td4mvp3
05-26-2012, 12:44 PM
maybe it was posted in march when it came out, but it deserves a new look given the situation
Monday Musings: Oklahoma City has major problems with the Spurs
Tony Parker's ability to penetrate in isolation and pick-and-roll plays drives the Spurs' offense. (Layne Murdoch/NBAE via Getty Images)
Incredibly, we are entering the home stretch of the regular season, which means it will soon be time to start looking ahead at potential playoff matchups. Talking heads love discarding the NBA regular season as meaningless, but actual evidence suggests regular season results tell us very important things about some head-to-head matchups. Trends from the first 82 games last season should have alerted us that the Grizzlies would be huge problems for the Spurs in the first round, and that a Hawks team willing to give Jason Collins heavy minutes against Dwight Howard would have a very good shot at upsetting a superior — in the big picture — Magic team.
On Friday in Oklahoma City, we got our latest reminder of another solidifying trend: The Thunder have a Spurs problem, and specifically, a major problem defending the Spurs. San Antonio has won five of its last six games against the Thunder, and eight of the last 10 dating back to the 2009-10, though San Antonio’s 3-1 mark against the 2009-10 Thunder probably doesn’t have much relevance now.
Taking too much from a five- or six-game sample size can be dangerous, and when you dig into the numbers and the tape, you notice a few variables that at first appear telling flip-flop completely over the next game or two. A random blowout or two can skew the entire sample, though this season’s blowout was actually the Thunder’s lone win in the series over the last two years, an early January romp in which Gregg Popovich threw up white flag and played his bench almost the entire second half.
Still, a few troubling trends have started to emerge for the Thunder:
• Oklahoma City cannot guard the Spurs, especially from three-point range. The Spurs have lit up the Thunder in three games this season to the tune of 107.1 points per 100 possessions, a mark better than that of the league’s best offense, and the worst such figure the Thunder has surrendered to any team they have played more than once, per NBA.com’s stats database. Of particular notice: San Antonio, which thrives on dribble-penetration and open three-pointers, has shot 28-of-57 (49 percent) from three-point range so far against the Thunder.
Both trends are carry-overs from last season, when the Spurs shot 29-of-57 (51 percent) and torched the Thunder at a rate of 107.9 points per 100 possessions — roughly the equivalent of turning the Thunder’s league-average defense into one of the NBA’s three or four worst.
Parker has torn the Thunder apart over the last two seasons. He shot 22-of-39 in three games against them last season, and scored 67 points combined in San Antonio’s two wins against Oklahoma City this season. He is perhaps the perfect guard, playing in the perfect system, to take advantage of Russell Westbrook’s defensive weaknesses. Westbrook has a tendency to reach for steals, jump a half-step toward ball-handlers on the perimeter and otherwise telegraph his plans, and Parker kills opposing point guards who shift their momentum even the tiniest bit the wrong way. Parker is possibly the best off-ball cutter among the league’s point guards — Deron Williams has an argument — and can thus punish Westbrook for any ball-watching or lapses in attention.
On Friday, it got so bad that Thunder coach Scott Brooks shifted Royal Ivey and then James Harden onto Parker, hiding Westbrook on the less-threatening Daniel Green. Westbrook responded by wandering too far from Green in situations that didn’t warrant so much of his help, freeing Green for two crucial three-pointers in the fourth quarter.
San Antonio’s offense, ranked fourth in points per possession, thrives on movement, spacing and three-point shooting, and Parker’s ability to penetrate in isolation and pick-and-roll plays drives the entire machine — especially with Manu Ginobili out. The Thunder have been unable to contain Parker, and have thus watched the Spurs destroy them from deep. The Spurs have scored a ridiculous 110 points per 100 possessions against the Thunder with Parker on the floor, per NBA.com. That number plunges to 99.6 when Parker sits, though if the Spurs are healthy in June, they would figure to have either Parker or Ginobili on the floor at all times.
The one bright spot here: The Thunder offense has scored much more effectively against San Antonio this season after sputtering its way last season to 93.2 points per 100 possessions — the worst mark Oklahoma City scored at against any opponent. This season, the Thunder have scored against the Spurs at a rate very close to their league-leading average, in part because they have stopped shooting as many long two-pointers, per Hoopdata.com. Last season, the Thunder couldn’t deal with San Antonio at either end; this year, the problems have mostly come on defense.
