BlaqkSpliffin
Ni**as Still Weird - Me
Keep been wanting that stretch 5 forever
A Tattered Dynasty Is Still a Dynasty: Official 2019-20 Warriors Season Thread
- Thread starter G.O.A.T Squad Spokesman
- Start date
G.O.A.T Squad Spokesman
Logic Is Absent Wherever Hate Is Present
I want one that's dominant on both ends.
BlaqkSpliffin
Ni**as Still Weird - Me
I've talked myself into Wiseman even more. I went and looked at all the big men drafted since 2007 in the Lottery. There are very few who you could call bust when healthy. You could argue some of them weren't the best player available when drafted but not that they're not good picks or impactful. The only "bad" picks ironically come from the Warriors and the Sixers 
Warriors drafted Patrick O'Bryant and Ekpe Udoh in the top 10 when neither made sense. Udoh was effectively a 4 year player in college who who shot the free throw bad. No reason for a top 6 pick. O'Bryant was unremarkable asf and his college numbers show it. Sixers bad picks were just Okafor and Noel but that was more fit with the team. A couple other players were cause of team construction too. A player like Wiseman tho with his talent and measurable rarely is a bust unless he's just injury prone which he's shown no hints of.
Warriors drafted Patrick O'Bryant and Ekpe Udoh in the top 10 when neither made sense. Udoh was effectively a 4 year player in college who who shot the free throw bad. No reason for a top 6 pick. O'Bryant was unremarkable asf and his college numbers show it. Sixers bad picks were just Okafor and Noel but that was more fit with the team. A couple other players were cause of team construction too. A player like Wiseman tho with his talent and measurable rarely is a bust unless he's just injury prone which he's shown no hints of.
G.O.A.T Squad Spokesman
Logic Is Absent Wherever Hate Is Present
Curry's doing God's work
Roland Coltrane
Superstar
has the thread for next season been made yet? i got some thoughts
idonttouchgrass
Superstar
Nope, not yet. I thought you were talking about this thread...lol.
Still too early for the season thread..
Roland Coltrane
Superstar
aight brehs, I read 3,4,5 glowing articles on Jimmy Butler on The Athletic yesterday
everyone in the fukking building knew the ball was gonna be in his hands and he came through like no other
and I couldn't help but think of all the criticism Steph has taken for not coming up in the big moment
do you think Butler had more "help"?
I guess that's a rhetorical question is there was a game in these playoffs where the Heat had 5 supporting role players score between 12 and 17 points....
but cotdamn, and I'm not tryna throw Steph and Steve Kerr under the bus but I feel like both of them could have taken some notes of that last Finals game.
also, i'm not saying Steph hasn't come up HUGE, but it seems like more often than not when opposing defenses have this hyperfocus on him when the stakes are high he's been stifled before. I don't know if that is reflective of the roster, coach, or Steph himself.
anyways, thoughts?
everyone in the fukking building knew the ball was gonna be in his hands and he came through like no other
and I couldn't help but think of all the criticism Steph has taken for not coming up in the big moment
do you think Butler had more "help"?
I guess that's a rhetorical question is there was a game in these playoffs where the Heat had 5 supporting role players score between 12 and 17 points....
but cotdamn, and I'm not tryna throw Steph and Steve Kerr under the bus but I feel like both of them could have taken some notes of that last Finals game.
also, i'm not saying Steph hasn't come up HUGE, but it seems like more often than not when opposing defenses have this hyperfocus on him when the stakes are high he's been stifled before. I don't know if that is reflective of the roster, coach, or Steph himself.
anyways, thoughts?
Not that there isn't room for improvement, but this article kind of addresses this:
Steph Curry's top five NBA Finals performances from decorated career
2016 and 2019 were both IMO outliers. He was not 100% healthy in '16 and we lost both Klay and KD in '19. I really don't see any blame to lay at Steph's feet (or Kerr's either for that matter). Last year there was no one scoring outside of Steph at some points so that made it much easier defensively to just sit on him and force the team to make shots (which they didn't).
