Jason (23:48)
Listen to my legacy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This, this is my legacy. Moving on to Clippers Bucks so the Bucks were trailing by 13 in the early fourth quarter and Giannis just completely takes over the game. They try to get some stops by running a 23 zone with Jericho Sims in the middle of the floor and Clippers got a couple of buckets at it, but it didn't a nice job of just kind of stagnating and changing the flow of the game. And on the other end of the floor, Giannis was just torching Ben Simmons, torching Nicholas Batum. Just he was using this spin move over and over again last night. Disguised it really well too. He had a fun one against Nick Batum where he catches the ball on the left kind of like elbow extended area there on the middle of the, of that left side of the floor and he's facing up in the, the Clippers are basically zoned up on him. So they're in both driving lanes. Kawhi Leonard's kind of doing the, the little defensive 3 second dance where he's hopping in and out of the key, trying to make sure that he's ready to rotate. They're rotating on the high side and Giannis just kind of waits for a second to kind of read the floor. And then he does a beautiful job of disguising a post op, making it look like he was about to go kind of into a traditional slowdown post op where he turns his back in into that high hesitation dribble and then just immediately spun off of it. It like disguised it like he was going to go for a slow, methodical post up and then just immediately spun off of it. Went right around Nick Batum. Kawhi had no chance. He was not even close to being there in time. He's right at the basket. It just reminds everybody that like when you, when you're dealing with one of those true upper tier guys, this is one of the reasons why I've been excited about Luka Doncic. When it comes to the Lakers, right, there are a handful of guys in the league. Nicola Jokic, Shay Gilgis, Alexander Giannis, Antenna Campo, Luka Doncic. I think Jason Tatum has kind of entered into this group where it's like there's really nothing you can do. There's no player that stops them. There's no scheme that stops them. They are world beaters and when you have one of those guys, you present a problem to the opponent that becomes very difficult to solve. So one of the big things that we've underrated, when we've talked about the Bucks in recent years, where we think about them as a broken roster. And look, here's the thing, they're not the best roster in the league. We all know that. But there's an important context to their last two playoff exits. Giannis didn't play. When Giannis played, even on a limited bucks roster in 2022 because of the Chris Middleton injury, it was just Drew Holiday, a bunch of role players, and Giannis, and he still pushed the Celtics to seven games because guess what? When you get into a playoff series, it's over and over and over and over again that he's coming downhill at you. And I remember early in that series, it's like Horford would wall him up, you know, like you'd. You'd have guys sliding their feet and absorbing contact. Grant Williams played some good minutes on Giannis in that series. But then what happened after, like the 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th time that he comes at you, he starts to just get through you and there's literally nothing you can do about it. And he pushed that series to seven games when it had no business going to seven games. And that's where the optimism comes. That's why have the Bucks looked mediocre at times this year? Yeah, you shouldn't write off Giannis. Have the Nuggets looked mediocre at time. At times this year? Yeah, you shouldn't write off Jokic. Have the Lakers looked like they have some obvious roster flaws with their new build, especially at the center position. Yeah, but you probably shouldn't write off luka Doncic and LeBron James playing the way that he's playing. And as I was watching that last night, it just goes to show you, like, Giannis is kind of flying under the radar this year because of all the excitement around Shea, all the excitement around Jokic. He's still one of those guys, one of those guys that presents a truly unsolvable problem for opponents. When Giannis sat out of the game, though, something really interesting happened. Kind of goes out of the the game in that mid fourth quarter stretch on a minutes restriction, obviously, coming back from his injury in the Bucks won the game with defense and everybody was guarding. Dame had a really nice steal where they were running a ball screen with Zubotch and Harden, and Harden threw a bounce pass to Zubac on the roll, and Dame dug down off of Amir Coffee and got a steal that ended up leading to a run out and one for Kyle Kuzma. Brook Lopez blocked Kawhi at the rim because Kuzma flattened out the drive. I talk a lot about flattening out drives. When you flatten out drives, it gives your helpers more time to rotate. And when Brook has time to kind of read things on the back line, he can be devastating. There he had another block. On another sweeping drive across the middle of the floor, he had three blocks. In the fourth quarter, Kyle Kuzma took a charge, tagging Zubot on