With around 30 seconds left, the Grizzlies and the Hornets were in a tight game.  The Grizzlies were up by 1 point with the ball on the side.  They were able to execute, meanwhile, the Hornets who got the ball down 3 were unable to.  That turned out to be the ballgame.

As the ball gets handed to Rudy Gay, Zach Randolph is going to set a downscreen to free up Mike Conley.

Conley makes the catch, and as he dribbles to the top of the three point line, he receives a screen from Marc Gasol.

David West is going to hedge out on this screen very hard, as Collison goes underneath the screen.  I think New Orleans decided to defend the screen like this because Conley isn’t the best defender and can be forced into turnovers at time.  Another possibility for New Orleans was that they were looking to trap the screen and Collison screwed up by going under it.

Conley makes a smart decision here as he sees Collison go under the screen.  He takes a dribble backwards, forcing West in a decision.  Does he return to Gasol, or does he stay with Conley?

West decides to stay with Conley, deciding that a switch was too hard to pull off.  However, as Conley took his dribble backwards, Marc Gasol turned himself around and set a screen on the other side.  Look what we have here now.  The Hornets have both defenders involved in the screen and roll on the wrong side of the screen, with nobody in an area to hedge or help.

As Conley comes off the screen, there is nobody to direct him away from the paint.  With Peja forced to stay close to Rudy Gay he can’t get too deep in the paint.

This gives Conley enough space to hit a runner in the lane.

Now lets compare that to what the Hornets did on the very next possession:

This thing is a mess from the start.  First, Marcus Thornton takes off way too early (before Peja even gets the ball), so early that he doesn’t even have a screen to run off of.  This kind of throws everything off.  Darius Songaila now has nobody to screen, and he pops out way too high and sets an awful screen while trying to free up Collison.  The ball finally gets inbounded and swung around to the wing, but by the time that does happen there is such poor floor spacing.  So when Collison drives the lane, Marc Gasol only needs to take one step to be in possession to get the block.  Gasol does block it (off of Collison’s head in fact) and clinches the game.