When you talk about the Dallas Mavericks and their defense, you can’t help but bring up their zone defense.  This is because they ran the zone 10.5% of the time, and had so much success with it, holding opponents to just 0.881 points per possession when they went up against Dallas’ zone.

Also, I am bringing this up because you should expect to see some zone tonight, because in each of the three games against the Lakers, the Mavericks have played zone, specifically, the Mavericks played 21 possessions of zone.  We all know about the Lakers’ struggle against the zone last year in their series with the Phoenix Suns, but the Lakers are a decent zone team, scoring 0.968 points per possession against the zone during the regular season.  In fact, against the Mavericks’ zone, the Lakers have been even more successful, scoring 28 points in those 21 possessions, good for a PPP of 1.33.

In my opinion, one of the reasons why the Lakers were so successful against Dallas’ zone is because they always seemed prepared for it, not getting caught of guard, and not having many possessions of simply passing it around the outside (which is what happened against Phoenix last playoffs).  So what was Los Angeles’ strategy?  The wanted to get the ball in the paint (the underbelly of the zone), and to do so they used cuts off of the basketball, with most of them coming out of their triangle offense:

The end result of all of these plays are shots in the paint.  This really goes to show you that when the Lakers are determined to run their stuff, no matter against zone or man, they can have success.

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One of the posts I had planned to do today was looking at James Jones and how he was able to get so many clean looks.  However, there was so much quality content on this topic, that it didn’t make sense to duplicate the great work done.  So I figured I’d link to the great work done by Kevin Arnovitz at the Heat Index and Chris Forsberg at ESPNBoston.

Definitely head over there and check out their thoughts/breakdown of how James Jones was allowed to be the X-factor in game one.

While everybody is talking about the Grizzlies’ post offense (and rightfully so, because they were awesome yesterday), the Grizzlies also excelled in other aspects of their offense, specifically their pick and roll game.  According to Synergy Sports Technology, the Grizzlies scored 33 points on 26 possessions, good for a PPP of 1.26.  When watching through the Grizzlies’ pick and roll offense, it becomes obvious who the Grizzlies were attacking, and that is Kendrick Perkins.

The reason why the Grizzlies were attacking Perkins is because he isn’t the quickest big man around, and Memphis was hoping getting Perkins moving around would result in open shots, and they were right:

This play early in the first quarter shows you exactly why the Grizzlies were looking to involve Kendrick Perkins in pick and roll defense, and that is because they were looking to exploit his poor foot speed.  Here, Perkins is hedging, looking to keep Mike Conley out of the lane, which he does.  However, this leaves Marc Gasol open, and Perkins is unable to range over and challenge the shot.

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It is safe to say that the Grizzlies’ bigs really hurt the Thunder with their ability to score in the paint.  Late in the fourth quarter, Memphis was able to take advantage of this dual threat, forcing the defense (specifically Serge Ibaka) into a tough decision, one that resulted in a shooting foul for the Grizzlies:

After taking the basketball from the side, Mike Connley brought the ball to the top of the key, where he got a screen from Marc Gasol.  As he used that screen, Zach Randolph, who was on the opposite block, moved with the basketball to set up and post up on the strong side.

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When doing the Clipboard Awards, I got a lot of flack for continuously putting Erik Spoelstra at the top of the list of good post-timeout plays.  Part of the reason is the same reason why Doc Rivers (in my opinion) doesn’t get the credit that he deserves, he has really good players on his team.  To me, that isn’t much of an argument because despite the good players, you need to put them in position to score.  Late in the 2nd quarter of their game against the Celtics, Spoelstra drew up a great misdirection play, that resulted in Dwyane Wade driving to the rim without any help coming in a timely fashion:

The play starts with LeBron James taking the basketball out and entering it to Mario Chalmers at the top of the key.  Once Chalmers gets the basketball, Dwyane Wade comes off of a screen away from the basketball at the opposite elbow to free himself up at the wing.

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