a roll they were guarding. AJ Green stonewalled Kawhi Leonard a few times. Kyle Kuzma had multiple stops on the ball against Kawhi Leonard and James Harden, either forcing them into bad shots. He forced James Harden into a three out of the right corner that was like a foot and a half over the back of the rim. He stonewalled Kawhi Leonard into passing the basketball because he's got the length to bother that pull up jump shot. Kuzma looks like a Swiss army knife. I've seen him take charges. I've seen him battle and beat in the post in front the post. I've seen him guard guards. I've seen him guard wings. He's grabbing a ton of defensive rebounds. He is a force multiplier for this defense. And I was, I was especially excited to see him in the context of playing alongside Giannis because again, that's what makes this work. When you're talking about, when you're talking about traditional switching schemes, it becomes about how many good defenders do you have on the floor. But when it comes to these, more like traditional pick and roll schemes, where you have Brook waiting at the basket, where you have Brook coming up to the level, sometimes it becomes more about off ball defense. It becomes more about how athletic are you on the back line, how well can you protect the rim and disrupt things. When the ball gets past Brook Lopez against types of players that are going to pull him out to the level and like, yes, Khris Middleton brought a lot of ball handling to this team, which, by the way, like Kyle Kuzma's done some of that. He had a big, one of the biggest clutch plays in this game. It's 104, 104. Kuzma attacks downhill with the ball, forces Zubacz to switch on him, swings a skip past the Torian prince Amir Coffee, ends up switched on Brook Lopez because Kyle Kuzma got downhill so hard he forced Zubacz to Switch got Brook a one on one in the post against Amir Coffee. He just bullied him right under the basket for an and one. They ended up leading the rest of the game from that point. You know, I'd already loved the early returns from the Kyle Kuzma trade. He made it immediately clear within the first few games that he was planning on playing winning basketball. Now, adding Giannis to this mix gives this team crazy potential and I have my eye on them as a team that could potentially jump considerably higher up my contender rankings after I see them with Giannis and Kuz together more. It's a physicality thing, it's a size thing, it's a protecting the rim and rebounding thing. It's a maybe you just can't handle Giannis antenna Kumpo on the other end of the floor kind of thing. That makes me so excited about them in the big picture. And then Dame, I mean like Dame, we Dame, when he was in the first round last year with Chris Middleton, had to carry such a massive offensive load within the context of this sort of build when they get to the postseason, when Giannis is playing the way he's playing, when you have this type of defense, Dame is a really dangerous second option. Has this remarkable ability to get to the foul line on three point shots. He drew two fouls on three point shots in the fourth quarter, hit another big step back three off the left wing. Just manufacturing points. That is another force multiplier within the context of what this team is capable of on the offensive end of the floor. All right, moving on the Lakers Blazers. This game looks so similar to me to the set of games that we saw between when AD got hurt in the Sixers game and when Luca joined the team. Think about like the, when they beat the Knicks like in the Clippers in that kind of phase of the, of the season. The Lakers defense has just been so good lately. Again, they're number one in the entire NBA and defensive ratings since January 15th. That's a 17 game sample or roughly 21% of the season. Oh well, Anthony Davis was in there for some of those games. You're right, he was in there for seven of those games. In the 10 games since, they are second in defensive rating now, we'll get deeper into what that means later because like, do I think they're a top tier defense in this league? No. But the point is they are guarding to the effect that they're guarding better than everyone in the NBA. Over the course of the last six weeks or so, they've Just done a much, much better job of executing JJ Redick's 1 through 5 switching scheme. We'll talk about that when we get into their defense. And then on offense, LeBron and Austin have just been in such a great group. There have been clunky moments, especially as Luka has been in the picture and they're trying to work that new partnership out. But LeBron in this 13 and 4 stretch, 27 points, 8 rebounds, 9 assists on 63% true shooting. That is MVP level production from a 40 year old in a winning context with massive games against good teams. Austin reeves in this 13 and 4 stretch, 21 points, 4 rebounds, 7 assists, 63% true shooting. That's insane. 