Trying to figure out what is wrong with LeBron James and his play, Hoopspeak’s Beckley Mason gathered some of the best basketball minds (and yours truly), and hosted a roundtable trying to figure what was wrong with LeBron and how the Heat can get him going. A part of my contribution to the roundtable:
When looking at what the Heat (and coach Erik Spoelstra) can do differently to get LeBron James going is something that they have done in the past and it is something that usually leads to tremendous success. However, for whatever reason the Heat shy away from it in late game situations. The set/quick hitting play I am talking about? The pick and pop with Dwyane Wade as the ball handler and LeBron James as the screener…
Going into game four, the Dallas Mavericks were using Dirk Nowitzki as the primary screener whenever they were running a pick and roll when he was on the court. For whatever reason (maybe it was because Nowitzki was sick, maybe it was because they noticed something on tape), the Mavericks decided to go away from that and run pick and rolls with Nowitzki not involved, standing away from the action. The results were exactly what the Mavericks wanted:
As you can see, the Mavericks ran 21 pick and rolls with Dirk Nowitzki on the court. Nine (42.8%) of those pick and rolls were with Dirk Nowitzki as the screener, with Dallas scoring just two points off of these pick and rolls. On the other hand, during the 10 (47.6%) pick and rolls where Nowitzki was not directly involved in the pick and roll action, the Mavericks scored 16 points (I’ll have more on the staggered ball screens in a future post).
So why were these pick and rolls where Nowitzki wasn’t setting the screen so successful? There are two reasons why. First, the defense has to respect and pay attention to Nowitzki and the pick and roll at the same time. Nowitzki is drawing attention to himself instead of the pick and roll taking place:
Trailing by three points with 6.7 seconds left, the Miami Heat were coming out of a timeout looking to tie the game. After going for the quick two a possession earlier, the Heat needed to go for the tie with no timeouts left. The play head coach Erik Spoelstra ran was one that would have resulted in a clean look, but some poor execution resulted in a tough contested three from Mike Miller:
The play starts with the Heat players on the court starting out in bunches of twos. Mario Chalmers and Dwyane Wade are standing on the strong side block while LeBron James and Chris Bosh stand on the strong side elbow. As the ball goes to the trigger man Mike Miller, Wade turns around and curls off of a Chris Bosh screen going away from the basketball.
