Last night, the Denver Nuggets and Los Angeles Lakers played the first game of the NBA’s Western Conference Finals. Predictably, the teams’ star centers, Nikola Jokić and Anthony Davis, were matched up early and often, and for the first half, Jokić basically ate AD and the Lakers alive.
Jokić had everything going. He was demolishing the Lakers on the glass, picking them apart with his passing, and scoring in such a wide variety of ways that Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy spent like 30 seconds oohing and ahhing at a simple jump shot off a pindown screen.
In the second half, of course, the Lakers adjusted. One of their adjustments was to take Anthony Davis — playing some of the best defense I’ve ever seen over these past few weeks — off Jokić. Instead, Rui Hachimura — nobody’s idea of an elite defender — got the assignment.
Seems counter-intuitive, right? An elite player has smoke coming out of his ears he’s so hot, and you decide to take your best defensive player — who happens to be the most natural positional matchup in this case — off that guy?
And yet, this is more and more common in the NBA. The 2021-22 Celtics made a great deal of hay on the defensive end by hiding NBA All-Defensive big man Robert Williams on shaky shooters and letting him freelance as a helper. Under Mike Budenholzer over the most of the past half decade, the Milwaukee Bucks did much the same with Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Anthony Davis is a natural for that kind of freelancing role. He’s been banged up so much of the past few seasons that we haven’t really had a chance to see him get to sing in it, but in the second half against the Nuggets, you could see why it works. On a given possession, Jokić might bury Rui Hachimura deep in the paint, but with AD’s man — Aaron Gordon, mostly — in the dunker spot, the further Jokić buried Hachimura, the closer he was to AD’s help. It’s all jumbled up, and there’s not enough space for Jokić to manipulate the floor.
Compare that to what happened when Jokić was able to post up with Davis as his primary defender:
Pretty big difference, right? What will happen next is that Nuggets will consider how they might adjust to these adjustments. Maybe Jokić will be more aggressive about just shooting over the top of Hachimura — he’s one of the best midrange scorers of all-time, so it’s not a bad option. Maybe the Nuggets will move Gordon out of the dunker spot — although his perimeter shooting is extremely suspect. They might make any number of other adjustments more extreme than these.
While all that’s happening, the Lakers will be anticipating those counter-moves, and they’ll be planning counters to those counters, and the whole darned human comedy keeps perpetuating itself down through the ages, as the fella says.
When the game was over, the very obvious adjustment/counter-adjustment dance that had played out over the course of 48 minutes got me thinking about basketball matchups more broadly.
It’s a cliché to point out that NBA basketball is played differently than it was in previous generations. It’s a cliché, also, to point out that these differences are as much about rule changes as they are about math. Yes: 3-pointers are more valuable than 2-pointers, but the requirements of basketball mean that jump shots from distance would be an enormous part of the game with or without the 3-point line.
The increased focus on space in basketball — no matter its myriad causes — has also yielded an increase in the importance of versatility. The obvious example of this is a player who can’t shoot. As I wrote above, when you have a player who can’t shoot on the court, the defense is able to use that player to hide elite defenders who will gobble up all your best offensive sets.
One of the interesting downstream effects of all the space in today’s game is that it’s almost impossible for either team to insist on a given matchup. Look at how LeBron James generated offense down the stretch for the Lakers in game one:
LeBron scored his final basket of the game less than one minute into the fourth quarter, but that doesn’t mean he was done impacting the offense. There were countless plays like the one above where LeBron patiently used screens to shift to the matchup he wanted (in most cases, Jamal Murray), and then just as patiently used the ensuing chaos to generate open looks for his teammates.
Imagine you’re coaching the Nuggets. You would like to have Aaron Gordon guard LeBron James, but LeBron won’t let you. What do you do? If you have Gordon on him, you’re asking for the action that leads to the switch. What if you just put Murray on LeBron from the start? Could you bog the Lakers down by literally just giving them exactly what they want?
See, that’s interesting to me, and that’s where Nikola Jokić — maybe the most versatile offensive basketball player of all time, seriously, no shit — really shines. You cover him one-on-one, and he’ll destroy you, but the thing is, he’ll still manage to destroy you in the ways he wants to destroy you. He doesn’t want to get bogged down. He doesn’t want to just post up a million times a game while his teammates stand around.
Most players can’t do a million things at once. It’s a question of whether you’re able to keep your options open. Watch what Bruce Brown and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope do to get a bucket here:
After Bruce Brown throws the entry pass to Jokić, you could forgive him for staying out there beyond the 3-point line, but he doesn’t. He moves through and slithers his way to the weak-side corner, pulling Austin Reaves just far enough away to remove the threat of his help entirely. That means D’Angelo Russell has to help off Christian Braun. That’s a good idea, since Braun’s not a great shooter, and Russell does a pretty good job, actually. He doesn’t stay in no-man’s-land. He traps Jokić, and it’s a good trap, and suddenly Jokić has no good options. He either needs to shoot a tough shot over Davis in the post, or kick out to a non-shooter at the top of the key.
That’s where it would end for most teams, but Jokić has a superpower, and his superpower is that he keeps options open. KCP begins to cut to the basket after Jokić has already been trapped. How he sees KCP over the monstrous limbs of AD is beyond me, but that’s not the most interesting part.
The most interesting part is that KCP even bothers to cut. Watch that cut: he believes he’s getting the ball. It’s my opinion that playing with Jokić allows a player to even begin to imagine something like this. I’m sorry, but De’Anthony Melton is not cutting for this bucket in Philadelphia when a team successfully traps Joel Embiid. Embiid’s amazing, and he might make the shot anyway, but his teammates wouldn’t really be involved. Not like this.
And that’s why, even though I think the Lakers did a tremendous job making adjustments in the second half of game one, I have faith that the Nuggets will keep finding ways to win. You can’t stay a step ahead of Jokić. Not for long, anyway; and not with the weapons he’s got at his disposal. Not with the imagination his teammates have built up in their years with him.
Coaches like to talk about making sure you control what you can control, but in a game where you can’t even really control which player is guarding which other player, you’re never really in control of anything. The game is living and breathing. You have to deal with it in the moment, over and over again. The only way to be in control is to have all options available to you at all times, and Jokić is as close as we’ve got to that.