48 points, 12 rebounds and 16 assists on 63% true shooting from LeBron and Austin over this 17 game span. This game kind of had an interesting flow and that's how it also kind of mimics some of these other Games recently when AD's been out, but Luke has also been out where like they start the game. There's a lot of ball pressure. That's like the book on the Lakers. You want to ball pressure Austin and LeBron and try to wear them out. That's by the way, one of the big reasons why I think Luca is so important to this team. He is impervious to that sort of thing. But in the early part of this game it's a lot of ball pressure. But the Blazers were running a lot of drop coverage with Donovan Clingan and Robert Williams where they're either they're coming up, but they're not that high up at the level, but they're sitting back waiting for the ball handler coming off of the screen. And LeBron and Austin just absolutely torched it, getting all the way to the rim. LeBron in particular had some really impressive finishes in traffic through clingan. LeBron by the way in this 17 game span is shooting 82% in the restricted area. So how's that for the old man? He's one of only six players in the league in that span that's making at least 3.5 shots in the restricted area on at least 80% and it's all centers and then LeBron the short to mid range shot making both Austin, LeBron were great with that. And then again, when you show a willingness to either attack downhill or to score and pick and roll, something happens with the screen defender. The ball screen defender starts to engage the ball handler more. As soon as you start to engage the ball handler more, that's when the roll man gets open. Jackson A's and Trey Jameson had 15 points in this game. A lot of spoon fed baskets right around the rim off of action that Austin and LeBron were running. But again, every team has a game plan for the Lakers. Lots of ball pressure, you wear them down and then usually over the course of the game there's more switching and then more aggressive ball coverage is where the big's coming up to the level. And what ends up happening is LeBron and Austin start to get tired and when they get tired, they get sloppy, particularly as passers. Those two guys finished with 17 turnovers. The team finished with a season high 24 turnovers. And so many of them were like pick sixes. And this is the weird part about that game. LeBron and Austin were brilliant, but they both undercut a lot of their success with these really sloppy turnovers that literally led to run out layups and dunks. Again, they had 31 points off of turnovers in this game the Blazers did. Denny Abdia in particular was amazing in this game. Did a ton of damage in those, like kind of pick, run, run out like pick six, pick six, type of types of sequences. But that allowed the Blazers to kind of slowly and methodically work their way back into the game. But LeBron James once again, just like he did against the Hornets the night before, goes absolutely berserk in the early fourth quarter shift. Hitting threes against Jeremy Grant, who was going underneath picks. And LeBron's just shooting the ball too well these days for you to go under picks. He made Jeremy Grant pay with two threes that way. Hit another one of those drop covered shots against Donovan, clinging like got Jeremy Grant in jail. And then hit like a little like 12 footer along the left lane line. Hit this crazy driving floater on to Monte Kamara, who was a really impressive defensive player all season, but was doing a lot of damage to the Lakers last night. Hit this driving floater on Tamani Kamara. All of a sudden the Lakers are up by nine. But then the rest of the way the Blazers just double teamed LeBron and there were a couple more ugly turnovers, a couple more runouts. It kept things kind of close. But when you double team LeBron, he's just going to pick you apart. They got good looks down the stretch. Austin Reeves hit a big three on the right wing off of a LeBron double that more or less kind of like ice to the game, so to speak. And then Austin reaves couple of big stops, got a stop on Scoot Henderson driving Off of the left wing. Got another stop in the post against Jeremy Grant. I've been telling everybody forever, like, Austin will have his bad games where he looks bad on defense, especially in like random regular season games against mediocre teams. But when LeBron need or when Austin needs to guard, he guards. Austin slides his feet, he absorbs contact. He's excellent at attacking the basketball. Both of those stops against Scoot Henderson and Jeremy Grant, he just attacked the basketball. He got Scoot Henderson up high, he got Jeremy Grant down low. Austin can guard and he got a couple of huge stops down the stretch of that game. Before we get into the Lakers defense, I just want to shout out a couple of Blazers. I was really impressed with Tomani Kamara again. He has just a really unique combination of like size and strength, but also long arms and lots of mobility laterally. He had five steals in this game, was causing a lot of problems. Denny Abdia, not just the transition runouts off of steals, but he brings a good amount of downhill force. He had this off foot dunk against LeBron, driving the close out off the top of the key where he literally made LeBron look like he was stuck in the mud. And LeBron's been guarding for a couple of months now. It's not as easy to do as you might think. And he just, he counters that downhill force with a nice jump shot. It can be somewhat inconsistent. He's