Small Ball: Batman and the Rockets made the WSJ

congratulations @Batman Jones.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket...on-nba-playoffs-11599200607?mod=hp_lead_pos13

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A strange little musical premiered two years ago in a small Houston theater. It was set on the fictional island from “Gulliver’s Travels” and told the story of the Lilliput Existers, a basketball team with players who were six inches tall. The show was called “Small Ball.” It was supposed to be surreal.

But now this team of basketball Lilliputians has an uncanny real-world equivalent: the Houston Rockets.

The Rockets don’t play anyone taller than 6-foot-8. Their starting center is 6-foot-5. It’s as if the person responsible for “Small Ball” also built an NBA team. As it turns out, he did. The musical’s producer was Daryl Morey—the general manager of the Rockets.

For as long as basketball has existed, the sport has rewarded size. What the playoffs have revealed is that shooting and a new kind of size are today’s keys to success. The NBA is no longer a league dominated by the biggest men on earth. Smaller is better.


The traditional center who plays with his back to the basket is basically dead. There were nine NBA teams that averaged nine or more post-up plays per game as recently as 2016. This year there was one: the Philadelphia 76ers.

The Sixers bet on a supersized lineup. In their first-round series with the Boston Celtics, their hulking 7-foot center Joel Embiid was guarded by a 6-foot-8 undrafted center named Daniel Theis. The Sixers were swept. “A lot of people always want me to be a big man and they want me to be Shaq,” Embiid said, “but this league and this game is completely different.”

The Celtics are built around Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and one bold idea: that skilled, rangy, versatile wings who score on offense and smother on defense play the most important position in the league today. After beating the Sixers, the Celtics now have a 2-1 lead on the defending champion Toronto Raptors, who won a championship with a similar blueprint.

Joel Embiid of the 76ers is pressured by Jaylen Brown, left, and Jayson Tatum, right, of the Celtics.
PHOTO: KEVIN C. COX/REUTERS
The Miami Heat also cruised through the first round after downsizing their starting lineup, turning Bam Adebayo into a 6-foot-9 center and surrounding their smaller big man with shooting. It was a canny move in advance of their series with the Milwaukee Bucks, who spread the court for Giannis Antetokounmpo by playing their 7-foot center Brook Lopez a few Brook Lopezes away from the basket. The Bucks had the NBA’s best record this season. The Heat have a 2-0 lead.

The Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers can go small, too, but there is no team that goes smaller than the Rockets.

The NBA is famously a copycat league. The Rockets really are cats. They appear perfectly content to behave however they please no matter how much it annoys the humans around them.

What they’re doing this season is experimental even by the standards of a team that shoots more 3-pointers than 2-pointers. The Rockets have shrunk. In their playoff series that begins on Friday night, every Lakers starter will be bigger than P.J. Tucker, the Rockets’ 6-foot-5 center. Mike D’Antoni’s innovative teams in Phoenix in the 2000s that played at blazing speeds were famously called the Seven Seconds or Less Suns. He now finds himself coaching the Seven Feet or Less Rockets.


It wasn’t exactly their strategy to play without a center at the beginning of the season, but this was a season when nothing went according to plan for the NBA, the Rockets or Morey, whose tweet supporting Hong Kong’s protesters incited a geopolitical stalemate with China last fall.

At the root of their latest radical gambit was the realization they weren’t good enough to win a championship playing like anybody else. So the Rockets changed the way they played—and the way that other teams have to play them.

“I think the way you win in this league is you optimize your system around your talents,” Morey said.

James Harden and Russell Westbrook are Houston’s talents, for better and worse, and the whole point of microball is to manufacture space for them to maneuver and then attack the basket. That meant trading Clint Capela, a 6-foot-10 rim protector and lob threat, for Robert Covington in a February deal that made Tucker their improbable center. They are now constructed like a football defense of linebackers without linemen.

The Heat's Bam Adebayo tries to shoot over Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Bucks.
PHOTO: MARK J. TERRILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
As they steeled their nerves in the uncertain minutes before making the trade, Rockets executives wondered: Would this really work?

They did not have to be reminded that it worked for another team that played smaller for longer than anyone ever imagined. The Golden State Warriors forced basketball to rethink notions about size, space and shooting during a reign of NBA terror that began with the 2015 playoffs, when they benched their center, embraced small ball and won three championships in five years. No team was as tortured by the Warriors as the Rockets.


It was one thing to play small ball in spurts, as the Warriors did, and it’s quite another to play that way permanently. But there was so much at stake for the Rockets—from the legacies of Harden and Westbrook to the jobs of D’Antoni and Morey—that they were especially willing to try anything this season. Doing something that no team had ever done wasn’t as risky as it sounds. The greater risk was doing nothing.

“If you’re trying to win the title, you have to take risks,” Morey said at the time. “Otherwise you’re going to lose before the playoffs or in the playoffs—and most likely you’re still going to lose in the playoffs because only one team wins.”

The first sign that it could work came on a night in February when the Rockets happened to be playing the Lakers. It was not the most welcoming matchup: LeBron James, who is nominally his team’s point guard, was bigger than anybody in Houston’s rotation. The Rockets won anyway. As for Tucker, the unlikely center? He guarded Anthony Davis better than anybody in the NBA this season, according to the league’s data.

“As a coach, you get scared to try something different,” D’Antoni said that night. “But I thought it would work. I don’t know why it wouldn’t.”

Can they win a title this way? Maybe not. But they figure this way has a much better chance than any other way.

Now, after increasing their variance and surviving a bizarre series with the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Rockets find themselves with a matchup that might be more in their favor: They’re playing the Lakers again. Never has an NBA team put so much at stake in such a peculiar style of basketball.

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com

 

the writer should have had the decency to at least mention the author of the musical that was the impetus for the column by name.