With only a handful of NBA games played, we’re already seeing a baseline emerging for trends like Lakers divergence, Cavs defense and more.
Since most teams only play one or two matches, it’s hard to say anything for sure. So, to avoid any loud generalizations, we’ll make a few notes worth following as the season progresses.
No Galen Bronson, no problem
With the Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Clippers and New Orleans Pelicans reintroducing their star players who missed the entire 2021-22 campaign, some cited the Dallas Mavericks as a regression candidate in the loaded Western Conference.
As you remember, the Mavericks have lost Jalen Bronson (arguably the second best player last year) to “nothing” at free agency this off season. However, the beautiful thing about basketball is that you never lose a player without having the opportunity to replace their output.
In this case, filling Bronson’s void would likely be a two-person job, but if Game 1 is any indication, these two guys – Christian Wood and Spencer Dinwiddy – are up for the task.
Bronson’s two biggest contributions last year were his scoring (second in the team on points per game) and his ability to masquerade as Luka Doncic when he left the Slovenian ground.
Wood (who scored 17.9 points per game last year) looks ready to tackle the first division. On his Mavericks debut, he lost 25 points (in just 15 shot attempts), including a staggering 16 as he flashed every iota of his indoor scoring game:
Meanwhile, Dinwiddie has already shown his ability to stage Luka-ball lite in the past, and that feeling only solidified when Doncic was off the bench for the first six minutes of the second quarter. During this run, Dallas expanded his eight-point lead to 17, with Dinwiddie contributing 10 points in that period.
Another note, with no Bronson in the fold, the Mavericks are incredibly tall. Of the nine players who watched the minutes against the Suns, no one was shorter than 6-foot-5.
Cleveland’s defense will be good
Many fans tuned in to the Cleveland Cavaliers’ season opener against the Toronto Raptors in hopes of seeing how the new backcourt dynamic between Darius Garland and Donovan Mitchell would play out. Unfortunately, this experience quickly ended as a eye laceration In the second quarter, Garland was sidelined for the remainder of the competition.
What we get is the other overarching question about the team, How will the defense hold up with two smaller guards leading the attack?
Fortunately for Cleveland, the guard’s defense isn’t as important as the paint protection (we’ll dive into this later in the season). And they’re all a long way off in this respect as long as Evan Mobley and Garrett Allen dress up as Cavaliers.
Thanks to the inner tandem defense, goalkeepers can press their matches because if the ball player can get past them, they will have excellent coverage on the back line.
But what makes their diversion tactics different from those the Utah Jazz used previously with Rudy Gobert is that there are two of them, so they not only clean up the guards’ mistakes, but also clean up each other’s mistakes:
In the 21 minutes they shared on the floor in Game 1, the modern Twin Towers had a defensive rating of 106.9 (per PBP stats). This tag could have been tied for number one for the entire last season in the NBA.
Is Matisse Thiebolle the strange man in Philadelphia?
Few analysts have accurately identified the Philadelphia 76ers as the team to represent the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals this season. And while much of that prediction is based on seeing star duo Joel Embiid and James Harden, this team also has a great deal of depth.
The 76ers flashed that depth in their opening fight with the Boston Celtics. In the first quarter alone, Coach Doc Rivers took five different players off the bench.
The last of these five was fourth-year goalkeeper Matisse Thiebol. Thybulle only saw 20.3 seconds in that quarter and twenty-four seconds in total for the entire match. In the next game, he received the dreaded DNP-CD.
This matters because Thybulle is a two-time pick for the mainstream All-Defensive team that was removed less than a year from their national broadcast star closure show On Stephen Curry.
Thybulle is one of the most important defensive playmakers in the outer periphery, but his offensive issues make it difficult for him to stay on the ground against high-level competition. Are injuries giving him a second chance with Philadelphia, is he fighting his way to the spin through improvement, or are the team and Thybulle simply parting ways on deadline or off-season?
New year, new Julius Randle?
After coming onto the scene in 2020-21, last year was a step in the wrong direction for Julius Randle. Most of his struggles were beyond his control (it was probably Error as the first attack), but he also tended to be his worst enemy at times.
One of the major improvements Randle made during his 2020-21 friction campaign was his death. His ability to prepare his teammates with expulsions or layoffs whenever a second defender pulled out a lethal tool in his cache of offensive weapons. However, last season, he evaded this approach, often selecting fiercely competing players (like him) instead of trusting his teammates.
This change is evident when you look at the trend of his annual production at Ben Taylor Traffic Rating Metric (an estimate of a player’s ability to pass on a “roughly” scale from 1 to 10):
* Data provided by Backpicks.com
Do you notice the stark decline from 2020-21 to 2021-22?
The good news is that early returns suggest that bounce season may be in the Randle’s papers. Against the Memphis Grizzlies, he sent in six assists, and in the process showed a level of poise, patience and decision-making that he often lacked last season.
The Lakers are spacing better, and now they need their opponents to notice
A principle that applies to many sports: Big abuses pitch, big defenses shrink it.
The Los Angeles Lakers have (finally) identified the importance of the earlier part of that feeling and they did it Spacing is a priority in their crime. In the half field, the Lakers line up in a 4-out, 1-in formation. like him:
The problem is that large offensive spacing requires two attributes – 1) the physical act of properly spacing the floor and 2) personnel to make the defense react to the spacing between you.
As the screenshot above shows, the Lakers are getting the hang of the first attribute. The problem is to meet the criteria necessary to achieve the second characteristic. To illustrate, let’s see how the rest of this sequence plays out:
Los Angeles was set up to expand the Golden State Warriors’ defense in theory, but as we know, theory also doesn’t translate into practice. None of the three ‘bowlers’ the Lakers had on the field was enough to threaten Golden State, and the result is a flurry of snags between LeBron James and the basket.
The Lakers as a whole have struggled downtown, converting just 19 of their 85 attempts through two games (22.4 percent), a number they will definitely need to improve if they ever want to capitalize on their divergence.
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