better off the dribble than he is off the catch. That means he's kind of like a rhythm player. Makes me think like in the big picture, he's kind of more of a second side creator, a guy who should run more action. Robert Williams, his length and mobility was a problem all night. He had two blocks and two steals. The Blazers are fun. They have a nice group of useful role players. It's just Anferny Simons and Jeremy Grant leave a lot to be desired as ball handlers. They went 4 for 25 from the field, and that's just really hard to overcome for anybody. But I want to focus on the Lakers defense for a bit. Again. They're number one in defensive rating since January 15th, a large chunk of the season here where they've been playing great defense, they've really settled into a base scheme that works for them. They either switch everything or switch almost everything, depending on the matchup. So like last night, for instance, they're not worried about getting picked apart in ball screens by Portland. Their ball handlers aren't good enough at scoring or playmaking to do that. So they had Dorian Finney Smith, some of their perimeter players gave Vincent chasing over the top of screens while clinging and Robert Williams rolled and it allowed them to make stay attached to their pull up shooters in bait, shade and sharp and bait and Fernie Simons into these like tough rear view contested pull up threes coming off of screens. And it worked. It baited him into a bunch of them. They took 17 pull up jumpers last night, made six of them. But then you'll see in other matchups where they're more concerned about ball screens. They'll switch with their fives as well. And then they do. They switch everything when they go to their small ball groups right when there's no center on the floor. But their switching scheme has worked so so much better in the last couple of months because the Lakers are actually doing the things that they need to do to make that scheme work. To JJ's credit, even when those guys weren't executing it, he stuck with it. He believed in it and now he's reaping the rewards. We've talked about this on the show before, but there are several key things that you need to do in order for a switching scheme to work. First, you need your on ball, your off ball defenders to be prepared to jump out immediately when there is a screen to avoid that interchange gap. We talked about that yesterday with Miles Bridges. You got to switch right away. You can't have a gap between the switch because that's when a decent player can rise up and knock down a jump shot. There's an example early in the game where you can see there's a couple of Portland screeners up at the top of the key the Lakers players are glued up on the backside ready to jump out whenever that screen comes so that that interchange gap isn't there. Secondly, you need your weaker defenders to battle. If you're switching, they're going to go, hey, let's attack Austin Reeves. Hey let's attack Luka Doncic. Austin. You got to compete in those situations. Austin last night, huge stops down the stretch against Scoot Henderson, against Jeremy Grant third. You need to shrink the floor around them by gapping driving lanes. You'll see possessions where the Lakers have two guys on either side of the ball arms out in the driving lane close enough where they feel like they can close out shrinking the floor. The Scoot Henderson drive against Austin Reeves. If you look, there's a Laker on either side of Austin in the gap, making it like a narrow lane for Scoot Henderson to try to drive through and so he doesn't really try to go around Austin. He tries to go through Austin. And Austin takes one good slide to the left, absorbs that contact and attacks the basketball and ties Scoot Henderson up. If you don't have those gaps there. Excuse me. If you don't have those defenders gapping there and they're out of the way, you have a wider lane. That is what allows Scoot Henderson to really get to mixing Austin up. And once he starts mixing Austin up, that's where he has more of a speed advantage that he can take advantage of. Right? Fourth, you need to have a plan for dribble penetration. Which way? If I'm going to get beat off the dribble, which way do I want to funnel the guy where I have more help? There was a big stop late in this game that LeBron James had on Anthony Simons. And here's the thing. Simons is faster than LeBron, especially at age 40, right? So, like, LeBron is probably going to give up at least some dribble penetration on that play. Now, his job again is to flatten out the drive. And he did. But watch that play. LeBron, he knows Rui Hachimura is gapping from the left side off of Jeremy Grant, and he knows Austin Reaves is sitting right at the left block or the right block. Excuse me. So with Austin on the right block and Rui gapping off of that right corner, LeBron knows my best help is if I funnel him towards the sideline. So if you look at LeBron, look at his stance. His right foot is high, his left foot is back. He's in position to slide with an Forney Simons, but he is forcing him towards his right hand. So what happens? LeBron knows the drive is going right. The drive happens to the right. LeBron slides with him. Both