Every morning (or late-afternoon), I am going to breakdown the some key possessions from the previous night’s games. Good possessions/bad possessions you can find them all here.
Last night there were two close games, both ending with the losing team having a chance to tie the game with a 3. Both teams ended up with a tough look from the corner.
Every Monday, I will be picking the one game from the upcoming week that I find most interesting and I will break it down.
There are some real good games coming up this week, but the one that caught my attention when I was looking ahead at the schedule was the Suns-Kings game on Tuesday night. The first reason being you have Tyreke Evans vs. Steve Nash. The second, both teams love to run the court, and when they get going, it is real fun to watch.
The Last Time They Met
Kings “Go To” Set
Tyreke Evans in the post. The Kings started off the game having Evans run right into the post. Not only did he score out of the post, but he forced the Suns defense to rotate towards him, allowing for other Kings’ players. It was so successful that the Suns were forced to switch defenders on him (going from Nash to Grant Hill) just three possessions in.
The Suns might not match Nash up against Evans, but Evans will be covering Nash, so there will be times where Nash will be forced to cover Evans, and when that happens, look for Tyreke to run straight to the post.
Suns “Go To” Set
The Pick and Roll/Pick and Pop. You guys already know my love for the pick and roll, and when the Suns run it, they are very dangerous. Steve Nash is such a good decision maker, you can’t let him get a clean run off the screen, so most teams switch the Suns pick and roll. Whenever this happens, Nash doesn’t force it, he backs it out and uses the mismatch to his advantage:
The Suns run this a ton, and it is a major key to their offense, along with the fast break.
Kings’ Weakness
Late in the game, it turned into the “Tyreke Evans Show” in a bad way. They got him the ball early in the clock on the wing, and as the rest of the team stood and watched, Evans tried to score, it didn’t work out too well. However, when the rest of the team was touching the ball and it was getting swung around, the Kings were scoring. They just didn’t do enough of this late.
Now, I had video to support this, but for some reason, the fourth quarter footage that I have from the game isn’t jiving with the my video program.
Suns’ Weakness
The Suns tend to get 3 point happy every once in a while, it helped them pull away from the Kings late (Up 5 under 2 minutes left, they still were able to get 3 more threes up), but if they would have missed a couple of these shots, they would have shot Sacramento back in it.
When you watch a NBA game, there is a pretty good chance that you will see a pick and roll ran a couple times. It is one of the few sets that you see every team in the NBA run. The reason? When run correctly, the pick and roll is probably the hardest play in the NBA to defend. This is because there are so many options: you got the guy coming off the screen, you have the screener either rolling to the basket or popping out for a jumper. Not only that, but because you have all eyes focused on the two men running the pick and roll there are opportunities for the cutters or guys spotting up for 3. I put together a video of all 30 teams running the pick and roll. What I think is awesome about this (besides the fact I made it) is that this is one play ran just about 30 different ways. Enjoy (3 or 4 NSFW words in there):
