What Were The Spurs Trying To Run On That Ginobili Shot?
We have looked at the play before it, and the play after it, and now we are going to take a look at the play that resulted in one of the craziest shots of the season. With the Spurs trailing the Grizzlies by three points with 9.4 seconds left, they had one timeout left and the basketball on the side. Deciding it was time to go for the three point shot, Gregg Popovich drew up a play to try and get a look from behind the three point line. The result was mayhem:
The inbounds pass to Ginobili gets deflected, and after a few more deflections, the basketball ends up back in his hands. Ginobili tries to get behind the three point line, but is unable to and gets off one of the longest twos you can take, knocking it down and putting his team down one point.
It was a crazy play, but I couldn’t help but wonder what the Spurs were trying to run, because it did look familiar. If you were reading this site over a year ago, you might have recognized it from a Spurs-Cavs game last March:
It is hard to tell if these two plays are the same live, but if you break it down piece by piece, you notice that it was the same play:
The first thing that you should probably notice is the clock. No, not the fact that the score was the same (eerie!), but look at the time. There was 9.0 seconds left last season, and there was 9.4 seconds left tonight. The play starts with George Hill (in both instances) running a rub screen for the man in the corner, Gary Neal instead of Roger Mason Jr.
As Neal (and Mason Jr.) is coming off of the rub screen to the top of the key, Manu Ginobili takes off towards the corner. This is where the plays start to get a little different, but not by design. Instead of going under Parker against the Grizzlies, Ginobili goes over Duncan, taking a strange path to the basketball.
Once Ginobili makes the catch in the corner, the play is designed for Gary Neal (or Roger Mason Jr.) to come off of a backscreen set by Duncan, get the pass from Ginobili, and take the three. That never happened last night because the ball got deflected. Here is another look at Ginboili’s crazy shot:
First, I can just imagine coach Popovich with a notebook of his plays categorized by how much time he needs to run each one, and that is a pretty awesome image. Second, and maybe most importantly, if the pass doesn’t get deflected, I don’t know if the Spurs get off a clean look.
This is all because Ginobili goes over top of Duncan for whatever reason. Maybe it was the defensive pressure, maybe he just had a gut feeling that he had to get to the basketball, but the second Ginobili goes over the screen, the play is dead. You notice it takes longer for the ball to get to Ginobili, forcing Neal to step up and be a safety valve. This makes him too far away from Duncan to actually run off of the screen effectively.
We will never know if they play would have worked or not, and in the end it all worked out for San Antonio, but it is interesting (at least in my opinion) to see what they were at least trying to run late.
