There’s no better feeling in team sports than being bestowed with an ominous-ass nickname by the general public. And like the Purple People Eaters, the Monsters of the Midway, Murderer’s Row, the Warriors solidified their status in sports history when the lineup of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Kevin Durant, and Draymond Green started to be referred to simply as the “Death Lineup”. They were capitalizing on a trend that had begun in the early 2010s, as the aesthetically unpleasing, smash-mouth play of the 2000s was phased out. The new NBA was about positionless basketball, spacing the floor, and switching on defense. As a result lineups got smaller and smaller, with teams moving from stretch power forwards as the biggest player on the court to the natural next step of taller-than-average small forwards playing the big’s role. I would argue this particular trend peaked when mad-scientist Daryl Morey pushed all of his chips in and sent their star center Clint Capela to the Hawks as part of a deal to acquire elite 3-and-D man Robert Covington from the Timberwolves. This was Billy Beane trading Pena in Moneyball. Either it works, or I’m getting fired.
As it turns out, Morey got fired. And the circumstances by which the small-ball Rockets were bounced from the Playoffs made it all the more ignominious. The Rockets small-ball experiment actually looked like it was working after the Covington trade, and their first signature win came when they flummoxed the Lakers, winning 121–111 on the road in a game that was not nearly as close as the final scoreline would suggest. Lakers head coach Frank Vogel tried to match the Rockets small ball lineups, phasing Dwight Howard and Javale McGee out of the rotation. AD won the battle inside, as one might predict, but the Rockets won the war.
But by the time the playoffs rolled around, Vogel had changed his plan, and rather than trying to meet the Rockets on their turf, the Lakers went ultra-big, playing Dwight and AD on the floor together. All of a sudden, the Rockets were getting bullied on their defensive glass, they couldn’t score inside, and unless they got scorching hot from deep (a real possibility), they were out of the series. Then came the final chess move: Vogel essentially instructed his players to let Russell Westbrook shoot uncontested jumpers from outside. They sent furious double teams at Harden, and inevitably the ball would make its way into Russ’s hands, where he would either settle for the jumper or barrel his way inside to miss at the rim. Game, set, match.
This story of two teams over the course of a season is a microcosm of larger questions going forward. Is small ball really the future? Was the Lakers use of the ultra-big lineups a brief reversion to the normal that will be washed out by the long-term changes to the sport? These are open questions as of tonight. If you want to understand the NBA, and its winners and losers, you have to understand the micro-events (trades, signings, player development) as well as the macro-events, the slower tectonic shifts that play out over the course of multiple seasons. If you step back, the question of size is potentially the most important, and unpredictable, of these shifts. We’ll watch the 2021 Playoffs intently to get a better sense of where we’re headed, because right now, the course ahead is unclear.
This article is part of our 2020–21 NBA Season Preview. To read the rest of our coverage, click on the NBA Preview tab at the top of the page, or click here to be taken to our main preview article.
