Over at SBNation I did a pretty detailed post looking at one halfcourt set, one SLOB set, and one BLOB set I expect to see each team run during the course of the series:
According to Synergy Sports Technology, the 2011 NBA Finals matchup between the Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heatfeatures the two best half court teams in the playoffs in terms of points per possession. The Mavericks have scored 1299 points in 1320 possessions (0.984 PPP), while the Heat have scored 1212 points in 1322 possessions (0.917 PPP). This means that we are going to see very efficient half-court offenses with a lot of interesting and effective sets from both teams. In addition to half-court offense, scoring from set inbounds plays (both from the side and from the baseline) is also very important.
Here, we are going to take a look at a set in each situation that you will probably see run during these NBA Finals:
If there has been one set that the Dallas Mavericks have run during the postseason whenever they were in trouble, it was the pick and pop with either Jason Terry or J.J. Barea as the ball handler and Dirk Nowitzki as the screener.
During their series against the Chicago Bulls, the Miami Heat trapped Derrick Rose hard coming off of just about every single ball screen. This wasn’t an adjustment that Miami made specifically for the Bulls’ series, instead, it has been the Heat’s defensive strategy all season long. So will the the Heat be willing to double/hedge hard on the ball handler when the Mavericks run the pick and pop with Dirk Nowitzki as the screener? Going through their two regular season match-ups, you see that the Heat will at least try to hedge hard on the ball handler, even when it is Nowitzki setting the screens:
During their playoff run to the finals, the Miami Heat haven’t seen much zone (only three possessions to be exact), but that is about to change in the finals as they get ready to match up against the Dallas Mavericks. While the Mavericks have played less zone in the playoffs than they did in the regular season (5.2% vs. 10%), you can definitely expect them to play zone, and stay in it. In their two regular season games, Dallas played zone against Miami 56 out of 179 halfcourt possessions (31.2% of total hc possessions). Miami scored on just 41.1% of these possessions, compared to the 44% success rate they had against Dallas’ man to man defense.
While these two teams haven’t even played in 2011, we can use their match-ups to give us an idea of how the Heat will try to handle their zone (they had pretty much the same zone offense all season long). When they are having success with their zone offense, the Heat like to run the set and try to do two things out of it. Either work the middle on a flash by a big, or screen the top of the zone:
Here, you see the Heat flashing a big to the middle of the paint with the goal of getting him the basketball. Once you get that ball in the middle of the zone, the defense becomes very vulnerable. In this case, it allows Chris Bosh (and Joel Anthony once) to make the catch and operate in space, where he can hit the jumper or pump fake and go.
