If there is one thing that really impressed me about France’s defense throughout EuroBasket it was their defensive rotations.  When France was playing defense, it looked like five guys on a string, rotating, helping teammates, recovering, and getting steals and forcing misses.  But then came the EuroBasket Finals on Sunday.  Spain ate France alive, scoring 98 points in 76 possessions with a good chunk of them coming off of broken rotations from France and their defense.  So how did a team that rotated so well get burned so badly in the finals?  Well, Spain is unlike every other team in the tournament because they can put 5 offensive threats on the court at the same time, and that really bothered France, and even when they did rotate correctly, they got burned:

Those two shots that the Spanish bigs knocked down there are the shots that France were willing to give up the whole tournament as they rotated the man covering that big to the middle of the floor to take away the pick and roll pass.  It didn’t really hurt them  because many teams didn’t really have two bigs who could be an offensive threat, and they were leaving open the less offensively skilled one of the two.  Against Spain, a team that has three bigs who can knock down that shot, the individual talent of all five guys on the court was far too great for these rotations to work.  So what happened?  France stopped rotating and started playing selfish defense, staying with their man despite needing to rotate:

Here, Spain is running a pick and roll with Juan Carlos Navarro as the ball handler and Marc Gasol as the screener.  Joakim Noah, who is defending Marc Gasol, hedges on the screen as Tony Parker works his way over it.

Now, as Marc Gasol rolls to the rim, Nicolas Batum’s responsibility is to drop to the middle and take the pass to the roll man away and then if the pass is made to his man, Rudy Fernandez, close out on him.  Instead, because Batum fears Fernandez’s shooting ability, he stays with him.

This leaves Marc open to catch the ball in the middle of the paint on his roll to the basket.  This forces a second defender to step up and leaves Pau Gasol wide open as he cuts to the rim.  The result is a sweet Gasol-to-Gasol pass and finish, but it all started when Batum refused to leave Fernandez and shade in the middle.  Here is the play in real time:

As you can see, this wasn’t a defensive adjustment from France, this was guys deciding not to hedge on the fly, and that is why everything looked so disjointed from France.  Nobody was on the same page.  Here are a few more examples:

On this play, Joakim Noah is the man responsible for defending the roll man heading to the rim.  Noah though, fearing that his man, Pau Gasol, would be open for a jump shot leaves early and leaves Marc Gasol wide open under the rim.  As this is happening, Juan Carlos Navarro is getting face-guarded away from the ball, when his defender could be helping in the lane.

Here, the French defender covering Serge Ibaka is afraid to leave him because he is a threat to knock down a jump shot (which is exactly what he did in the first video on this post).  So he doesn’t leave him and that leaves Pau Gasol open for the lob.

This play seemed to be a culmination of everything.  France got the lead down to 12 points and they need a stop to try and make the final 4 minutes or so a game.  Instead, Jose Calderon inbounds the basketball to the high post, curls off of it, gets the ball back and goes up for the easy dunk as every French defender sticks with his man, afraid to leave him open to help.

Now, if France rotates perfectly, do they win this game?  Probably not, but they played a pretty good game on the offensive end (scoring 85 points against Spain in 40 minutes is pretty impressive), but every single time that France needed to get a stop to make it a game, they gave up a basket, and usually poor rotation was the cause.  A great tournament from France, but the talent of Spain stretched their defense thin in the finals.