DBC10 wrote:Spurs took the 3rd fewest 3s per game in the playoffs (5th fewest in the regular season). That was not a 3pt shooting team.
That Spurs team was the best Spurs team in team history, and their ONLY bottleneck was being old and not being able to rebound. Imagine if they actually had younger talent that could rebound tenaciously and score. You should watch the video, it actually describes how they were playing. It wasn't their lack of 3 point shooting that was killing them. It was their ISO as the video mentions. Every one on that team worth a damn could somewhat shoot, it just wasn't falling at the right time.
The Pistons lack player movement off the ball because none of them can catch and shoot. No point to running guys off screens if they can't make a jumpshot even when open. No defense is going to bother much with chasing bad shooters around. They'll just camp in the paint and wait for them to miss or dribble to them. Which is why we aren't more effective at cutting off the ball too, despite having one of the better cutters in Harris. When the defense can pack the paint because you have no perimeter threat, cutting to the rim off the ball obviously isn't going to be very effective against a packed paint. The most effective cutting teams are able to spread the court and clear the paint. We can't as currently built.
Defenses still have to tag off of our guys unless they want to get a defensive violation called on them. So you still see guys chasing KCP whenever they call for an elevator play. So the off-ball movement does work. It's not like these defenders are automatically just ignoring KCP/Tobias/Marcus running around and just camping the paint. Plus, if they really were camping the paint when someone runs around, then we should have seen way more open 3s from T/K/M this season, it wasn't so. Guys were still closing out perfectly fine on them. Most often, the passes came late and it led to a weird situation where T/K/M wasn't nearly as open enough for a catch and release and they had to resort to a ISO. We saw that plenty of times.
Plus, we don't all move around much as a unit, it's currently one guy initiating some action and then another guy moving to said action. What I'm calling for is multiple guys moving and rotating around the driver. You can't expect to catch the ball from standing still most of the time when defenders are ball-watching anyways. You have to make them pay when defenders are ball-watching and "cheat" our offense. None of our guys are rotating and I blame that on SVG.
Another thing, they don't call for plays from the high post which is why you saw the increase in ball usage from RJ being the top 3 in all PGs. The more we get our other guys involved from either the dribble handoff, the better since it'll lessen the pressure from RJ making something out of nothing and doing it badly.
Which are all reasons why we need better shooters so we can do all those things. I don't know why you think our shooters have to be strictly spot-up. If we get guys who are actually good at shooting off screens, they'll be run off screens too. And if they're good enough to draw attention, it will create more backdoor opportunities as well. All of which fosters ball movement. Hard to pass when all the defenders are playing off in the passing lanes because they don't respect your shooters and the paint is packed. Better shooting leads to easier passing lanes. Better shooting leads to better off-ball player movement. If we want a better ball/player movement team, and we want to maximize Drummond and Reggie's talents in the paint, better off-ball shooters will improve all of that. That is why it's this teams biggest need. It is the one area that if improved can pay the biggest dividends in multiple areas. Better offense leads to better defense too.
Respectfully disagreed.
How many guys in this league can actually shoot off screens and as you describe "elite" shooters? From that same thought, how many of them are actually decent at dribble drives to keep defenses honest when not shooting? Now, how many of them are under contract? And again, from that criteria, how many are actually obtainable? Very few if not all taken. These guys that can come off and shoot are not exactly dime-a-dozen and anyone of them that are worth a damn are already on most formidable teams. Plus, a lot of the times they also have the added disadvantage that they are strictly one dimensional, in that they don't provide much FOR ball movement because all they can really do is shoot. They don't know how to pass, dribble drive, nor cut baseline. Similar to the Anthony Morrows and Ilyasova's of the world.
I don't think personnel is what is our achilles heel right now unless it's for a stud star.
Defenders packing the paint doesn't have much to do with it because it's not everyone basically has one foot away from the paint from all our guys at all times. That just means they're ball-watching more to go for steals since so much attention is created from Dre beating everyone to the rim on PnRs. Plus, they
know we're not going to move around much as a unit and stay planted on the perimeter. That in itself, the league is on full notice of our offensive tendencies and playstyle, that we as a unit don't move much. You see it all the time at our games, the defenses just ball-watch what RJ and Dre are doing. We don't let the ball-watching be punished since nobody uses a backdoor cut/lob or rotate to a different spot on the perimeter for an easy catch and release. We can punish them easily whenever they "cheat" but the offensive system doesn't allow it to. This was very similar in SVG's Magic too, where guys just sat there, but they had better passers and shooters which mitigated the downside to this type of offense. Also having a prime Dwight that destroyed the league helps too.
SVG in general doesn't allow a lot of off-ball movement to be utilized which is a shame.
