Let’s take a test in class: Which player is forced to defend the most pick-and-rolls in the 2021-22 NBA East and West championship games?
An all-around rim protector like Bam Adebayo or Al Horford? Or Draymond Green or PJ Tucker all-in for sizes 1-5? Or maybe Marcus Smart, Dorian Finney-Smith type of ace peripheral locks?
In fact, the answer is none of the above. The correct answer might surprise you: Stephen Curry, who was forced to pick and roll 115 times in this round against the Dallas Mavericks alone! (After Game 4 of the Western Conference Championship) Interestingly, in the regular season, Kevon Looney’s “average 100 pick-and-roll encounters” column is 5 times that of Curry, and Green’s number is more than 3 times; However, once the playoffs arrived, Curry’s defensive test was the combined number of Looney and Green.
|
player |
Defensive Pick-and-Rolls |
average per hundredround Defensive Pick-and-Rolls |
|---|---|---|
|
Stephen Curry |
115 |
42.4 |
|
Al Horford |
101 |
36.3 |
|
Jordan Poole |
70 |
32.4 |
|
Bam Adebayo |
66 |
20.1 |
|
Grant Williams |
65 |
20.1 |
|
Luka Doncic |
63 |
21.3 |
This is nothing new for Curry. As early as in the past championship games against the Cavaliers, he has been constantly singled out on the defensive end – sometimes, the pick-and-roll defense he faced in the playoffs, even That’s ten times as much as the regular season.
However, he is not alone. His teammates are also likely to be the future successor Jordan Poole. In this series, the burden of pick-and-roll defense is more than 5 times that of the regular season. It seems that the Mavericks really do everything possible to find Luka Doncic. Any defensive flaws.
Further reading:After searching for many years, the Warriors finally found the genuine spray “third brother”: Jordan Poole
But when it comes to Doncic, you think he’s a hunter, but you don’t know that he’s also a prey on the defensive end: In the playoffs, he also screened twice as many times as the regular season, which is exactly what star guards do in modern times. Trend in the NBA playoffs: Teams are counting on you to smash on offense; you also have to take relentless blows from opponents on the defensive end.
NBA teams are meant to take advantage of opponents’ weaknesses, but today’s dominant “all-switch” strategy opens the door to that trend. The Warriors began the 2014-15 season with a bold strategy of switching all five positions to create a so-called contemporary “free-flow” offense, and the rest of the league followed suit. Since the introduction of “tracking data” in the 2013-14 season, the league’s switch rate has roughly tripled since then. In the 2017-18 playoffs alone, Curry’s switch rate was 46 percent with LeBron James on the ball, 56 percent with James Harden, and 62 percent with Chris Paul. The Rockets are well aware of the Warriors’ defensive strategy, so they continue to name Curry, and then continue to beat him.
However, in terms of data, how to know that the offense is “deliberately” picking defenders is a big problem. The single player who defended the most pick-and-rolls in a single playoff series throughout the years of tracking data was Joel Embiid (284) in 2020-21 against the Atlanta Hawks, but we wouldn’t say the Hawks It’s Embiid who deliberately “names” his excellent defensive ability. After all, he just happens to be a good pick-and-roll partner for Clint Capela — Trae Young.
Therefore, we can only use the difference in the number of screens (pick-and-rolls) encountered by the same player in the regular season and the playoffs as the target of judgment. Just taking the 2020-21 season as an example, Embiid faced an average of 53 pick-and-rolls per 100 possessions in a series against the Eagles, not much different from his 47 in the regular season — not to mention that the Eagles are already a team. A team that uses the pick-and-roll as its offensive tone, so it is reasonable to speculate that this is not a targeted roll call strategy.
Looking at all the players of the tracked data age (100+ minutes in the series) in the manner described above, we can come up with the following list over the past 9 years, along with those “prey” that were most often singled out: Sure enough, Curry is far ahead of the pack, taking the top 3 and the rest…