This is in part because San Antonio is generally uninterested in forcing turnovers, and turnovers remain the Thunder’s biggest weakness. No team turns the ball over more often, per possession, than Oklahoma City, but only two teams force them less than often than the Spurs. The Thunder can at least be certain they will get their usual number off against San Antonio, which hasn’t been the case against turnover-forcing machines such as Memphis and Portland.
• Oklahoma City is not equipped to consistently punish Matt Bonner. The Thunder’s three-man front court of Kendrick Perkins, Nick Collison and Serge Ibaka is good at many things, but scoring from the low post is not one of them. The Spurs have thus been free to play Bonner decent minutes against the Thunder, and they have thrived in those minutes. San Antonio has scored an insane 116.6 points per 100 possessions against Oklahoma City with Bonner on the court this season after scoring about 110 points per 100 possessions in such situations last season — about equal to the league’s best offense in 2010-11.
The Spurs score more efficiently with Bonner on the floor in general: Station three good long-range shooters around a Parker/Tim Duncan or Parker/DeJuan Blair pick-and-roll, and any defense is stretched to its breaking point.
One caveat here: San Antonio thrives when teams go small against them, since it either allows them to play Bonner comfortably at power forward or go even smaller, with Kawhi Leonard filling that spot. But Oklahoma City’s small line-ups, with Kevin Durant at power forward, force San Antonio to hide Bonner on someone like Daequan Cook and are often able to out-small the tiny Spurs line-ups with Leonard at the four spot. This bears watching.
• The Spurs do not foul. This is Popovich 101. Only the Lakers allow fewer free-throw attempts per field-goal attempt, and this is especially important against a Thunder offense that thrives on getting to the line. The Thunder have averaged about two fewer free-throw attempts per game against San Antonio over the last two seasons, and that’s actually a bigger victory than it sounds like for the Spurs, since these two teams have played at a blistering pace in those six regular-season games. They averaged about 102 possessions per game last season, the highest number for any Thunder opponent, and though that’s down to about 98 possessions this season, it’s still well above both the league’s average and the Thunder’s average.
All those possessions aren’t translating into the usual heap of free points for the Thunder. The Spurs are smart at playing the odds on defense, and they will tilt away from the Thunder’s so-so outside shooters in order to contain action elsewhere. The Thunder shot 27 long two-point shots per game last season against the Spurs — more than any team averaged per game — and though they’ve smartly turned a lot of those long twos into threes this season, the Thunder are not an elite three-point shooting team. The Spurs know this, and they are happy to watch Westbrook, Thabo Sefolosha, Ivey and Reggie Jackson clank away from deep. And unlike some other teams, the Spurs will not deviate from this strategy during a random Westbrook hot streak — as happened on Friday.
• San Antonio cleans the defensive glass. The Thunder are only a decent offensive rebounding team, but they can take advantage of unathletic front lines. They haven’t been able to do so against San Antonio, always one of the league’s best defensive rebounding teams: The Thunder have rebounded their own misses at a rate well below their average against the Spurs over the last two seasons, per NBA.com.
This would seem to be an area in which the Spurs might be vulnerable, especially if they play Bonner heavy minutes. Ibaka grabbed five offensive boards in just 25 minutes on Friday, and as mentioned above, the Thunder have finally broken through against San Antonio’s offense this season.
And even so: They just cannot figure out the Spurs, and they are lucky the seedings will break in such a way that they cannot face San Antonio until the conference finals.
The Thunder aren’t alone in having a dreaded opponent or two out there, obviously. Miami is 10-1 against Philadelphia since LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined the Heat, but they’ve split their last eight games with Orlando, suggesting a possible second-round matchup with the Magic would be very competitive. The Magic have long had problems with Boston, and those problems have persisted this season in two embarrassing losses, even though alleged “Howard stopper” Perkins is in Oklahoma City.
Boston is 13-2 in its last 15 games against New York, including last year’s first-round sweep, but several of the games have been come down to the final buzzer, and the Knicks’ personnel has changed so much even in the last two months that it’s hard to read much into the overall results.
The Rockets have played Oklahoma City well over the last two seasons, and the total scoring margin in the three most recent games between the two teams is plus-1 for the Thunder. Houston won two of those games.
As John Hollinger has noted, the Grizzlies and Nuggets have each played the Thunder close.
The general point: Dismissing head-to-head regular-season results is foolish when general trends start to emerge, as they have when it comes to the Thunder and Spurs.