Regarding the team makeup, we've been trying (and making it work) to find low paygrade guys that fit financially as well as on the court so lets be honest, some of those guys we've had (and won with!) weren't great, but the team made it work.
Like I said, always room to learn and grow/improve, but I don't think there's much real criticism that you can give Steph for his Finals performances. There is a very deep running dislike for Steph for some reason and I think people way overblow his minor errors/mistakes.
Except for this one:
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BlaqkSpliffin
Ni**as Still Weird - Me
Jimmy has more help than Steph did in Game 6 after Klay went down. You can't leave shooters open period and Miami has 3 of them on the floor with Jimmy. Steph had Draymond, Iggy, Boogie, and McKinnie/Livingston. Nurse sold out on Steph and forced everyone else to beat them. Lakers can't do that and plus they just played soft in that game.
Jimmy and Steph aren't guarded anywhere near the same. Also Jimmy is a 6'6 guard/forward and Steph is a 6'3 guard. They're physically different. There not much Kerr can do when their entire offense is based on Steph's ball movement. If he gives the ball up that makes the offense harder to defend EXCEPT when they trap and foul Steph off ball which teams do alot. There's a reason KD didn't like Kerr's system all the time. Sometimes the system doesn't work against great defensive teams, especially when they have 7 games to gameplay for you.
I've said this time and time again when it comes to Steph v. every other player:
Nobody in the history of the game is defended like him, so you can't take any instance of where he's been stifled and use it in relation to another player, because no other player has had to deal with that defensive attention. If you review Game 3 of this season's Finals, Jimmy was defended 1v1 throughout the entirety of the game, and he was allowed to touch the ball, unimpeded, basically whenever he wanted - the Lakers were pretty much living with him as a scorer. Now, you compare that to Steph in playoff series' where defenses lose their cotdamn minds at his sheer presence; he doesn't even need to have the ball in his hands to where he has multiple defenders around him.
Can you imagine the destruction that Steph would inflict if teams didn't defend him like they do and were just willing to let him do whatever he wanted?
Steph and Kerr have had to gameplan and execute under more difficult circumstances to generate points than your regular team does. This ultimately is reflective of the limitations of the support cast over the last half a decade, which haven't been necessarily bad, it's just that they've been average.
Roland Coltrane
Superstar
and the Heat offense is engineered like that of a team with no heliocentric scorers(I cribbed that from an athletic article
)Hollinger: Miami’s not a Heroball team. That’s why Heroball worked in Game 3
By John Hollinger Oct 5, 202027
Jimmy Butler was 47th in the NBA in Usage Rate this year. Let’s start there.
This stat, which captures what percentage of a team’s possessions end with a given player (either by shot, free throw, assist or turnover), is typically the province of superstars who only require one name. The top three names on the list this year won’t surprise you – Giannis, Luka, The Beard. LeBron James was 11th, while his partner in crime, Anthony Davis, was 19th but first among bigs.
And the best player on the Eastern Conference champion was 47th.
That’s the remarkable context about Butler’s takeover of Game 3 – one in which he carried the Heat to victory with 40 points, 13 assists and 11 rebounds while missing only six shots. It was completely out of character for the Heat to have so much possession go through one player.
Butler had more shot attempts, more free throw attempts and more assists than anyone on the court, including James and Davis, and very nearly more turnovers too. Add it all up and nearly half the Miami possessions directly connected to Butler when he was on the floor.
And yet, all season long, Miami has presented the polar opposite of that approach. In a basketball world that has become increasingly heliocentric, as our Seth Partnow noted earlier this year, Miami’s distributed scoring model is an enormous anomaly.
For starters, to the extent that there was “The Man” for Miami’s offense this year, it wasn’t even Butler. He didn’t lead the Heat in Usage Rate this season —Goran Dragic did.
I know what you’re thinking: “But Butler took over in the playoffs.” Actually, no. The Heat had a different leading scorer in each for the first three rounds of the postseason. Meanwhile, Butler’s 25.1 Usage Rate from the regular season has, indeed, increased … all the way to 25.2.
