Round 2 playoff takeaways: The pick-and-pop takes center stage
Another weekend of playoff basketball is in the books, and it saw three of the four second-round series get underway. We've covered Raptors-Sixers already, so here are three key takeaways from the weekend's other two Game 1s.
Bucks let Celtics do exactly what they wanted
Coming into the series, we knew exactly how the Celtics would go about trying to exploit the Bucks' defensive coverage, which packs the paint and drops the screen defender way back in the pick-and-roll, protecting the rim at the cost of surrendering above-the-break threes. We'd already seen Boston do damage against that scheme it in the regular season.
It seemed like the Bucks might be prepared to tweak that coverage against a team that isn't much interested in getting to the rim and thrives on shooting from above the break, particularly out of the pick-and-pop. But the Bucks weren't prepared at all. Instead, they let the Celtics do precisely what they set out to do.
Boston swapped Aron Baynes out of the starting lineup in favor of Marcus Morris, stretching the floor with a five-out unit that could either exploit Milwaukee from beyond the arc or let Kyrie Irving operate with space inside it. This was yet another game in which Al Horford demonstrated his enormous value as a playoff performer and matchup headache.
Against the drop coverage, Irving was either able to get to his pullup jumper with plenty of room or hit Horford for clean looks on the pop. The Bucks routinely collapsed the paint and did a terrible job recovering out to shooters. Through it all, they stubbornly resisted switching Boston's on-ball screening actions.
There were times when they declined to switch even when doing so would've presented a minimal size trade-off, like on an Irving-Hayward pick-and-roll that was defended by George Hill and Khris Middleton. There were other instances in which, with the drop man corralling the ball-handler, they could've had the on-ball defender peel off to challenge the shot off the pop, instead of bringing a late help rotation from a defender in the corner.
The Bucks may not love the idea of leaving Hill on Horford or Hayward in those situations, but letting those guys try to work a mismatch from 25 feet away is preferable to surrendering clean 3-point looks. That doesn't jive with the Bucks' defensive identity, but they need to wise up to this reality: The Celtics were fifth in the league in above-the-break 3-point percentage during the regular season at 37.1 percent and rank first in the postseason at 40 percent after going 11-of-25 on such shots in Game 1. If only for this series, the Bucks need to change who they are and what they do.
At other points, the mere threat of the pick-and-pop caused a chain reaction that led to a complete defensive breakdown. On this fourth-quarter possession, with Brook Lopez sinking and turning his attention toward Hayward, Sterling Brown saw an open Horford and stunted toward him from the nail, which opened up a basket cut for Jaylen Brown:
You could also see the personnel issues that might make this a really difficult series for Milwaukee. The Bucks did adjust somewhat by bringing Lopez higher up to take Irving's pullup threes away, but Irving could still attack downhill and get to his mid-ranger without much issue. Ersan Ilyasova and Nikola Mirotic, the bigs Milwaukee brought in to ostensibly give them more mobility, didn't fare much better. Ultimately, the issue may be that the things the Bucks' defense is best at taking away aren't things the Celtics' offense subsists on.
Milwaukee's offense was also terrible in this game, but that should improve. Giannis Antetokounmpo simply isn't going to shoot this poorly from 2-point range, and he'll find ways to burn the Celtics for sending so many extra bodies at him. The shooters around him will be better, too. The Bucks' defense - and more specifically, their refusal to tailor their scheme to their opponent - feels like a bigger issue right now.
Golden State's defense finally woke up
The Warriors didn't exactly come out looking like the world-beating juggernaut they've been for the past half-decade - their offense was pretty janky, and they still committed some infuriating turnovers - but for the first time this postseason, they played championship-level defense.
As is always the case when playing against the Rockets, it began with how they defended James Harden. They threw a variety of looks at him, from switches to hedges to soft traps to blitzes. Unlike in their previous series against the Clippers, the Warriors did an excellent job helping and recovering from the nail and from the weak side, blowing up Houston's deadly pick-and-roll.
