Yesterday, the Celtics made it official. Kendrick Perkins won’t be playing in game seven tonight against the Lakers. Kendrick Perkins is very important for the Celtics on the defensive end, and the numbers prove it. According to raw +/-, the team is about 8 points better per 100 possessions with Perk on the floor versus with him on the bench, and it is performing better on both sides of the ball with Perk in the line-up (according to BasketballValue via CelticsHub).
On the defensive end, Kendrick Perkins is the anchor, allowing for the rest of the team to play against more favorable matchups. Kevin Garnett on Andrew Bynum is rough, but Kevin Garnett on Pau Gasol (the matchup when Kendrick Perkins is in the game) is much more manageable.
Perkins is also one of the reasons why the Celtics are so good at defending the pick and roll:
Perkins hedges out real hard here, but the Celtics probably gameplan it this way to get it out of Kobe’s hands. The Lakers actually counter with a nice play, a quick pass to Gasol who then hits a rolling Bynum (trying to take advantage of Perkins’ hedge). However, Perkins is able to get back, use his body, and force Bynum under the basket. This is something that Kendrick Perkins does very well.
Rajon Rondo is easily the key to the Celtics offense. If he is playing well, then the Celtics are really tough to stop, if he isn’t playing well then the Celtics look average at best. In game six, the Lakers were able to slow Rajon Rondo and as a result they were able to hold the Celtics to just 67 points. Here is how they did it:
Ignoring Rondo In The Halfcourt
The Lakers were able to stop Rajon Rondo in the halfcourt by basically ignoring him as his defender (Kobe Bryant for the most part) played about 10-15 feet off of him the entire game, whether he had the ball or not. It was as if the Lakers were saying, “If Rajon Rondo beats us with jump shots, then so be it.”
The above play is a perfect example of the Lakers’ strategy working as planned. Here, the Celtics run a screen and roll with Rajon Rondo coming off of a screen set by Kendrick Perkins. The Lakers switch the screen, and Pau Gasol ends up being forced to cover Rondo. This is usually a point guard’s dream, and the way a point guard normally attacks this is by pulling the ball out and then just blowing by the big man covering him. In fact, Rajon Rondo does try to do this, but Pau Gasol doesn’t take a step in Rondo’s direction and he stays in the paint. Rondo is basically left with only one option (the pass to the mismatch isn’t there because Gasol is clogging the passing lane), and that is to take an awkward jumper that he misses.
Kobe Bryant’s third quarter in game five was truly amazing to watch. With that being said, I have to agree with Matt Moore who wrote at ProBasketballTalk that this run ruined any chance the Lakers had of winning. They Lakers played their best basketball and were most competitive when they were passing the ball around and having contributions from all players. However, where Moore blames Phil Jackson for this run (for essentially allowing Kobe to go off), I want to give the Celtics defense credit.
When you are dealing with a superstar like Kobe you always here of two defensive strategies. You can double him and force the ball out of his hands and let his teammates beat you, or you can let Kobe get his but not let anyone else go off. The Boston Celtics decided to go with the latter and it worked for them. Think about it, during Kobe’s spectacular run, did you see a double team? No. In fact, the Celtics didn’t overreact and completely change their defensive strategy:
This is Kobe’s first basket of the third, and it is a pretty good look at the Celtics’ defensive strategy. Kobe gets the ball in the corner and starts to back Ray Allen down as no double comes (Paul Pierce fakes a double and stays with his man). Kevin Garnett eventually brings a double, but only when it is apparent that Kobe is going to take a shot. They force Kobe Bryant into a tough shot, but he is able to knock it down.
The Celtics found themselves in a pretty interesting situation up five points with around 40 seconds left. Taking the ball out of bounds, they had four seconds to advance the ball from the backcourt (where they were inbounding it) past the halfcourt line in four seconds. The Celtics could have advanced the ball with another timeout, but because they only had one left, Doc Rivers decided to draw up a play for the Celtics to quickly advance the basketball. As Trey Kerby so accurately described it, it was basically the NBA version of the “The Annexation of Puerto Rico.” However, the Lakers made a few mistakes that aided to the play:
As Kevin Garnett gets the ball to inbound it, Rajon Rondo and Paul Pierce switch places. They don’t set a screen, they just switch. It looks like the first option was Rondo curling towards the basketball (trying to get it to him in a dead sprint so he can just run it across half court) and Paul Pierce was the second option curling out towards the halfcourt line.
Most undersized post players have a hard time scoring against this Laker front line. In fact, we even talked about how the Utah Jazz were having a tough time finishing against the Lakers’ big men earlier in the playoffs. However, the one player who hasn’t seemed bothered by the long arm of the Lakers is Glen “Big Baby” Davis. Davis has been the Celtics’ best player off the bench this entire series, scoring 10.25 points per game on 51.6% shooting, and maybe most importantly, Davis has only had 1 shot of his blocked during the entire series. This is pretty significant considering that he had the largest percentage of his shots blocked in the NBA during the regular season (out of players who played 10 MPG for over 40 games).
So how has Glen Davis been able to finish at the rim this series?
