Positionless Basketball and Rockets 2022-23/beyond

That's code for you didn't understand it amirite?

 

I fully understand your low self esteem

 

In terms of position less basketball, the term refers more to how the team guards. Or at least that's how I perceive it. Having players like Jabari, Tari, Tate and Garuba (!) That can switch seamlessly 1-5 or 1-4. But how about on offense? I'm firm on KPJ not being this team's PG but going back to the "positionless" direction....what does PG even mean anymore? I don't mind him bringing the ball up 50% of the time with Green and initiating the offense. But him, Green and Al-P should be splitting playmaking duties on offense. KPJ can thrive in this type of setup.

 

They did share the playmaking the last 10 games or so. I think that is exactly what is going to happen. They will have sets that feature all three at the point.

 

It’s really simple, so simple that it gets over looked.

With the league deciding almost twenty years to tweak the rules and philosophy of the game we have seen the importance of spacing become the single biggest indicator of success.

On offense you want to create as much spacing as possible and on defense you want to limit spacing as much as possible.

It has been an evolution in the game because for years the players that limited spacing on defense didn’t create it on offense - that isn’t a big issue anymore. There are enough players that can contribute both.

The very best team builders and coaches understand the core importance of this principle and do everything strategically to gain the spacing advantage.

Teams like the Warriors, Heat, Sixers and Celtics may go about it slightly different in emphasis (defense versus offense) but the core truth remains spacing.

 

Im really hoping that the investment on the defensive side pays off. I think Stone is thinking along these very premises in the way he's putting together the team. It will be a Borg mind where you can input any player and they will know the role and expectation for what the philosophy requires on both sides of the ball. Defense was most critically needed and that coming from a guy who favors offense.



I think our offense will be pretty good:

 

Rockets defense worse than MIN and POR. Not a little worse, much worse.

Truly embarrassing.

 

Yeah man. Its startling. I guess my "Score 200 and dont worry about it" attitude was not going to cut it. Hoping Jabari and Tari can anchor that side moving forward.

 

It’s very simple - teams have to find ways to be versatile. You are only as strong as your weakest link so if there is a player that simply can’t guard 3 or 4 of the 5 players on the opponent, then smart teams will find ways to exploit that. If a player can’t reliably shoot from certain places, then teams will find ways to exploit that with their defensive coverages. It isn’t a “fad” - it’s just GOOD offenses and defenses are built to exploit opponents weaknesses - whatever they are- poor rebounding habits, not getting back in transition, player who have no capacity to hit shots past 10ft, defenders who can’t put up a little resistance against their offensive matchups in a switch, etc.

The best teams have at least a few players who have that versatility and the very best teams have a 5 man unit with that versatility who can both not be taken advantage of and who can also scheme to take advantage of other teams’ weaknesses. That’s never going away and as a result players are training to get that versatile skill set so the trend will only continue. You already see it now with big man specialist skill sets falling by the wayside for more generalized skills.

 

Thanks for sharing those tweets - really interesting perspective. Based on that, OKC seems like they should win way more games than they did. I’m not sure what’s up with that. That same group shared a tweet of elite offensive creators and SGA was just behind Luka for generating good looks for himself or his teammates. Then those tweets above showed they have a roughly league average defense and slightly better than average offense. Weird that they still ended up in the standings with Houston who clearly was a terrible defensive team. Also, Brooklyn’s offense wasn’t really that good nor was it’s defense. Good luck with that, KD. Also curious how Washington wasn’t better - they were better defensively than I was expecting but their offense was sooo up and down. I guess injuries? By far they were the strangest team in the curve. Also interesting that so many teams got WORSE defensively as the year progressed. You really didn’t see any teams get better - I suppose that is a commentary on injuries but an interesting observation nonetheless given the playoffs are heavily skewed towards defensive teams.

 

Great post. I kind of wrote it off as defenses(and offenses) being smarter today and knowing how to create advantages based on another teams limitations but you are spot on that spacing is the biggest commonality in both instances. Thanks for digging a level deeper there.

 

OKC was tanking just like us. They shut down Giddey when he probably could have kept playing. OKC really is an interesting team. They've amassed some talent and now need to weed the garden. Id agree with you in that injuries are a big part of a declining slope on defense over the course of a year. Its a long season some of these teams can ease off the throttle as it winds down when playoff slots are mostly determined. I still firmly believe that in a do or die moment elite offense will beat elite defense. Balance is the key, and you definitely need a decent defense to even get you into the playoffs to begin with.

 

Great post overall, but I wanted to emphasize this part. Guys like Tate and Mathews have helped the Rockets on one side of the ball regarding spacing, but hurt on the other side. I am excited that Smith and Eason possibly could end up as contributors on both sides of the ball eventually.

 

An awful lot of this is due to rules changes that favor perimeter players.

Back in the day defenders could hand check and have lots of other direct physical contact to disrupt players on the perimeter ..... Today defenders can't touch the offensive players and refs give them stupid "rip thru" calls that the offensive player causes .... all while teams defend bigs in the paint with a zone mentality where that was illegal not long ago.

This isn't the same game that Magic, Bird, Akeem & MJ were playing .....

 

This is exactly right and why all the “we need a true pg talk” is just traditional thinking getting in the way of reality.