Harden completed exactly one lob to Clint Capela all game, and one of the Rockets' bread-and-butter plays - a Harden-run pick-and-pop designed to spring shooters off a slip screen - produced basically zilch. The Rockets shot the ball poorly - going just 14-of-47 on threes - but the Warriors made sure most of those looks were well-contested. Only 17 of those 47 attempts were classified as "wide open" by NBA.com's tracking data. (By comparison, 20 of Boston's 31 threes against Milwaukee were considered wide open.)
The usual suspects had a lot to do with it - From Andre Iguodala's smothering on-ball defense on Harden, to Draymond Green's superhuman help rotations, to Klay Thompon's, ahem, closeouts (more on those in a bit) - but as much as anyone, it was Steph Curry who made the difference. Harden and the Rockets hunted Curry, as they so often do when the Warriors play small. But Curry proved up for the task - getting into Harden's dribble, stringing him out, beating him to his spots - even though he nearly fouled out in the process.
The Warriors hedged a lot of those Curry-targeted actions to avoid an unfavorable switch, but once the shot clock ran down past five seconds, they'd either concede that switch or full-on blitz Harden, knowing he didn't have enough time to punish them for it. A ton of Rockets possessions in this game finished in either 24-second violations or desperate attempts to beat the horn.
That included perhaps the Warriors' best defensive sequence of the game. Late in the fourth, nursing a five-point lead, Curry and Iguodala sprung a trap on Harden just past midcourt and sealed off the slip pass to Tucker. They forced Harden to pick up his dribble, denied multiple handoff attempts, executed a seamless switch after Tucker finally helped break the trap, and forced Harden to step on the sideline when Curry slid his feet laterally on the switch to take away any space. That Curry managed all that with five fouls made it all the more impressive.
The Rockets can certainly do a better job executing their sets. They can fan out a bit further and faster on their pick-and-pops to give Harden more options, or they could clear out the weak side (rather than the strong side, as they frequently did in this game) to try to get Capela going in the pick-and-roll. But the Warriors stole Game 1 despite putting up a meager 107.2 offensive rating. The Rockets can't get that one back.
'Landing area' proves difficult to define
The rules of basketball are never going to be entirely black and white. There are nuance and room for interpretation in each one. One such rule came under the microscope in Game 1.
The NBA has made protecting a shooter's "landing area" a point of emphasis ever since Zaza Pachulia stepped underneath Kawhi Leonard while contesting his jumper in the 2017 conference finals. Foul calls on those plays have been pretty consistent all season, sometimes even going as flagrant fouls if the defender is deemed to have made no effort to get out of the shooter's way.
Klay Thompson's overeager contests on Harden's step-backs in Game 1 certainly seemed to violate that rule, but went uncalled.
Rockets coach Mike D'Antoni told reporters postgame that the officials admitted to missing at least four calls, and on the broadcast, Steve Javie agreed they should have been fouls. The Rockets are reportedly using internal research to try and prove a pro-Warriors bias.
But the game's final instance of a "landing area" judgment call, on Harden's would-be game-tying three with 10 seconds to play, provided a good illustration of why officials might opt to swallow their whistles in such situations. It wasn't a natural shooting motion, and it seemed clear Harden was trying to force the issue by kicking his legs out and creating contact with Green as he came down.
You can see why it might be difficult to discern what should actually constitute a shooter's landing spot, and seeing stuff like that leg-kick is inevitably going to make the officials a bit cagier, especially when the team involved has built a lot of its offense around taking advantage of the vagaries of the NBA rulebook. That still doesn't excuse the obvious ones they missed earlier in the game.
The hope is that this leads to greater clarity regarding how the rule should be enforced. A concern is that the spotlight that's been cast onto it has the potential to induce an overcorrection. We'll see what effect this has, if any, on how the Warriors defend Harden's step-backs for the rest of the series.