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Have you ever wondered as to the etymology of certain ubiquitous phrases? Or for instance, that an eager rookie champs at the bit, he doesn’t chomp at the bit, for the phrase refers to horses biting - or champing - at the bits in their mouths out of impatience. The question of what it means to be hoisted on one’s own petard begs the first order question of what exactly a petard is. As with much in English, we have Shakespeare to thank for that. To wit: Hamlet vows to have the conspirator Claudius blown up (hoisted) by his own small bomb (petard). In summary, to get hoisted with one’s own petard is the delicious irony of falling prey to one’s own device.
Such was the fate of the Memphis Grizzles in losing Game 6 of the Western Conference Semifinals to the Golden State Warriors. The Grizzlies were the best offensive rebounding team in the league this season, something they carried over to the playoffs. The Grizzlies rebounded nearly a third of their own misses in the regular season per Cleaning the Glass. In Game 6, the Warriors succeeded in rebounding 42% of their own misses, 30% better than Memphis’ league-leading mark, led by 11 offensive boards from Kevon Looney and an under-the-radar 6 from Andrew Wiggins.
Let’s start with Wiggins, who had 5 or more offensive boards in three of the six games in the Memphis series, channeling what Marcus Thompson II called his “big man spirit”. Wiggins has upped his offensive rebounding rate in the playoffs to the point where he is rebounding 9% of missed Warrior field goal attempts, in the 96th percentile of all forwards league wide per Cleaning the Glass. Dig into the film and there is a quiet intelligence to Wiggins’ approach to the offensive glass. When the Grizz had a smaller player like Tyus Jones or De’Anthony Melton on Wiggins, he would establish position below the rim and take the easy box out.
Here, Wiggins recognizes that a defensive scramble has left him without a man marking him. He crashes in from way outside the perimeter to snag the rebound and a putback.
One approach I have especially enjoyed is when Wiggins comes towards the nail from the weak side corner. Eric Nehm had written about the Milwaukee Bucks’ approach to offensive rebounding last season; one paragraph jumped out to me:
While players sprinted straight up the sideline from the corners to get back on defense in previous seasons, their first two steps from the weakside corner are now toward the middle of the floor, which at least gives them a chance at offensive rebounds.
I can’t tell if this is a Wiggins original, a point of emphasis by the Warriors coaching staff, or both, but Wiggins has taken a similar approach to sneak in for offensive boards.
At other times, Wiggins recognizes when his man is both sleeping at the wheel and not gearing up to leak out in transition, more low-risk opportunities to gamble.
Why do these subtleties matter? Go back to this 2016 Zach Lowe story on teams weighing up the tradeoffs between offensive rebounding and transition defense, and this bit in particular:
[Coach Brett] Brown is trying to teach Philly's corner shooters to loop up toward the foul line when a teammate launches a 3-pointer, just in case a long rebound happens to carom there. Both Stotts and Frank Vogel encourage the same tactic. "With everyone shooting 3s, you might be able to pick up some cheap points," Brown says.
Cheap points are never a bad thing, but especially not in a series where the Warriors often struggled to muster 100 points per 100 possessions (the Orlando Magic had a league worst offensive rating this season that was nearly 5 points higher).
The tension at the heart of Lowe’s piece was about the tradeoff between offensive rebounding and transition defense. The theory is straightforward: having your personnel stationed below the opponent free throw line for a rebound puts them out of position to get back on defense. This is especially true for wings and guards, whose men might be most likely to get out ahead in transition.
Retreating prevents fast-break points and forces opposing offenses to work against both a set defense and the dwindling shot clock.
Teams should be especially wary of crashing the glass against a team like the Grizzlies. During the regular season, only the Charlotte Hornets added more points in transition than the Grizz per Cleaning the Glass. Moreover, Memphis had a bottom ten half court offense; there is a lot to be gained by slowing down Memphis’ transition attack.
Yet, the Warriors succeeded in keeping the Grizzlies to just 80 points per 100 transition plays in game 6, while coming away with 25 offensive boards (not to mention all the attempted offensive rebounds that could have left them vulnerable).
Let’s address the elephant in the room right away: The Grizz played Game 6 (as well as Games 4 and 5) without Ja Morant, a transcendental open court force. While Memphis still managed a decent transition offense with Morant off the court in the regular season, the results were putrid in the playoffs. In 460 possessions with Morant off the court in the playoffs, the Grizz only mustered 100 points per 100 in transition. They ran like hell, but to little avail.
It wasn’t just Morant’s absence. There was a method to the Warriors’ offensive rebounding madness. I touched on Wiggins’ low-risk approach above, but that approach doesn’t always work if the rest of the team isn’t committed to providing a safety net. Even more than Wiggins, Kevon Looney clearly had a mandate in Game 6 to crash the offensive glass. Look at Looney fighting for the board here, with all five Memphis players in frame. Wiggins is also in the paint, with Draymond Green already making moves back to the Warriors’ basket. Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, the other two Warriors on the court, are well out of frame even though both their men are in the paint.
Even as Looney fought for boards hard, the Warriors, demonstrated a commitment to getting back on defense fast. Get back, get set, and force Memphis to settle for the half court.
Here, Steph sneaks out to the corner in case Wiggins needs an outlet, but Draymond and Klay are backpedaling as soon as Steph’s shot goes up:
Lost in the shellacking of Game 5 was that the Warriors still did a decent job of slowing Memphis down in transition. Although the Grizzlies still ran a ton, they actually added fewer points in transition than they did through their half court play (on the back of some stout offensive rebounding) in that game. I imagine that once they were done licking their wounds, Golden State noticed that underneath the dross they had done some things right.
Two potentially related stats: 43% of the Warriors’ shot attempts were non-corner 3s, with just 16% coming at the rim. That first number would have led the league by a country mile in the regular season.1 The second is considerably lower than Phoenix’s 25% of shot attempts (CP3 and Devin Booker bringing back the mid-range, so on and so forth). That rim number may seem perplexing when one considers how many potential put back opportunities the Warriors generated through Looney and Wiggins, but is perhaps explained by the rim protection of Jaren Jackson Jr. and Steven Adams. So what came of all those offensive boards? Here’s the Warriors’ shot chart from Game 6:
Look at all those three point attempts above the break and beyond the hash mark. I don’t think this is unrelated to how the Warriors approached the offensive glass. With Looney and Wiggins committed on the inside, the other Warriors manned the back line to guard against leak out opportunities; with the non-rebounding personnel spending much of their time above the break, it isn’t a coincidence that so many of the Warriors’ chances came from there.
Pundits talk about championship pedigree and I often don’t know what that means. Perhaps in Golden State’s case, the ability to adjust on the fly and find a way to smartly crash the boards is one example.
Golden State itself attempted the second most non-corner 3s this season…with 33.7% of their attempts.
great, great stuff!