No Wasted Motions
When you are smaller than the defenders who are playing against you, you can’t wait for them. What I mean by that is if you have a step on them (or have them out of position), you can’t wait for them to recover, you need to attack. No extra dribbles or meaningless pumpfakes:
Lamar Odom (Glen Davis’ defender) needs to hedge out on the screen, and that frees up Davis for the roll. Paul Pierce hits him and Davis makes the catch and goes straight up with it before the help defense can make it over. If Davis takes a dribble or makes a pump fake there, he loses his advantage and the defense would be able to alter the shot. However, by going quickly, Davis catches the defense off guard and is able to finish with the And 1.
I like to criticize the referees as much as the next person, but for some reason I can’t help but think that everyone is blowing this officiating situation during these finals out of proportion. Maybe it is because you have two fan bases who are known to complain about pretty much everything or maybe it is because of the announce team (I like Jeff Van Gundy and can live with Mark Jackson, but do they really have to go on and on about how bad every single call – even when they aren’t that bad – is during the replays?), but I just get a vibe that everyone is looking for a reason to hate on the officials.
A very good example of this came midway through the 3rd quarter. After a Derek Fisher jumper, the Celtics came down and the refs made a very quick three second call. Everyone was outraged. The fans, people on Twitter, and the ESPN announce team. All of them pointed towards the shot clock and how only 4 seconds ran off of it. Taking a closer look though, you see this was the correct call:
Kendrick Perkins gathers the ball after Derek Fisher hits a jumper. On a made basket, the game clock continues to run as the shot-clock holds still until a player gathers possession.
In game two, the Celtics offense was predicated on movement, sharp passing, and good floor spacing. In the second half of game three, this Celtics’ offense disappeared and it was replaced by a slow and stagnant offense that really struggled to get into a flow. A lot of it started because of the Celtics inability to get any action or movement off of the basketball.
In the above video, the first thing that you should note is how far away from the basket Ray Allen is when he makes the initial catch. There is no way you can initiate an effective offensive set that far away from the basket. Next, you have both Ray Allen and Tony Allen cutting to the same place (ball side corner), eventually forcing Ray Allen to break off his cut and head to the top of the key. After holding onto the basketball for about 10 seconds, the ball ends up in Kevin Garnett’s hands. Allen makes the catch on the post, but he is blocked. Why? Well, let’s take a look at a second angle that gives us a better idea.
During the early going of the fourth quarter, the Lakers offense was really struggling. They stopped going inside, they stopped moving the ball, and they stopped spacing the floor. It basically turned into a “get Kobe the ball and watch” game, something we haven’t seen during these playoffs:
That was just one of the Lakers’ poor possession in the fourth. However, with about 5:30 minutes left and a four point lead, the Lakers came across a play that started working well for them, and that was the “1-2″ Screen & Roll. The “1-2″ Screen & Roll is simply your point guard (or the “1″) comes off of a screen set by the shooting guard (or the “2″).
After the inbounds play, the ball gets swung around to Derek Fisher on the top of the key. Kobe Bryant, who was ISO’d up on the opposite block, now comes up to set a screen for Fisher.
Kevin Arnovitz already did a fantastic job breaking down how Ray Allen got so wide open on most of his threes last night, but I wanted to take a closer look at the Ray Allen vs. Derek Fisher match up.
I briefly mentioned this before the series started, but Derek Fisher’s off the ball defense doesn’t work when covering a shooter who can run off screens, like Ray Allen. Like I said before, Fisher does a lot of stuff when getting screened that works in pick and roll situations. He punishes the screener, he hooks his body around them, and he gets very animated sometimes drawing the foul. All that stuff works, because he has a defender hedging on the ball handler. However, off the ball, that stuff doesn’t work, because there is rarely someone hedging out.
On this play here, Ray Allen has two options. He can come off of a Big Baby screen, or he can fake going off that screen, go baseline, and come off a screen set on the baseline. He chooses the latter option.
At points of last night’s Orlando-Boston game the score was closer than the Suns-Lakers game the night before, but it just didn’t have that feel. Thursday night, you always had the feeling that despite the lead being as much as 18 at some points, that the Suns were just one spurt away from getting back in the game. In Boston last night, I never had that feeling, and Ray Allen was a large reason why. Up 13 early in the third quarter, Ray Allen knocked down back-to-back threes extending the lead to 19, and essentially ending the game for good. Even Stan Van Gundy talked about the importance of these threes (quote from The Baseline):
“I think after Ray’s two threes, I don’t think we quit at all, but I think what happens is your confidence and what really happens more than that is you don’t sustain your game,” Magic coach Stan Van Gundy said. “You start doing things, trying to get it back in a hurry … instead of sticking with your game and going possession by possession.”
Let’s look at the two threes that ended Orlando’s season.
Three Pointer #1
Now, Rashard Lewis is the one at fault here. He gets stuck covering Ray Allen as the Magic switch the first screen on the right side. The ball gets swung around and there is a pick and roll at the opposite side, with Ray Allen standing at the top of the key. It is initially well defended, but off the ball there is some problems:
