Lowe: How the small-ball virus has infected NBA

[Draco]

Great article by Zach Lowe today formerly of Grantland.

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/14209124/is-small-ball-dominance-golden-state-blip-trend

Golden State wasn't the first champion to lean on small ball, but no team had ever gone that small, for that many minutes, on the league's biggest stage. That move now has coaches across the league reimagining the limits of small ball and the very nature of the sport itself.

"This is a copycat league," said Randy Wittman, who has Kris Humphriesjacking 3s and Jared Dudley working as the Wizards' closing-time power forward. "The success of Golden State has propelled coaches to play more small ball than maybe they even wanted to. More teams will push the envelope."

The Warriors even surprised Mike D'Antoni, who was ahead of everyone but Don Nelson in the small-ball revolution. "Shoot," he said, laughing, "maybe we didn't even go small enough in Phoenix."

If size doesn't matter as much as it used to, you might as well replace at least one behemoth with a smaller guy who can dribble, pass, and shoot 3s in a league where hand-checking is illegal. Coaches (other than Byron Scott) finally grasping the power of the 3-point shot has accelerated small-ball experimentation. On a basic level, three is a lot more than two in a game of finite possessions. Three-point shooters drag defenders away from the rim, leaving open paths for layups. A lineup with five 3-point shooters presents the biggest player on the other team -- the classic rim-protecting center -- with a brutal choice: stay near the rim and allow his guy to jack open corner 3s or hover close to him and leave the rim naked?

Studies of rebounding in the SportVU era have found that most boards are snatched about 8 feet above the ground, where players of any height should be able to battle for them. "A guy like Gobert will get some you can't reach," D'Antoni said, "but the others, you should at least have a fighting chance." That's especially true for the Warriors, a ferocious gang-rebounding team. Again: If you're going to build a smaller team, you'd better find taller wings who love to play inside.

3. Tim Duncan's old-school block-and-drop
Timmy needs to patent this sequence:

Al-Farouq Aminu's shot, and he keeps the ball in play, because he's Tim Freaking Duncan, and he has no time to spike balls out of bounds and engage in some unbecoming, chest-pounding outburst. The Spurs have recovered better than 80 percent of Duncan's rejections this season, the highest rate in the league among high-volume shot-blockers, per SportVU data. Duncan is near the top of that leaderboard every season.

10. Will Barton, transition maniac
Will Barton doesn't thrive in transition. He creates transition from thin air and then somehow improvises his way to the hoop on wild drives through a thicket of defenders swirling all around him. Every foray is a cliffhanger in which the ending could be anything from an emphatic Barton dunk to Barton tripping over his own feet, colliding with a defender and flying into the fifth row.

So far, Barton is averaging 1.5 points per possession on transition chances -- one of the best marks in the league, per Synergy Sports research. He's about to surpass his career-high in 3-point makes, and he's emerging as an improbable Sixth Man of the Year candidate for a frisky Denver bench that keeps the Nuggets afloat.

Lot of other good stuff in the article too.

 

[illmatic99]

Nice to see this again. He needs a better medium than ESPN

 

[Tunchi]

Will Barton.. Damn

 

[Natebishop3]

Will was one of my favorites... albeit frustrating as hell. The crappy part is that he would have fit in perfectly with this current team, but he didn't make sense with a team that was trying to make a deep playoff run.

 

[KingSpeed]

Will Barton is a great fantasy player. I'm glad I have him.

 

[PCmor7]

Will Barton is a great fantasy player. I'm glad I have him.

You know who is a really great fantasy player? Anna Kournikova. I wish I had her.