Utah Executes Brilliantly Out Of A Timeout Late
After a broken play where Oklahoma City scored to put the Thunder up 1 with 5.0 seconds left, the Utah Jazz needed a basket coming out of a timeout, and Jerry Sloan sure didn’t disappoint. What happened afterwords (I am not even getting into it) shouldn’t take away from that:
The Jazz are set up in your standard box set coming out of a timeout. Usually, you will have your point guard come up from the low post off of a screen on the elbow. Instead, Carlos Boozer simply turns around, pins his man (Jeff Green) on his back, and makes the catch.
After C.J. Miles makes the inbounds pass, he cuts backdoor, as if he is running off of a backscreen. In regards to that backscreen, it never really happens. Deron Williams sets himself up as if he is setting the backscreen, but he doesn’t even stop to sell the fake screen. Williams then curls around to receive a handoff from Carlos Boozer.
As you can see, this “fake screen” causes some confusion, and this is because teams love to switch every screen late (we have talked about this a ton on the site). Here, Thabo Sefolosha is switching, and he hangs around the low block waiting to pick up C.J. Miles. Up top, James Harden sticks with Miles for a split second before he realizes what is going on, but by the time he does, Williams is already getting the handoff. Speaking of the handoff, Jeff Green is doing a very good job of getting right into Boozer’s body (so that he doesn’t turn around). The problem is though, that he is stuck to the body of Boozer, and that makes him unable to help on Williams.
Both Harden and Green are too late to bother Williams’ shot, and he calmly knocks down the go-ahead jumper. Here it is in real time:
