210Aggie14 said:

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I'm laughing so hard at the rockets thread

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They're a bunch of sensitive Sally's that can't handle any negativity. That's why their thread is the only one with a staff warning on the op and they're all pumped about a couple of guys getting 30 day bans for some trash talking. Petty victories.

Confirmed that Harden shouldn't have gotten a foul called.

Nunn was head of refs for five years and a ref for decades.

I'm saying this here because I'm not trying to set off Rockets fans, but while the Spurs defensive scheme was brilliant and effective last night, it was also the next step in the perversion of basketball.

From around 2000 to 2002, the league changed the rules to eliminate handchecking, make it harder for centers to clog the paint, and reduce legal contact to impede a screener. The Spurs were one of the first teams (with Detroit) to figure out how to defend and also one of the first (with the D'Antoni Suns) to exploit it offensively with pick-and-roll offenses led by light, quick guards. Along with the rail-thin Ginobili's innovations in footwork, Parker was in the first wave of guards that were physically weak but used screens and speed to score at will in the paint. By the late 2000s, the Suns and Spurs were battling it out with pick and roll offenses.

The next wave was to go from simply playing within the new rules to exploiting the rules. Ginobili was in the first wave of players to exploit the rules to draw fouls. Other, more egregious offenders were: Paul Pierce, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Paul with the "pump fake and jump into the defender" (Aldridge was a fast follower). Dwayne Wade and Chris Paul brought the "crash into a post defender and throw the ball up while flailing arms wildly" to an art form. Certain players brought back the Reggie Miller leg extension to draw contact.

The Chris Paul Clippers were the first team to build their offense around drawing fouls (and trusting that officials would not call moving screens). The Scott Brooks Thunder were close behind, and the eventual arrival of D'Antoni in Houston changed things there from one horrible flopper doing his thing to designing the offense around gaming the officials.

With the advent of using screens to draw fouls (by using the cover to grab a defenders arm; the screener pushing the defender into the ball handler; curling hard off the screen to create contact with the lead arm; or pulling up to shoot before clearing the screen to force a collision), the problem had been set.

Exploiting the rules is worth 50% more when the foul is on a three point shot. Analytics (a toolset pioneered by San Antonio and eventually picked up by the Battier/Morey Rockets), helped identify that drawing a foul is a lot better than taking a good shot. An 80% free throw shooter taking two is worth 1.6 points per possession, well above the league average of 1.05. Make it three and it's worth 2.4 ppp, which means that as long as you draw a foul every other time you try you're coming out ahead. Any made shots are gravy. The worse the shot, the more likely you are to get a foul call, which means that the Rockets now intentionally take bad shots.

The Spurs adjusted brilliantly. They stopped fighting through picks, opting instead to follow the ball handler and challenge shots from the side where they could prevent contact from the screener and see the ball handler to avoid contact on the stop-and-launch. They gave up straight line drives to the basket betting that the Rockets would go straight to the nearest big man trying to draw contact, which the Rockets obligingly did. And they told the big men to stay down and stay vertical, which allowed them to block shots without fouling as long as drivers went straight to them. It's the Tim Duncan, and I suspect he had a hand in the game plan.

But it's all so stylized. The Rockets aren't trying to take good shots and the Spurs are trying to prevent bad shots. We've gone in circles and the game is hardly recognizable. I'm happy we won but sad that this may be the future of basketball.

It's so strange to watch elite athletes intentionally flop and flail with clear space between them and the nearest defender. The bad shots are just bad shots without much chance to draw a foul, but the Rockets keep taking them.

He may want my vote after all

I think Simmons made a strong case for taking a lot of the guard minutes. His defense is very good 1-3, he's so strong and explosive that if you gamble and lose he's going to get into the lane and likely throw it down, he rebounds, and he plays calm. It helps if Aldridge can keep playing to his talent because the Spurs can play through the post more which saves Leonard and Mills to handle point duties.

The key offensively is Aldridge though. Without him scoring, we don't have the horses to keep up. Kawhi will get his, Mills and Gasol will score some, but there's only one real second scorer on the team now.

Game 4 would be a really great time for a throwback game from Manu though. Matching up with Harden, an extra day of rest, and the team needs him....

Player +/- is a bad stat in general even over the course of a season and it's meaningless for 14 minutes of gameplay. Murray went 1 of 5 from the floor and lost control of the ball 5 times in 4 possessions after Beverley and company realized how loose his dribble is and how much slower his brain is working compared to everyone else. And he's not a good defender. He was atrocious.

The kid has tons of tools and I think he'll be good eventually, but that was a conspicuously bad performance. He's not ready. I'm hoping he'll contribute a few minutes, but only if he learned that he doesn't scare people enough yet to get away with all the flashy tricks he learned from Jamal Crawford.