him and Austin end up attacking the basketball, and they force it out of bounds. That's a plan that's going to be big when you have Luca. When Luka's in this picture and he does start getting attacked, you need to have a plan for what he's going to do. That doesn't mean Luka allows dribble penetration. I heard that a lot from Mavericks fans. Like, oh, Luca's job was to let guys drive past him into rim protection. No, it's not. Your job is to contain the ball as best as you can. But in the absence of the ability to actually literally contain the ball, you need to force him in one direction where you have a plan to handle it. And then fifth you have to gain rebound. When you switch, you're likely going to have smaller players battling bigs underneath the rim. You have to come flying in from the perimeter to help that smaller player in those situations. They've been doing a good job of that. In the 10 games since Anthony Davis left the team, they were 13th in defensive rebounding. That's not bad at all for a team that's been playing a lot of small ball over that stretch. Now the question is, how good is this defense really, especially in the context of Luka Doncic? To be clear, even without Luca on the floor, even if we just remove Luca from the equation, this is obviously not a number one level defense. A lot of this is February basketball. There have been good wins in there. Some they've played really good defense against some good teams. They defended the Clippers really well, they defended the Knicks really well. They defended the Pacers well. But a lot of bad offenses were in there too. Games against Utah, games against Charlotte, games against Portland, games against Washington. Those are going to. The warriors offense has struggled a lot this year. Those are games that are going to influenced your defensive rating a certain amount. Right. You add 30 plus minutes of Luka Doncic into the picture and yeah, your defensive talent goes down a level. So I don't think this is going to be some top five dominant defense. I'm not here today saying Lakers number one defense, they're going to say number one defense, they're going to win with defense. I don't think that's going to be the case. But they don't need to be that type of dominant defense. This team absolutely needs to be a dominant top two or top three level offense. And I do think that's a real possibility for them with the talent level that they have on that end of the floor. With LeBron playing at the level he's playing at, with Luca playing at the level he's capable of playing at, they can present an unsolvable problem to teams. But if they're a top two or top three level offense, they don't need to be a dominant defense. They just need to be good enough. I've talked about this a lot in the context of like Denver in 2023, somewhere in that like 10 to 15 range of defense is good enough when you have peak unguardability on the offensive end of the four. And I absolutely think the Lakers can get to that point. I think the Lakers can be a slightly above average defense. With Luka in the picture. They you've been getting too many stops now for a while for like I'm seeing so many people just writing the Lakers defense off and who knows, maybe Luca gets in the picture and they actually can't guard. Maybe everything falls apart, but it's all conjecture at this point. There's too many good defenders in the lineup. We talked about how Austin's a better defender than people think. Gabe's a good defender. Dorian Finney Smith's a good defender. LeBron for months now has been a good defender. Jared Vanderbilt, when he's right, is a great defender. They have good defenders in this lineup. They're going to get some stops. I absolutely think they can get into that slightly above average range of defense. I like the switching scheme as like a way for them to essentially bend but not break. Shut down screening actions, try to bait teams into running a lot of inefficient ISOs and post ops, giving up some points, but keeping teams in check enough for their offense to be a differentiator. My worries center around specific matchups like I've been talking about, like we talked about earlier with Boston and the realities of playoff series. Like I do worry about Boston truly spacing them out to where they can't gap, to where they can't help, and it becomes a problem. I can see a team like Denver where it's like they just can't keep Jokic off of the offensive glass and even if they double team him and force teams into misses, he just waddles his way underneath the basket and starts shoving guys off and gets offensive rebounds and put backs. I can see that being a problem. But I think in the big picture they're going to get a lot more stops than people think. I don't view them as a top tier contender, even if they're at their peak, simply because of the fact that they're going to have severe matchup weaknesses. But if they get their defense into that, you know, slightly above average range and they get their offense where they're capable of at the top tier in this league, I absolutely think they can enter into that second tier in the league with teams like Denver, with teams like Cleveland, I absolutely think that's in their potential.
