up much (MarShon Brooks and Kent Bazemore) to acquire him. They ran him out there for a few months and decided that he wasn't good enough - they let him go for nothing and added Shaun Livingston and Leandro Barbosa to the roster. If Blake was still in Golden State, he would be the 11th man.

At this point in his career, that's probably the best use for his skill-set. He's still a decent NBA PG with decent size (6'3 185) who can function as an emergency starter in a pinch and keep an offense afloat for a few weeks after an injury. However, the days of him being an effective rotation player on an elite team may have come and gone. The first red flag is that he has been on 6 teams in the last 6 seasons, including 2 stops in Portland.

If you look at his stats, you can see why. In the last 4 seasons, he has only been over 40% shooting once - 2012 with the Lakers, when he was playing in MDA's PG porn offense that boosts everyone's numbers. As long as his three-point shooting doesn't fall off he won't be completely useless, but he doesn't have great quickness or size on defense and he can no longer get to the rim on offense. He's becoming a 34-year old Derek Fisher.

A two-PG line-up with Blake and Damian Lillard is going to bleed just as many points as one with Dame and Mo Williams, except it won't be nearly as explosive on offense. Williams was an important part of the Blazers team last season and Blake won't be able to replace him. While their competitors in the West were upgrading their bench, Portland was downgrading theirs, which is never a good sign for a team trying to improve.

They did bring in Chris Kaman to add more scoring to their second unit, but he has the same red flag as Blake in terms of being on his fifth team in five seasons. While he has always been able to put up big stats, you have to wonder about a guy who hasn't been able to stick anywhere since he moved into his late 20's. His defense is really bad and the two-man unit of Kaman and Blake could get absolutely shredded in a seven-game series.

Where Portland has to get better is through internal improvement, namely two young guards who they have drafted in recent years - CJ McCollum and Will "The Thrill" Barton. While they have been competing for PT with each other, the Blazers would be better off if they were both getting minutes. That is not to say they would both produce if given bigger roles, but that Portland needs them to if they are going to take the next step out West.

Here's the best case scenario with those guys: Barton becomes Manu Ginobili and McCollum becomes Patty Mills. To be clear, there's almost no situation where Barton becomes as good as a future Hall of Famer. What I'm saying is that he has the skill-set to be a 6th man you can run a lot of offense through on the wing, which in turn would open up McCollum for the role he's best suited for - coming into the game and bombing away from 3.

Barton was a really high-usage player in college who averaged 18 points, 8 rebounds and 3 assists a game on 51% shooting at Memphis. He has never been given that type of freedom in Portland, as he is such a wild player that point Barton would almost inevitably result in on-floor choas. However, he does have the chops for it - he's very fast and very long, he can dribble into the lane and he has shown flashes of real passing ability.

I don't know if he is ready for that type of role, but this is his 3rd season in the NBA. At a certain point, you have to know what you have with the young guys you have drafted. That was one of the biggest pluses from Mark Jackson's tenure in Golden State - he wasn't scared to give guys like Harry Barnes, Draymond Green and Festus Ezeli big minutes right away. Now, all three have big roles on one of the best benches in the NBA.

It's the same deal with McCollum, whom Portland spent a lottery pick on two years ago. A small-market franchise that isn't very active in free agency can't afford to just punt on an asset like that, not if they want to make real noise in the West. It's not like he's a developmental guy - McCollum was a four-year senior without a ton of athletic ability. The stuff he's good at - hoisting 3's and handling the ball - should have translated right away.

McCollum's problem is that it's hard to pair him with another PG like Lillard or Blake because of what it does to your defense. With two small guards in the game, Portland has very little chance to match up with a big SG like Klay Thompson. McCollum needs to share a back-court with a big wing like Barton. In theory, those two have fairly complementary games and they could give the Blazers a different dimension on their bench.

The idea would be you give Barton the ball on the wing and he drives and kicks to McCollum for 3 - basically Manu plus Mills in SA. I like the idea of running offense on your second unit through a 6'6 guy, because it gives your team a different look and allows you to put a pure scorer at the PG position. You look at what Mills can do for the Spurs - he comes into the game and guns the ball, shooting 43% on 4 3's a game.

That's the role that best makes sense for McCollum. He came into the league with the reputation of an elite shooter, as he was a career 38% 3-point shooter from Lehigh on 6 attempts a game. He's not going to give you great defense and he probably doesn't have the size or athleticism to make a living in the lane that a guy like Barton can, so if he's going to be a good NBA player, it's going to come from lighting teams up from deep.

Maybe McCollum and Barton aren't reliable enough to have big roles on offense and aren't good enough on defense to prevent the team from bleeding points. That's certainly a possibility. However, I can tell you right now that Blake is just good enough to get you beat in a playoff series. If the Blazers don't believe in their young guys, they had better start thinking trade. The West is too good to get away with the bench they are using right now.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)