Monday Musings: Oklahoma City has major problems with the Spurs
Tony Parker's ability to penetrate in isolation and pick-and-roll plays drives the Spurs' offense. (Layne Murdoch/NBAE via Getty Images)
Incredibly, we are entering the home stretch of the regular season, which means it will soon be time to start looking ahead at potential playoff matchups. Talking heads love discarding the NBA regular season as meaningless, but actual evidence suggests regular season results tell us very important things about some head-to-head matchups. Trends from the first 82 games last season should have alerted us that the Grizzlies would be huge problems for the Spurs in the first round, and that a Hawks team willing to give Jason Collins heavy minutes against Dwight Howard would have a very good shot at upsetting a superior — in the big picture — Magic team.
On Friday in Oklahoma City, we got our latest reminder of another solidifying trend: The Thunder have a Spurs problem, and specifically, a major problem defending the Spurs. San Antonio has won five of its last six games against the Thunder, and eight of the last 10 dating back to the 2009-10, though San Antonio’s 3-1 mark against the 2009-10 Thunder probably doesn’t have much relevance now.
Taking too much from a five- or six-game sample size can be dangerous, and when you dig into the numbers and the tape, you notice a few variables that at first appear telling flip-flop completely over the next game or two. A random blowout or two can skew the entire sample, though this season’s blowout was actually the Thunder’s lone win in the series over the last two years, an early January romp in which Gregg Popovich threw up white flag and played his bench almost the entire second half.
Still, a few troubling trends have started to emerge for the Thunder:
• Oklahoma City cannot guard the Spurs, especially from three-point range. The Spurs have lit up the Thunder in three games this season to the tune of 107.1 points per 100 possessions, a mark better than that of the league’s best offense, and the worst such figure the Thunder has surrendered to any team they have played more than once, per NBA.com’s stats database. Of particular notice: San Antonio, which thrives on dribble-penetration and open three-pointers, has shot 28-of-57 (49 percent) from three-point range so far against the Thunder.
Both trends are carry-overs from last season, when the Spurs shot 29-of-57 (51 percent) and torched the Thunder at a rate of 107.9 points per 100 possessions — roughly the equivalent of turning the Thunder’s league-average defense into one of the NBA’s three or four worst.
Parker has torn the Thunder apart over the last two seasons. He shot 22-of-39 in three games against them last season, and scored 67 points combined in San Antonio’s two wins against Oklahoma City this season. He is perhaps the perfect guard, playing in the perfect system, to take advantage of Russell Westbrook’s defensive weaknesses. Westbrook has a tendency to reach for steals, jump a half-step toward ball-handlers on the perimeter and otherwise telegraph his plans, and Parker kills opposing point guards who shift their momentum even the tiniest bit the wrong way. Parker is possibly the best off-ball cutter among the league’s point guards — Deron Williams has an argument — and can thus punish Westbrook for any ball-watching or lapses in attention.
On Friday, it got so bad that Thunder coach Scott Brooks shifted Royal Ivey and then James Harden onto Parker, hiding Westbrook on the less-threatening Daniel Green. Westbrook responded by wandering too far from Green in situations that didn’t warrant so much of his help, freeing Green for two crucial three-pointers in the fourth quarter.
San Antonio’s offense, ranked fourth in points per possession, thrives on movement, spacing and three-point shooting, and Parker’s ability to penetrate in isolation and pick-and-roll plays drives the entire machine — especially with Manu Ginobili out. The Thunder have been unable to contain Parker, and have thus watched the Spurs destroy them from deep. The Spurs have scored a ridiculous 110 points per 100 possessions against the Thunder with Parker on the floor, per NBA.com. That number plunges to 99.6 when Parker sits, though if the Spurs are healthy in June, they would figure to have either Parker or Ginobili on the floor at all times.
The one bright spot here: The Thunder offense has scored much more effectively against San Antonio this season after sputtering its way last season to 93.2 points per 100 possessions — the worst mark Oklahoma City scored at against any opponent. This season, the Thunder have scored against the Spurs at a rate very close to their league-leading average, in part because they have stopped shooting as many long two-pointers, per Hoopdata.com. Last season, the Thunder couldn’t deal with San Antonio at either end; this year, the problems have mostly come on defense.