The list of players without their own coffee brand who still had the rock more than Butler did this season is a pretty jaw-dropping one. LeBron and Davis, okay, you probably expected that. But how about Julius Randle, Andrew Wiggins, Spencer Dinwiddie, Andre Drummond (!), Buddy Hield and Dillon Brooks? They all were more heavily involved in their respective offenses than Butler.
As you can see by the chart below, the Heat spread it around. Five Miami players have a Usage Rate of 21.0 or higher in the postseason, and Andre Iguodala is the only Miami player who doesn’t have a fairly significant role. Even “low-usage” Duncan Robinson is a major factor, with his running off screens and the panic it induces in defenses often creating openings without his ever needing to touch the ball.
Miami Heat Usage Rate by player
PLAYER REG. SEASON PLAYOFFS
Goran Dragic
25.9
27.4
Jimmy Butler
25.1
25.2
Tyler Herro
22.3
21.7
Bam Adebayo
21.2
21
Kelly Olynyk
17.4
21
Kendrick Nunn
24.1
19.7
Jae Crowder
15.3
16.2
Duncan Robinson
16
15.5
Andre Iguodala
12.7
9.3
— Min. 100 playoff minutes
Among good teams, the Heat are almost a complete anomaly. They ranked seventh in the NBA in Offensive Efficiency despite not having a top-35 player in Usage Rate to be the centerpiece of the offense.
Usually, when a team has a widely distributed offense like this, there’s an easy explanation: The team sucks. Bad teams, lacking a single player with enough talent to become the focal point of their attack, are much more likely to have a chart that looks like the one above. The bottom two teams in Offensive Efficiency this year, Golden State and Charlotte, had no qualifying player with a Usage Rate above 25.
Ironically, the last team to make an NBA Finals with a similar approach was the “beautiful game” Spurs in 2014, the team that ran Miami ragged in that year’s Finals and ended the Heatles era with LeBron. That team, like this year’s Heat, was only seventh in the regular season in Offensive Efficiency.
There’s a reason it’s rare: Devising an equal-opportunity NBA offense is easy in theory, extremely difficult in practice. I don’t think people understand how difficult it is to have a high-caliber offensive where the fifth-best player has nearly as big a role as the best player.
At various times in Memphis, we tried to make ourselves less “heliocentric” by instituting more read-and-react schemes that could make us less predictable. They all failed for the same reason that most distributed-offense schemes fail: It relies on your team having several good offensive players rather than just one or two. It’s just way easier and more productive, especially in the regular season, to keep the ball in the hands of your two best players and let the other players eat the leftovers.
But if a team can pull it off, the distributed model has lots of stealth upside in the postseason. This goes against the grain because we typically tend to think of superstar-driven teams as the most capable of “ramping up” in the playoffs. A team like the Lakers, for instance, can increase the minutes for LeBron and Davis, and it has a major effect on the quality of their lineup over the 48 minutes.
Tactically, however, what Miami does is really challenging in a postseason environment because the Heat are so malleable. Even without Dragic and Bam, the Heat were able to sub in two other players (Tyler Herro and Kelly Olynyk) who were high-frequency contributors.
This sets up the Heat to pick at a team’s biggest weakness, whatever it might be. With multiple capable ballhandlers, multiple 3-point threats, and at least a few players good enough to beat a switch 1-on-1, they presented a conundrum even for elite defensive teams in Boston and Milwaukee. The pinnacle moment, perhaps, was Game 5 against the Bucks, when six Heat players scored between 12 and 17 points in a 103-94 win. Call it anti-heroball.
And in Game 3, they turned their tendency on their head and used it to shred the Lakers. It was a stark contrast to previous rounds, where the Lakers suffocated “heliocentric” offenses built around Damian Lillard, James Harden and Nikola Jokic with an assortment of traps, double-teams and Davis switches.
