The Kevin Durant/Russell Westbrook pick and pop with Durant coming off of a screen away from the basketball is a play that the Oklahoma City Thunder ran against the Memphis Grizzlies in the past with mixed success. When they ran it against Tony Allen, the Thunder struggled to score:
The reason that the Grizzlies are able to stop the Thunder’s pick and pop here is because Allen has absolutely no interest in hedging on Russell Westbrook coming off of the screen. This allows him to stay attached to Durant’s body and prevent the pass from going to him.
However, when they ran it with Shane Battier covering him, they had some success due to Battier’s tendency to hedge on Westbrook coming off of the screen:
For whatever reason, Battier decides to hedge and this allows Durant to get off of his defender’s body and cut to the rim where he gets the pass and the dunk.
Before game one of the Eastern Conference Finals started, I took a look at the Bulls’ pick and roll and how I thought the Heat were going to attack it on the defensive end (with trapping). As expected, the Heat did a fair amount of trapping when Derrick Rose came off of ballscreens, and there were mixed results. Early on, the Rose and the Bulls struggled with the Heat’s defense:
Here, Rose takes the trap on, dribble backwards, and tries to thread a bounce pass to Carlos Boozer at the top of the key, but James is there to get the steal. To me, it is as if Rose saw the trap, knew his read was to make the pass to Boozer, and did so without really looking at the defense. Almost as if he was surprised that James rotated so quickly to Boozer and wasn’t expecting it.
Something you are going to hear about today when reading about game one of the Eastern Conference Finals is how the Chicago Bulls absolutely dominated the Miami Heat on the offensive glass. The Bulls grabbed nineteen offensive rebounds and scoring 31 second chance points off of those offensive rebounds. Looking at offensive rebound rate, the Bulls grabbed 41.3% of all available offensive rebound opportunities.
The Bulls are one of the best offensive rebounding teams in terms of ORR (4th in the NBA with an ORR of 29.4%), but this performance wasn’t all Chicago as Miami helped out the Bulls making a few different errors, meaning that Miami’s poor defensive rebounding is correctable. Specifically, there were two big problems with the Heat’s defensive rebounding, they didn’t box out the shooter on occasion and they failed to rotate properly and box out.
Poor Rotations
In my opinion, the biggest problem that the Miami Heat had on the offensive glass was their rotations. The Heat are a quick defense that does a fantastic job helping and rotating to the basketball. However, last night, the Heat never finished off their rotations, meaning that the help man came and stopped/bothered the shot, but nobody had his back, allowing for an offensive rebound:
On this play, there is a loose ball/scramble situation and Joel Anthony ends up matched up with Derrick Rose. Rose drives baseline, and James Jones does a good job of stepping up and forcing Rose to take a floater that he misses. LeBron James slides over to get in front of Taj Gibson, but nobody slides over to get the man he leaves (Joakim Noah). This allows Noah to go up tap the basketball and keep it alive, eventually allowing Taj Gibson to get the rebound and get fouled.
With 5:30 left in the fourth quarter in game one against the Miami Heat, the Chicago Bulls were looking to extend their twelve point lead and put the game away. To do so, the Bulls went to a play/set that they just don’t run often, a Derrick Rose/Kyle Korver pick and pop.
So why would Tom Thibodeau run a play in the fourth quarter of the Eastern Conference Finals when he hasn’t ran it all postseason and ran it just three times (0.5% of Korver’s total possessions) during the regular season? Because he saw a situation where he could exploit the Heat’s defensive strategy:
As Derrick Rose brings the basketball up, Mario Chalmers is playing off of him standing around the three point. As soon as Rose crosses halfcourt, Korver runs up and sets a screen on Chalmers.
