The Warriors Won the Pick-and-Roll Chess Game
But credit the Celtics counters. A November game doesn't have to mean something, but it doesn't mean nothing either.
Does basketball even matter right now? Or as Tom Ziller asked, is America cooked? And to my fellow California/urban/coastal residents trumpeting a bubble as a silver lining: when we can’t even agree that slavery is a bad thing, don’t talk about a bubble. The call is coming from inside our house.
It may mean nothing and everything, but watching Steph Curry play basketball brings me joy in even the darkest timelines. So let’s make a hard pivot to this past Wednesday when the Golden State Warriors put their #2 ranked defense (it’s still early) up against the defending champions and their #1 ranked offense. Aside from the early-season caveat, Boston was without Jaylen Brown and Kristaps Porzingis, while Golden State was missing Brandin Podziemski and De’Anthony Melton.
The modern NBA is a pick-and-roll league and one of my favorite things to track early in games is how teams are approaching pick-and-roll defense. On this game’s opening play, the Celtics run a Derrick White-Jrue Holiday pick-and-roll. It looks like Steph Curry is trying to stay at the level of the screen, with Moses Moody tasked with fighting over the screen to stick with White. However, Holiday slips out of the screen early and the Warriors have to switch later. With Moody trailing the play, Holiday is able to find Neemias Queta out of the short roll for a dunk.
We’ll come back to those guard-guard pick-and-rolls later. The thing to note in the clip above is that Andrew Wiggins stays close to Jayson Tatum at the top of the arc, while Moses Moody desperately tries to catch up to Holiday.
Contrast that with the clip below a few possessions later. There’s a lot going on here, so watch both pick-and-rolls a few times:
The Celtics again go to the White-Holiday pick-and-roll. This time Moody goes under the screen, impeding Holiday should he slip out early, and allowing both Curry and Moody to stick with their assignments. The Celtics then swing the ball over to Tatum for a Tatum-Queta pick-and-roll…which the Warriors cover by trapping Tatum. Moody helps all the way off White to cover Queta’s short roll at the nail and is able to force a turnover.
That latter strategy is how the Warriors managed to force ten Celtics turnovers in the first half. They trapped the ball handler whenever Boston ran a pick-and-roll involving one of the big men (Queta, Luke Kornet, and even Al Horford at times.) The Warriors had a defender showing help at the nail, comfortable with gambling on the inability of Queta and Kornet to make plays out of the short roll. And they did this with multiple Celtics ball handlers. Here’s another trap on a Tatum-Horford pick-and-roll, with Gary Payton II helping at the nail:
Or how about trapping Payton Pritchard on a Pritchard-Kornet pick-and-roll, with Buddy Hield helping on the short roll.1
As we see in the second White-Holiday pick-and-roll above, the Warriors generally did not send two to the ball handler when the screener was not a big man. Golden State tried to keep the Celtics guessing by varying their approach on those sets, whether having the screener’s defender at the level, hedging and recovering, or even straight up switching. For all the talk about this being an early season game that didn’t matter, neither team was just going through the motions. Boston was quick to bust out counters. The very possession after the Warriors successfully covered the White-Holiday pick-and-roll, Boston ran a Tatum-Holiday pick-and-roll. Only this time, Holiday pops to the top of the arc instead of rolling, scrambling the Warriors defenders and forcing a late switch:
Golden State got lucky there, with Holiday missing an open three.
Anticipating that Golden State would throw in occasional blitzes on even those pick-and-rolls, Boston busted out another smart counter during crunch time. Derrick White sinks down to the weak side corner while Al Horford cuts over to the strong side corner, pulling away any help from the nail. Tatum finds Holiday on the short roll out of the trap and Holiday, a more accomplished play maker than the Celtics bigs, is able to bait Kevon Looney enough to find Queta for the alley oop:
The Celtics didn’t restrict their counters to just the guard-guard/wing-guard pick-and-rolls. Here, they test how synced up Golden State’s defenders can be while varying the looks that they throw at the Celtics, by running a Spain pick and roll. Looney and Hield play this well, but Jonathan Kuminga misreads the play (watch Hield and Looney desperately pointing Kuminga to switch onto Sam Hauser) leading to a Boston three:
My favorite counter to scramble the Warriors’ nail help was this tasty number, where it looks like another Spain pick-and-roll. However, Hauser veers off to the wing without setting the back screen, giving Kornet an easy outlet out of the short roll when Kornet’s man, Kyle Anderson, tags Kornet at the nail:
Boston also found success in the second half through off ball screening actions that really tested the Warriors’ screen coverage schemes. The clip below may have been my favorite example. The Warriors switch the first screen that Neemias Queta sets for Jrue Holiday. You know what they say: The best way to beat a switch is with a slip. Queta turns and sets another screen for Payton Pritchard…only this time he slips out of the screen and with GP2 and Anderson not on the same page, gets an easy dunk out of it:
Boston lost this game, but they are a well-oiled machine, able to devise and deploy counters on the fly.2 Golden State’s defense did enough to gain them some buffer, not to mention Kyle Anderson hitting three straight (!?!) threes, Kevon Looney pulling down ten rebounds in 16 minutes, and an evergreen Steph Curry closer performance. But Boston responded in the moment and on another night, dare I say most other nights, this might have been a Celtics win in the end. For a November game, it sure had the feel of a playoff game, complete with intricate defensive coverages and counters on counters.
Something to keep an eye on: Boston is scoring 1.25 points per possession on pick-and-rolls with Pritchard as the ball handler, the third best mark in the league (minimum 2 possessions/game.) The players above Pritchard are Ty Jerome and Jordan Hawkins, so this may just be early season noise. Nevertheless, Pritchard looks sprightly thus far and it’s worth monitoring.
Boston only had two turnovers in the second half.