This is in part because San Antonio is generally uninterested in forcing turnovers, and turnovers remain the Thunder’s biggest weakness. No team turns the ball over more often, per possession, than Oklahoma City, but only two teams force them less than often than the Spurs. The Thunder can at least be certain they will get their usual number off against San Antonio, which hasn’t been the case against turnover-forcing machines such as Memphis and Portland.
• Oklahoma City is not equipped to consistently punish Matt Bonner. The Thunder’s three-man front court of Kendrick Perkins, Nick Collison and Serge Ibaka is good at many things, but scoring from the low post is not one of them. The Spurs have thus been free to play Bonner decent minutes against the Thunder, and they have thrived in those minutes. San Antonio has scored an insane 116.6 points per 100 possessions against Oklahoma City with Bonner on the court this season after scoring about 110 points per 100 possessions in such situations last season — about equal to the league’s best offense in 2010-11.
The Spurs score more efficiently with Bonner on the floor in general: Station three good long-range shooters around a Parker/Tim Duncan or Parker/DeJuan Blair pick-and-roll, and any defense is stretched to its breaking point.
One caveat here: San Antonio thrives when teams go small against them, since it either allows them to play Bonner comfortably at power forward or go even smaller, with Kawhi Leonard filling that spot. But Oklahoma City’s small line-ups, with Kevin Durant at power forward, force San Antonio to hide Bonner on someone like Daequan Cook and are often able to out-small the tiny Spurs line-ups with Leonard at the four spot. This bears watching.
• The Spurs do not foul. This is Popovich 101. Only the Lakers allow fewer free-throw attempts per field-goal attempt, and this is especially important against a Thunder offense that thrives on getting to the line. The Thunder have averaged about two fewer free-throw attempts per game against San Antonio over the last two seasons, and that’s actually a bigger victory than it sounds like for the Spurs, since these two teams have played at a blistering pace in those six regular-season games. They averaged about 102 possessions per game last season, the highest number for any Thunder opponent, and though that’s down to about 98 possessions this season, it’s still well above both the league’s average and the Thunder’s average.
All those possessions aren’t translating into the usual heap of free points for the Thunder. The Spurs are smart at playing the odds on defense, and they will tilt away from the Thunder’s so-so outside shooters in order to contain action elsewhere. The Thunder shot 27 long two-point shots per game last season against the Spurs — more than any team averaged per game — and though they’ve smartly turned a lot of those long twos into threes this season, the Thunder are not an elite three-point shooting team. The Spurs know this, and they are happy to watch Westbrook, Thabo Sefolosha, Ivey and Reggie Jackson clank away from deep. And unlike some other teams, the Spurs will not deviate from this strategy during a random Westbrook hot streak — as happened on Friday.
• San Antonio cleans the defensive glass. The Thunder are only a decent offensive rebounding team, but they can take advantage of unathletic front lines. They haven’t been able to do so against San Antonio, always one of the league’s best defensive rebounding teams: The Thunder have rebounded their own misses at a rate well below their average against the Spurs over the last two seasons, per NBA.com.
This would seem to be an area in which the Spurs might be vulnerable, especially if they play Bonner heavy minutes. Ibaka grabbed five offensive boards in just 25 minutes on Friday, and as mentioned above, the Thunder have finally broken through against San Antonio’s offense this season.
And even so: They just cannot figure out the Spurs, and they are lucky the seedings will break in such a way that they cannot face San Antonio until the conference finals.
The Thunder aren’t alone in having a dreaded opponent or two out there, obviously. Miami is 10-1 against Philadelphia since LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined the Heat, but they’ve split their last eight games with Orlando, suggesting a possible second-round matchup with the Magic would be very competitive. The Magic have long had problems with Boston, and those problems have persisted this season in two embarrassing losses, even though alleged “Howard stopper” Perkins is in Oklahoma City.
Boston is 13-2 in its last 15 games against New York, including last year’s first-round sweep, but several of the games have been come down to the final buzzer, and the Knicks’ personnel has changed so much even in the last two months that it’s hard to read much into the overall results.
The Rockets have played Oklahoma City well over the last two seasons, and the total scoring margin in the three most recent games between the two teams is plus-1 for the Thunder. Houston won two of those games.
As John Hollinger has noted, the Grizzlies and Nuggets have each played the Thunder close.
The general point: Dismissing head-to-head regular-season results is foolish when general trends start to emerge, as they have when it comes to the Thunder and Spurs.