Adjustments > Outcomes
The Bucks keep trying to run through a brick wall. It paid off in Game 3, but will it always do so?
A lot of attention was paid to the Milwaukee Bucks’ offense in the first quarter of Game 3, with Khris Middleton finding his stroke and Giannis making it a point to get to the cup. Even as the Bucks built up a 21 point lead (which seems unfathomable in an eventual 3-point game where neither team cracked 90 points!) though, two Brooklyn misses had me queasy about how long Milwaukee would hold off the Nets.
“Why are the Bucks still dropping against KD and Kyrie?” I texted a friend. “Surely they’ll start making those at some point.”
The Bucks’ defensive scheme on pick and rolls is no secret: their guards chase ballhandlers over screens, while their center, most notably Brook Lopez, drops to seal off the rim. The Bucks have met with more than a modicum of regular season success. They had a top two defense in Coach Bud’s first two seasons. They allowed the fewest shots at the rim and the lowest percentage on those shots per Cleaning the Glass, happy to concede less efficient midrange shots. Brook Lopez won Second Team All Defense last season for his critical role in this defensive scheme.
After two straight postseason exits, the Bucks showed a willingness to deviate from their base scheme this season by switching more on pick and rolls. Their defense dropped from top-two to tenth in the league, a price that was perhaps worth paying in order to build in reps that would stand them in good stead come playoff time.
Thus far in the Nets series, the Bucks have largely stuck with their drop-and-chase pick and roll defense with switches few and far between. This could spell trouble for two reasons: first, the Nets are excellent from the mid-range. Only the Chris Paul-powered Phoenix Suns shot better than the Nets this season on mid-rangers per Cleaning the Glass. In Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in particular, the Nets have two players that have historically ranked 90th percentile or better in accuracy from those spots. Second, the Nets are happy to draw Brook Lopez into those pick and rolls with Kevin Durant as the ballhandler instead of Kyrie Irving. Irving’s primary defender in Game 3, Jrue Holiday, has been much better at chasing over ballscreens and putting in a rearview contest than Durant’s man, PJ Tucker. As good of a defender as Tucker is, he hasn’t been as stout going over, opening up cleaner looks for Durant. And again, even if Tucker does fight over, this is Kevin Durant we are talking about.
Which brings us back to those two canary in the coal mine plays. With Durant’s and Irving’s jumpers off in the early going, the Nets adjusted to exploit Lopez in the drop by utilizing Bruce Brown’s expertise on the short roll.
Lopez dropping gave Brown the space he needed to get to his comfort zone (something I wrote about in the Game 2 recap.) This basket was the first of four straight short floaters by Brown off of similar plays. Brooklyn found a way to pick at a pain point while still making an in-game adjustment.
Fast forward to the fourth quarter and a stretch where the score was locked at 76-76 and neither team scored for nearly four minutes. During that stretch, Brown missed similar floaters on consecutive plays, even as Milwaukee maintained its defensive scheme.
Bring on the adjustment: The Nets continued to run the Durant-Brown pick and roll, but with Durant walking into a mid-range pull up instead. Bang.
The contrast between those two clips is interesting: In the first, Brown doesn’t even make contact on his screen, allowing PJ Tucker to catch up and put in a decent contest on Durant’s jumper. The screen from Brown is much better on the second occasion, forcing Lopez to play up slightly higher before backpedaling aggressively. The result is the same on both plays though.
The Nets could have sealed the game on a Kyrie-Brown pick and roll that, you guessed it, again tried to leverage Lopez in a deep drop.
Kyrie Irving might have overthought things there, making one adjustment too many, hitting Brown on the roll too early after Durant had opted for the mid-ranger on the previous two plays. It might have still worked if Kyrie had held on to the ball a mite longer and given Brown the ball in a more advantageous spot. One can’t fault the process too much though.
One could view Milwaukee’s unwillingness to adjust in-game as a commitment to sticking with what has worked for them (at least in the regular season.) And at the end of the day, they came out on top. Still, I am reminded of a comment I once heard about macroeconomic models: they work right up to the point that they don’t. The Nets are willing and have the talent to adjust, which may expedite the point at which Milwaukee’s rigidity proves costly.