But even with the Heat going against type by running most of their offense through one player, they had so many threats around Butler that the Lakers couldn’t easily load up on him.
In fact, Miami’s wide array of threats was the exact reason Butlerball worked so well in Game 3. For instance, look at all the real estate he has to operate once he draws a switch against Kentavious Caldwell-Pope:
The same thing happens, 90 seconds later, when Butler operates with a wide-open floor against Caldwell-Pope and draws a foul. He’s already closing in on 40 points, and yet nobody other than KCP is within 10 feet of him because they’re worried about all the other options on the floor:
In particular, one other thing to note in all these sequences is how Olynyk changes the floor dynamics relative to Adebayo. Davis is normally the last line of defense for the Lakers, but he’s marooned at the 3-point line with Olynyk in most of these clips. If Adebayo remains out, the Lakers need to figure out how to keep Davis closer to the rim.
Meanwhile, one obvious wrinkle for the Lakers in Game 4 is for James not to concede these soft switches that create a mismatch in the first place. Here Robinson barely taps him on the shoulder and, voila, it’s Butler vs. Rajon Rondo at the nail.
While we’re here, one key takeaway from re-watching this fourth quarter is how out of gas James looked. In addition to two traveling violations, a few missed jumpers and getting backtapped in transition by Olynyk, James was pretty low-energy on defense (save for one play at the rim where Butler drew a “foul” that the Lakers should have challenged). For instance, check out this clip where Butler smokes James on a straight-line drive, with the only deception being a casual glance to his left first.
I’ve noted before that the Heat have dominated fourth quarters in these playoffs, and in particular the final eight minutes. This played out again — the game was tied with nine minutes left, but Miami ended up winning by 13. It’s a worrying trend for L.A. if it can’t make the kill early, as the Lakers did in the first two games.
But I digress; let’s talk about the Heat again. One other reason Butler’s Usage Rate is so low for a star is his weird penchant for passing up potential layups to throw the ball to the deep 3-point line, but in the clip above you see it works out — he hits Olynyk for an easy catch-and-shoot.
In the next clip we’ll see another soft switch by LeBron off of Butler (again, why put LeBron on Butler if he’s just going to switch off him at the first hint of a screen?), and another brilliant pass by Butler to set up a bucket. But this time the real story is a perfectly timed slip by Olynyk that beats Davis while everyone worries about the other screener, Robinson.
Again, distributed weapons are tough to guard! Just when you load up on one option, another one beats you. While we’re here, Erik Spoelstra deserves a ton of credit for designing a system that took advantage of his teams’ multitude of options. Olynyk is a perfect example: He was a DNP in Game 1, yet good enough to plug into a high-usage role in Games 2 and 3.
Even though the Heat went against type by going into classic “heroball” mode late in the game, it all worked because of how threatening their secondary players are. It’s a huge contrast to the Lakers’ system, where the Heat collapse to take away James and Davis and count on the other Lakers being unable to make enough jump shots to punish them for it.
The Lakers will undoubtedly have adjustments for Game 4. Frank Vogel has done his best work in these playoffs right after losses, and one expects the Lakers to focus a lot more attention on crowding Butler’s driving lanes and having Davis in a better position to help. Strategy aside, they could also just play better and harder than they did in Game 3.
The unusual thing about Miami, however, is that this offense always has adjustments to the adjustments. Even minus two starters, the Heat have a variety of offensive weapons they can use to attack whatever weaknesses L.A.’s Game 4 strategy opens up. Remember, we saw much of the same thing from Miami’s offense in Game 2 — the only difference was that the Heat couldn’t stop the Lakers.
Sum it all up, and Sunday’s win was a bit of a rope-a-dope from Miami. No, Miami’s team isn’t designed to play heroball through its best player every night the way most other elite teams do. The paradox, however, is that’s what made the Heat’s heroball so effective in Game 3.
(Photo: Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images)
just watch this
it's reflective of the roster which was amplified even more vs the Toronto Raptors Finals. I think Steve Kerr and the Warriors organization realized this and have made the necessary corrections though.
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