When Marcus Smart made his comments about the Celtics’ offense last week, there were lots of responses chastising him in lots of different ways, but most of these pointed out that the team had just given up 39 points in the fourth quarter to the Bulls. Offense, these people argued, was the least of the problems.
Basketball, thank god, isn’t football or baseball though—offense and defense aren’t two relatively separate worlds. In basketball every thing is everything, all the time. For what it’s worth, 10 days after Smart’s comments, the Celtics are up to 10th in defensive efficiency. They are 23rd on offense. Those two sides of the ball are trending in exactly the ways those numbers make it sound like they are trending.
Marcus Smart’s comments, to me, were a little more searching than they were defiant anyway. After the part about how there’s only so much he can do if he’s standing in the corner without the ball, he said, “We're running plays for our best players. The other team knows that. They do a good job of shutting that down. We can't allow that. When they shut that down, we can't keep trying to go to those guys. We gotta abort that and find another way to get them the ball.”
Smart went on to talk about how Jayson and Jaylen need to pass the ball more. It’s hard to talk about this stuff. Every thing is everything. There is such a thing as passing too much. You have 24 seconds to get a shot off, so if you pass up a decent one, you might end up with nothing. Of course, that’s not what’s happening here. At one point in his comments, in response to a question about whether he would prefer running plays to focusing on isolation chances, Smart says, “I mean, I would just like to play basketball.” A comment like that can get shucked aside as a bit of defiant nonsense, but it isn’t.
What he was really talking about was moving the ball and keeping it moving. “I would just like to play basketball” is code for playing without stagnation. Over the past few years in the NBA, James Harden led a kind of offensive basketball movement in which basketball basically became chess. Harden was and is so good at processing a situation that his best opportunity for mustering an advantage comes from a starting place of stasis. Place good shooters opportunely around the perimeter just so, let Harden manipulate the defense into the wrong move, and voila!
We saw the limits of chess-ball, though. Basketball has a wild heart beating in its chest; it is fundamentally unpredictable, and all of your possession-by-possession math will vanish like smoke in the fire of the highest stakes. What Smart was trying to get at is that when you have great isolation players, you still need to try to make things easier for them. For the team. Five players are out there, and you might as well use them. Actually, you need to use them. Instead of going one-on-one against a set defense, Tatum could be going one-on-one against a defense that has just had to scramble side-to-side after a serious of actions. Even if those actions are dummy actions, still, the machine is humming, and everyone is involved. And since every thing is everything, that involvement impacts other parts of the game. An involved player might be more apt to correctly jump a passing lane, or trap at the exact right moment, or whatever.
It’s what happens in whatever that wins you basketball games. Smart’s whole career has been about the fact that in the midst of whatever, he’s the player most likely to do something totally special, and if you listen to him with a spirit of generosity, and hear that he’s aware of the fact that Jayson and Jaylen are the best players on the team, maybe it’s easier to also hear what he’s trying to say.
Some Other NBA Notes:
I meant to be writing about Jayson Tatum, who is now fourth in the league in percentage of plays in isolation while somehow being only 18th in drives per game. That’s a bad combination. He’s basically the least efficient of all the high volume isolation players in the league.
The Nuggets are now 7-4 despite Michael Porter Jr.’s missing the past two games and playing terribly for the previous nine. The key has been Will Barton, who is playing the best basketball of his career. His chaotic, herky-jerky floor game is a perfect fit with Jokić’s improvisational wizardry. Barton has upped his usage and assist rates while turning the ball over less frequently, and is an active and versatile defender. He’s also just fun as hell to watch.
The Wizards are 8-3 with Bradley Beal in the midst of his worst offensive season in over half a decade. Turns out if you trade Russell Westbrook for basically an entire competent basketball team, it helps your depth in pretty significant ways.
The Lakers have been terrible, but they do keep winning close games in overtime, which means they are banking wins while playing terribly. That’s going to matter if and when they ever start playing well. I hate to admit it, but at 7-5, given the fact that they’ve had injuries and have struggled to fit Russell Westbrook in, they’re in pretty good shape.