Minutiae involved in the three pointers attempted in game 1. VIDEO 1 The second offensive play of the game reveals exactly how the Warriors intend on defending. Since last year’s playoffs the NBA has been invaded with this idea that the best way to guard a bad offensive player is to ignore them entirely. The Warriors immediately determine their plan of attack will be to put Draymond Green on Roberson and let him roam freely to defend anything anywhere. Seems clever, but there are definitely some inherent flaws. In fact the very first play of the game Robes is able to slide baseline without any Warrior aware of his presence for an easy layup. Here, on the second play we can see how they plan to handle any wing attacks. Durant has the ball in the right corner and is bodied by Klay. Klay can leave so little separation because Bogut has left Adams to guard the strong side behind Klay, and Green has sunk down off of Robes to try and handle Adams. Roberson is left unguarded. They are making this decision because philosophically, they don’t believe Roberson can hurt them. In practice however, it is difficult to not overreact to an NBA player catching a ball wide open. You can see that upon the catch not only does Green rotate out to him, but Barnes shades down to pick up the previously unguarded wing. Roberson makes the simple pass to Serge at the wing. The shot is missed, but Serge is hitting those at a 50% clip this playoffs. It’s a shot the Thunder will take every time. VIDEO 2 The dreaded offensive rebound effect. When Durant’s shot goes up 3 Warriors converge on Adams in the paint. All 4 go up and the ball is tipped towards out of bounds. Barnes hustles to try and save it to a teammate, but Adams gets a quick hand up and controls it. He hits to Kanter in the corner and the Thunder are immediately at an advantage. Barnes hit the deck on his attempt at saving the rebound. Now it’s up to the Thunder to swing the ball quickly to find a shot before the defense can recover. It’s safe to say they need to get a shot up in a matter of seconds to take advantage. Pass to KD at the top, swing to Dion at the wing and another swing to Foye in the corner gets the open shooter. Barnes is scrambling but it’s too little too late. Foye cans the 3. VIDEO 3 If you felt like I was overreacting to the Warriors defense in the first video, here is an even better example. When KD receives the ball at the left corner midrange several actions immediately take place. As KD crossed over to this spot Steph provided coverage on the passing lane to disallow an early pass that could see KD taking an immediate turn into a layup. Upon KD catching the pass and posting Iggy, Steph crosses the floor to pick Waiters up in the right corner. Draymond has been in the paint his entire play. When KD establishes post position he rotates over to act as the rim defender for Iggy. This effectively cuts off any drive option, so what happens next doesn’t have a negative for the Thunder. With the paint filling up quickly, Serge dives to the rim to pull Barnes with him. Suddenly the paint and left side of the floor are overloaded. Roberson is left alone at the right wing and Dion is in the right corner with Steph barely paying attention. KD kicks a pass out to Robes. Immediately, Curry reacts to the open man catching the ball and leaves Dion. Again this is the Warriors plan, but boy does it require a ton of speed to attempt to get that corner 3 contested. When Robes immediately swings to Dion, look at how much space there is. Barnes is trying to rush out there, but nothing he can do will properly contest the 3. This is the power of Kevin Durant. This is why the offense can put up 108 points despite him missing 20 shots. VIDEO 4 Oh hey, a catch and shoot Roberson 3 with zero contest from Draymond. He has to be willing to take this shot. It’s nice seeing the confidence here. VIDEO 5 The Warriors switched up their defense of the KD mid-range iso’s at halftime. Now, instead of refusing to leave the paint, the Roberson defender rushes out to him on the pass. When he swings to the corner the defender is in place. This is a really good adjustment by Kerr. Russ just happens to go and ruin it for them anyway.
VIDEO 6 I like the way this play goes down. The Thunder know that the Warriors are switching off the ball. Look how KD directs traffic to set up ideal cross matches before going into the action. Iggy starts out guarding him and that just won’t do. Barnes starts on Adams and Mo Speights on Kanter. Adams enters the paint and forces the Warriors to switch Barnes onto Kanter. Kanter then goes up to screen Iggy to force Barnes onto KD. Kanter retreats back to the rim and Adams comes up to set a screen on Barnes. Mo Speights is not a good defender and is forced to hang back in PnR situations much the same way Kanter is. With a solid screen from Adams on Barnes KD rises up to take an uncontested 3. It misses but everything was done properly. Another note here is that suddenly the Warriors have Iggy and guards to try and ensure Kanter doesn’t get the offensive rebound. It takes a good bounce for them and the possession is a success despite being put in every position to fail. VIDEO 7 I love everything about this play. It took me several times watching to follow each moving part to figure out what happens. A double screen for Russ that sandwiches Livingston between Kanter and KD. Livingston rolls out of it to recover on Russ and Kanter steps in to screen Klay for KD. Russ hits to KD for a catch and shoot 3 that he misses. Kanter rolls hard after his screen and gets the rebound but rushes the putback. Another play with perfect execution that comes up empty. I really liked the double screen action however. It put everything in a blender for just long enough that KD got a wide open 3. Can’t complain about that in the fourth quarter of any game.
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