This has been a talking point for me a couple of times in the past, and last night, the Thunder’s late game execution cost them another game. This doesn’t mean the Thunder haven’t been successful late, but those successes came from quick hitters, and when Durant is used as a decoy. However, the Thunder really seem to struggle (especially when coming out of timeouts) when they try to run sets to get Kevin Durant the ball. That is what happened yet again last night:
In the above play, you can tell that Durant really wants the basketball. He has what he thinks is a mismatch with Monta Ellis on him, and he wants to take advantage of it. However, there is a ton of confusion for the Thunder on the offensive end here. As Westbrook brings up the ball, there is a lot of standing around, and when the team finally gets into a set, they kind of just jog through the motions. Jogging through sets isn’t really effective, because when you are jogging the opposition knows that you aren’t a threat. When they know that, that is one less thing the defense needs to worry about (rewatch the video from an old post. Durant sprints through his cut, forcing attention and freeing up Jeff Green). Eventually the ball gets swung to Jeff Green, who to his credit tries to attack. However, the poor spacing causes the ball to get stripped.
After a series of really bone-headed plays where we saw two fouls that shouldn’t of happened (Martell Webster’s foul to give when the Blazers didn’t have one/Derek Fisher’s foul on a three point shot), the Lakers were down three points with about three seconds left. The Lakers have 4 three point threats on the court in Sasha Vujacic, Lamar Odom, Derek Fisher, and of course Kobe Bryant. Instead of running a play for one of those guys, Phil Jackson decided to run one for Pau Gasol who was 0-4 from the three-point line before the play started:
The play starts with Fisher running off of a double screen set by Pau Gasol and Sasha Vujacic.
One of the cool things about running a blog is that you occasionally get the pleasure of having advanced copies of books sent to you to check out. In this case, the book is Stumbling on Wins, the new book by Dave Berri and Martin Schmidt, authors of a book I reference a lot on this site: The Wages of Wins. So why am I telling you about this? Well, in addition to the copy that was sent to me, there were a couple copies to give away. So what better way to give these two copies away than to have a contest where you need to answer some stat related questions?
Here are the rules. I am going to ask 4 questions, and you can submit the answers in the comments (make sure you are using your correct e-mail address, because this is how I will be getting in contact with the winners). When you submit your answers you automatically get one entry, and for every question you get right, you get an additional entry.
So let’s say you get 3 questions right. You will have 4 entries in the drawing (the most you can get is 6). I will accept entries until 8:00 AM (48 hours) Wednesday morning, and will announce the winners around 10. Hopefully, if everything works out I will get the books out to the winners that day. Questions after the jump:
