Do you see how no one has liked your quips? Perhaps take a hint. No one likes the unfunny guy who thinks he’s funny.
Do you post for the approval of random nobodies? What a really pathetic confession. I just like laughing at stupid people.
Spacing is how the defense guards a player rather than the number of attempts per game. Jokic certainly spaces the floor and opens up the paint for his teammates. His threes are up this year, but for the five seasons prior he averaged 3.2 attempts at 35.3%. That's pretty close to Mobley's 2.8 this season. Hell, Westbrook takes more threes than either and he doesn't space the floor at all IMO.
Yeah I didn't. Whoopsie. lol. In response to the question of "can you have adequate spacing (and in general success) with 2 non shooters" and not "is spacing overrated" the answer is you have to have REALLY good shooting to offset it elsewhere on the floor, and even then it's a lot more difficult. The Heat made it to the finals with Jimmy and Bam twice but lost both times, the Warrior most recent ring had them play half their games with Otto Porter instead of Looney to help the spacing. Lakers won the bubble ring with Howard/Davis starting, but Davis shot over 40% from 3 that series on respectable volume. The last rings with 2 poor/non shooters were McGee/Draymond + Durant/Klay/Curry. Almost all contender have been 4 out teams in the last 10+ years. Could you have general regular season success, sure we're an example enough as is, our spacing is awful. But there's a clear cap on the teams success and it just makes the game so much harder than it has to be in todays league. Short of Amen and Sengun developing into top 5-10 players, short of us getting MULTIPLE historically great shooters elsewhere in our starting lineup, for us to be a true contender one of them really needs to develop into a respectable shooter (like Mobley has).
Well If Sengun can do what Giannis can do, then I would say he doesn't need to shoot well either. But as someone who watches basketball, I can tell you that's not ever happening.
Playoffs are a different animal. Regular season, marathon schedule has you going through a rigged schedule of East coast road trip followed by a few games at home followed by a West coast road trip followed by a few games at home and back to backs squeezed in here and there. Players injured while some are secretly load managing, in shooting slumps while others are red hot, scouting reports are week to week while some are day to day. Teams don't want to show everything and thus put out vanilla offense and/or vanilla defenses......but want to win at the same time.....unless they are tanking. I often say, Embiid, KAT, Sengun, *Jokic are build to be MVP's of the regular season because they outweigh their defenders by about 60 pounds on most nights......but things that are most often done in the playoffs ( see below ) 1) teams try to take away the first and second options on offense. In the case of the Rockets, it's take Sengun and Jalen Green out and make VanVleet, Dillon and Amen beat them. Some here will say option 1 and 2 would be Sengun and VanVleet (or insert Amen here)......in that case teams are saying Sengun and VanVleet are not going to beat us, it's gonna have to be Jalen, Amen, & Dillon. 2) teams will pack the paint design specific to our team strengths and weaknesses. When you pack the paint....most often than not players try to get their body between offensive player and rim. Advantage goes to the defense where they most often than not, just find a body and box then out. 3) Popovich would tell his team 4 1/2 men back during the playoffs. So crashing the boards were not as important as getting back and protecting the rim.....limiting fast break points. MAKING PLAYOFF GAMES MORE HALF COURT BATTLES. These things are Givens _______________ Packing the Paint Teams will mix things up guarding Sengun. It's so hard to play post up nowadays with defenses being so smart and scouting reports are so up to date. They can tell you where, when how a shooter has made his 3's for the season, the past month, the past week or in shoot-a-round that morning, what he had for breakfast and if he took a dump that morning. Coaches will form their rotation accordingly. They know if a player has a poor 3P% because of end of quarter heaves, players dribble for 20 seconds and then dump it into the hands of designated sucker, "please bail us out" guy. Right corner good (play him close) left corner bad (sag off of him and help pack the paint). Sengun will have a player guarding him normal, but then front him with a defender leaving that corner shooter and defend the lob pass, to zone, to two smaller players always cramping his foot space to two taller players throwing elbows. Sengun got 14 points by halftime backing Porzingis under the rim. In the second half Boston played two bigs in the form of Kornett and Porzingis providing help defense......Sengun scored 0 points in that second half in 10.5 minutes. Playoffs games are full of adjustments. Teams tailor their game to beat you in 7 games. They can focus on Sengun, VanVleet, and Jalen Green and don't have to think about LeBron, Durant, Curry......you know, players on other teams. Just our players. 3's Teams will recognize which 3-point shooters we're doing well prior to Playoffs or while playing in previous round. Those shooting 33% or under the previous week might be left open while the best shooter gets covered close. So in the regular season defenses might be token packed paint, but in the playoffs teams can set the rotation design specific to your strengths and weaknesses. Yes Amen is back to his last March greatness of vertical spacing, dominant in that Dunker Spot, and loves cutting from left corner for lob dunks. You can expect coaches to tell their players Amen is 50% from left corner 3, but has only shot 8 attempts from there all season. Go ahead and protect the paint with the understanding that Amen is going to cut to the paint to get in the mix. You have to meet him halfway or he will dunk over you. Amen is 26% from the other corner (on 23 shots)....so same defense. Amen is something like 61.1% in NBA percentile as roll man in PnR while Sengun is around 28% NBA percentile. Packing the paint clogs up things vs Sengun, Jalen Green, Amen and VanVleet. This is why is say, get me more 3-point shooters. Ones that not only shoot quality....but also quantity. I'm ok with Jalen Green shooting 8 or 9 three's a game. Only about one more make per game to being dangerous to other teams. In the playoffs teams won't worry about Amen, Tari, Jabari, Tate, threes because they shoot low quantity. Maybe Jabari if he hit 3 out of 4 in the first half of a game. But our players are prove it from one game to the next. Chances are Dillon goes 6 of 8 one game but then 2 of 8 each game there after. Now let me get back to this OKC - Cavs game. A basketball lovers dream game to watch. Pure B-ball junkie like me.
You don't have to shoot a lot. Just show the opponents they can't afford to leave you open for those shots and it creates spacing for yourself and your teammates. Jokic takes an average of only three 3s for his career. (For some reasons, he is taking much more and hitting much more this season.) And that's enough to give him a lot of room to operate from the perimeter in. As mentioned, the goal is not to shoot 3s. The goal is to get easy layups. The way to do it efficiently is to force the defense away from the basket.
Doubt it is overrated, Memphis is experimenting without Screens, Rockets are doing it with unorthodox methods and 2nd chance opportunities. It just adds to new old things that work.
the importance of spacing becomes apparent in the playoffs plenty of non-shooters that get minutes in the regular season then can’t even afford to be on the floor come playoff time
This disposable vape's got me spacing... I feel it's rated appropriately. Floating like Amen on a putback
I hope no one believes it's the end-all be-all and I hope no one believes it's as low-impact as, say, rebounding. Spacing is just very important. The more spacing you have, the more you get out of the same exact parts. So when you bring your shooter in, not only does he make the 3, but he is sprinkling 0.2 or 0.5 points extra for a few players because there is for example 1 more possession per game where a rim protector couldn't meet them in the paint. This is effectively you adding production to your roster without acquiring anyone or counting against the cap. Most teams are better than us so even if it were not important, we have created such a deficit for ourselves. It means we're not doing anything wrong but everyone else is getting free bonus production. Why would I screw my players over like that if I can make their job easier on offense it saves energy for defense. Having said that as I was explaining to someone the other day, nothing is absolute. Being elite at any of these big picture things can compensate the difference: excellent finishing at the rim, interior defense, perimeter defense, transition (can be as impactful as spacing). These things MOVE your net rating and thus move you up the Western RANKINGS. This is something you can't do with just good rebounding - you have to be a historically elite rebounding team to make that kind of noise in net rating (and we are the perfect example of that). It's really important to know the weighting of everything in basketball. The game is half offense and half defense. When you talk about rebounding, you're not talking about some third category. Every single thing we do fits in offense or defense. Offensive rebounding in offense. Defensive rebounding in defense. Loose balls - defense. Screens - offense. You get the picture. 99% of the game of basketball is contained in defensive and offensive possessions. The other 1% is just loose balls and the 1 final offensive possession for which there will be no subsequent defensive possession. We know that pretty much all NBA champions on history are top 10 in offense and top 10 in defense. This includes any period where the league changed the rules to promote offense. It never, ever mattered. You still always have to be among the 10 best defensive and offensive teams. Most don't know: Offense did not ever statistically become more important, it just requires less effort now. There are some outliers to this rule, such as one Shaq/Kobe/Phil title where they just turned it on defensively in the playoffs because of Shaq. Didn't bother to play defense that regular season. He just turned into the best defensive player in the playoffs when the playoffs started. We don't have Shaq. Defense is easy, you can grade these 4 factors and know what your defense will be like: interior defense, perimeter defense, man defense, team defense. That matrix will overshadow every other stat and tell you exactly how good a defensive team it is. OFFENSE is where people get so confused and frankly it is not that simple or objective. But it's pretty obvious spacing acts as a multiplier upwards or downwards. #1 in spacing? Your individual non-shooters thrive. #30 in spacing? Your individual non-shooters die. We don't need #1, it's not a necessity. We need to be around #15 and our athletes will have enough breathing room. Obviously, teams' respect for your scoring is based on the points you score if you're left open away from the rim. That's more accurately measured by 3PT% and TS% than our offensive rating, because our offensive rating is anomalistically reliant on rebounding to climb 10 spots. The respect teams show us when we play them (i.e. almost all 29 teams pack the paint extra against us) is more in line with our shooting stats (bottom 5) than our offensive rating ranking (mid table).
I feel like our back to back ships in 94 & 95 support this point. Hakeem in the middle surrounded by shooters. If you doubled him, he passed to the open shooter. If you didn't double him, he just roasted whoever was guarding him one on one. Defensively, the guards would gamble on steals knowing Hakeem was back there to block shots. Then again, Hakeem got his own fair share of steals as well. Thanks for sharing!
There are many ways to skin a cat. At the end of the day what matters is you have a top 5 offense and/or defense. Spacing is important but in the playoffs teams will scout you and try to take that spacing away. Players become more tired and their shooting goes down so the spacing matters less. Look at the teams like Harden Rockets, Nash Suns or Princeton Kings, they relied on spacing but have no alternative if that spacing is taken away thats why they lost. Remember 0-23 from 3? lol. You need to have multiple ways to score spacing or no spacing.
Cavs vs OKC just showed you that you need spacing, it is quintessential in the Modern Offense.... but it is not the only option now.
