The Houston Rockets May Be The San Antonio Spurs’ Kryptonite
The San Antonio Spurs are one of the NBA’s best defensive squads, but the Houston Rockets tore open every weakness in game 1.
There are a few things we can count on as the years go by. Loud debates over the rightful MVP, talking heads in network studios who have questionable grasps on the game they cover, and the San Antonio Spurs having a top-tier defense.
This season was like many others in all of these respects, the Spurs’ defense prime among them. For the second straight season, they had the NBA’s top defense, allowing just 100.9 points per 100 possessions. In a way, it’s incredible that head coach Gregg Popovich was able to coax such an effort out of this squad. Aside from Kawhi Leonard, the Spurs aren’t laden with athletic stoppers. Their bigs aren’t mobile, and with the exception of Danny Green they have no strong back-court defenders.
You don’t have the NBA’s best defense in back-to-back years in this explosive era by accident. Their output can’t be chalked up to smoke and mirrors, but there’s a risk a team like this runs when they come up against an elite offense.
The Spurs ran into their worst-case scenario in game 1 against the Houston Rockets.
While the Spurs have held their opponents to a reasonable 24.1 three-point attempts per 100 possessions, they’ve had no success limiting the Rockets from behind the arc. In fact, the Rockets averaged 38.5 threes per game in the regular season against the Spurs, just a touch below their record-setting 40.3 per game.
The Rockets hit just 29.2 percent of those threes against the Spurs in the regular season, which might seem like they were goaded into taking loads of bad threes. In fact, this is incorrect. You can read more about this topic here in Seth Partnow’s excellent piece, but in general the best metric of three-point defense is in shots allowed. Good perimeter defense is reflected by the absence of attempts, not by a low success rate. When a three goes up, the defense has already failed, and the Spurs allowing the Rockets such a high number of attempts is an indictment on their ability to protect the three-point line.
We can take a closer look at the threes the Rockets attempted against the Spurs in order to find outlying causes. For starters, James Harden went just 10-of-34 from long range, a rate just slightly higher than the team’s 29.2 percent. It was also a rate significantly below his 34.7 clip on the season.
Second, Corey Brewer (now of the Los Angeles Lakers) went 0-of-7. There are a couple things Brewer shouldn’t get. Meaningful rotational minutes and three-point attempts are two big ones.
Brewer was moved at the trade deadline for Lou Williams, a significant shooting upgrade. If we look at Harden’s poor three-point shooting effort as an outlier, we can completely disregard Brewer’s lack of production. In Brewer’s place is Williams, a high-volume shooter who hit 36.6 percent from long range this season, and he’s shooting 42.3 percent in the playoffs.
In essence, the Spurs were fortunate that allowing the Rockets a high volume of three-point attempts in the regular season didn’t come back to haunt them, but one game into this playoff series it seems it’s time to pay the piper.
When we dig a bit deeper than the raw three-point numbers, we find the root of the problem, the reason why the Spurs have been helpless to cut down on the Rockets’ relentless perimeter onslaught. For that we must look no further than James Harden and his mastery of the pick-and-roll.
Hyperbolic? Maybe. Debatable? Surely. It doesn’t really matter. James Harden is the NBA’s best pick-and-roll ball handler and he used it to perfection to shred the league’s best defense.
In the above example, the Spurs start with Kawhi Leonard guarding Harden and LaMarcus Aldridge on Ryan Anderson. Aldridge is a split second late catching up to Anderson, and that split second is all it takes for Harden to find him for an open three.
Aldridge is victimized again in the above clip. When Aldridge switches onto Harden, it’s already over. Aldridge gets caught flat-footed and has no chance to react as Harden drives by for an easy layup.
Harden and Clint Capela team up to expose Danny Green and David Lee above. Once Capela screens Green, it’s a two-on-one against Lee in the paint. Harden dishes a no-look between-the-legs assist to Capela for the dunk.
In the above clip, LaMarcus Aldridge gets caught looking the wrong way. Capela comes out to the arc for a high pick-and-roll, David Lee tries to trap Harden with Danny Green. Aldridge spots Capela rolling to the basket and takes one step the wrong direction, leaving Trevor Ariza alone for a wide-open three. James Harden won’t miss that pass, and Ariza didn’t miss the shot.
Harden is lethal with the ball in his hands. You can pick your poison against him, but in the end you still end up dead. He’s in the 93rd percentile as the pick-and-roll ball handler, scoring 1.01 points per possession. He’s unstoppable when defenders go over the screen against him, scoring an incredible 1.287 points per possession (good for the 97th percentile), and nearly as transcendant when defenders go under, scoring 1.141 points per possession (good for the 76th percentile). When defenders go into the pick, he’s in the 87th percentile, scoring 1.174 points per possession.
When passing out of the pick-and-roll, he’s a devastating decision-maker. The Rockets score 1.121 points per possession when he runs the pick-and-roll and passes from it. The Rockets score 1.156 points when he passes to the roll man, 1.018 when he passes to a spot-up shooter and a glittering 1.623 points when he passes to a cutter.
The Spurs didn’t make any significant adjustments in game 1, mostly because it was completely out of reach halfway through the second quarter. The Spurs may have a completely different defensive approach for the rest of this series, but they’ve been exposed for being exactly what they are. They’re not athletic enough, their bigs are too slow and James Harden is the catalyst for a dynamic pick-and-roll attack they simply have no clear answers for.
This Rockets’ offense is built to take advantage of almost any defense in the NBA, and the San Antonio Spurs defense is no exception.
