Posts Tagged ‘Roy Hibbert’

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Pacers Must Keep Miami Role Players From Making A Strong Impact

May 21, 2013  ·  12:08PM

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HANG TIME NEW JERSEY – Part of the Indiana Pacers’ success in the conference semifinals was keeping New York’s shooters in check. They knew that the Knicks were at their best when they were knocking down threes and, except for a flurry in the third quarter of Game 6, really did not allow themselves to get beat from beyond the arc.

With Paul George defending Carmelo Anthony one-on-one and Roy Hibbert protecting the rim, the Pacers’ other defenders were able to stay at home on the shooters.

That strategy is obviously more difficult when you replace Anthony with LeBron James and then throw Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh into the mix, but the Pacers still want to keep their opponent’s role players under wraps.

We remember James and Wade combining for 70 points in Game 5 of last year’s conference semifinals, but other than that 40-point explosion, the four-time MVP hasn’t had a really big scoring game against the Pacers over the last two years. Wade, we know, is banged up and looks only able to score in bursts here or there.

Consider the three games the Heat and Pacers played this season. James, Wade and Bosh had similar production in all three contests: 66 points on Jan. 8, 58 on Feb. 1, and 60 on March 10. And it was when their teammates came through with another 45 points that the Heat got their only win of the season series.

Heat offense vs. Indiana

Jan. 8 Loss FGM FGA FG% 3PM 3PA 3PT% FTM FTA PTS eFG%
Bosh, James & Wade 24 46 52.2% 5 7 71.4% 13 18 66 57.6%
Others 4 22 18.2% 3 12 25.0% 0 0 11 25.0%
Total 28 68 41.2% 8 19 42.1% 13 18 77 47.1%
Feb. 1 Loss FGM FGA FG% 3PM 3PA 3PT% FTM FTA PTS eFG%
Bosh, James & Wade 21 44 47.7% 1 3 33.3% 15 21 58 48.9%
Others 12 26 46.2% 4 11 36.4% 3 3 31 53.8%
Total 33 70 47.1% 5 14 35.7% 18 24 89 50.7%
Mar. 10 Win FGM FGA FG% 3PM 3PA 3PT% FTM FTA PTS eFG%
Bosh, James & Wade 25 41 61.0% 1 3 33.3% 9 13 60 62.2%
Others 13 27 48.1% 6 11 54.5% 13 18 45 59.3%
Total 38 68 55.9% 7 14 50.0% 22 31 105 61.0%

Now, poor defense had a lot to do with the Feb. 1 loss, and Bosh’s nine field goals from outside the paint had a lot to do with the March 10 win. But with the way the Pacers defend and with the way the Heat is set up to succeed, it makes sense that Miami is most dangerous when the “others” are making shots.

Looking beyond the three games against Indiana, the Heat are 43-3 when players other than James, Wade and Bosh scored at least 37 points. Now, there’s a garbage-time factor there, but they’re also 33-2 when Mario Chalmers has scored nine points or more and 29-2 when Shane Battier has scored eight points or more. Neither of those guys plays a lot of garbage-time minutes. Chalmers scored 26 points in the win over the Pacers.

Oh yeah, the Heat are 31-0 when they hit at least 10 threes.

Erik Spoelstra has been saying for a while now that he wants his shooters “hunting down shots.” Not only is three greater than two, but threats from the outside help open things up for James and Wade in the paint.

As was the case against New York, the Pacers don’t want to give shooters much space. They can do that for the most part in the Heat’s half-court offense, and the key might be transition. Three of Chalmers’ five 3-pointers in that March 10 game were generated by secondary breaks, where the Pacers simply didn’t get to him in time.

So the Pacers’ defensive success may come down to their offense. If they can avoid too many live-ball turnovers and maintain floor balance, they can get back in transition, stop Miami’s attackers and get out to the shooters.

And really, the shooters might be more important than the guys with the big names.

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Posted in 2013 Conference Finals: Pacers-Heat, 2013 NBA Playoffs / Comments (7) /

Pacers, Heat Both Learn From ’12 Series

May 20, 2013  ·  7:03PM

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Learn from the past or risk repeating it.

That’s sound advice always — the sort of wisdom that saves people from going on second blind dates and reveals how an NBA playoff contender can fix what ailed it in a previous series.

That’s the hope, anyway, of the Indiana Pacers, facing the Miami Heat in the East bracket for the second time in as many postseasons. They’ve been hard at work since eliminating the Knicks Saturday night, breaking down video and plumbing the results of their loss in six games in the conference semifinals last May.

The teams met three times in the 2012-13 regular season and those games are relevant, too (Indiana won the first two meetings, Miami the last). But the style of playoff ball is different and so is the schedule, facing the same foe over and over. By the end of Miami’s Game 6 victory on May 24, a genuine dislike and legit rivalry had been cemented.

It was the starting point for the three meetings this season, and it will serve as backdrop for the four-to-seven the teams play over the next two weeks.

“It’s going to be a beast,” Miami forward Chris Bosh said the other night.

Here are some takeaways from the 2012 showdown:

* No Bosh: The Heat’s talented, occasionally maligned power forward suffered a strained abdominal muscle in the first half of Game 1 and was done for the series. Miami actually trailed when Bosh exited, then won that game, but it did seem to help a Pacers squad that already was seen as having an advantage up front.

Sure enough, in Games 2 and 3, the Pacers’ two victories, they outrebounded Miami by 26. In the four they lost, they were beaten on the boards by a combined 19. Indiana forward David West didn’t have to contend with Bosh’s extended shooting range, and scored more points and shot more free throws than anyone in the series not named LeBron James or Dwyane Wade. Center Roy Hibbert averaged 12.3 points and 11.5 rebounds, personal playoff bests.

The Heat’s most effective lineup a year ago included Joel Anthony. Now he hardly plays because Chris (Birdman) Andersen gives Miami energy, toughness and solid passing (and OK finishing) skills. And because Bosh is healthy and helping. Bosh is averaging a career playoff low 13.2 ppg, but that means nothing to him within the context of his and his team’s ambitions.

“I’m here to play a specific role and be what this team needs me to be,” Bosh said after the semifinals ouster of Chicago. “I’m not trying to have a big head, get to an ego problem, then think I’m too big for my britches and not want to change my role.”

Just playing, period, is important. He wasn’t too comfortable watching Miami slip behind 2-1 in games and 54-46 halfway through Game 4.

This time will be different, Bosh said. “I was really looking forward to that series and I didn’t get a chance to play. Hopefully this time around I can stay healthy, first of all, and put my imprint on the series like I wanted to last year. That’s why you stay patient and wait. I’ll get my chance, they’ll get their chance and everybody will be happy.”

Well, not everybody. (more…)

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Posted in 2013 Conference Finals: Pacers-Heat / Comments (68) /

Flattened Last Year, Stephenson Is Flattener Vs. Knicks

May 19, 2013  ·  2:02AM


INDIANAPOLIS – A year ago, Lance Stephenson was comic relief and the Indiana Pacers’ resident knucklehead. Twelve months later, he is as serious as a flagrant foul and the single biggest reason the Pacers eliminated the New York Knicks in Game 6 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series Saturday at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.

Last May, Stephenson was the Indiana deep reserve, all raw talent and immaturity, who got caught by the cameras making a choke sign when LeBron James missed free throws in Game 3 of the teams’ playoff series. James ignored him, in the moment and when asked about him later. But a couple of his Miami teammates weren’t so detached; Juwan Howard got into a verbal confrontation with Stephenson before Game 4 and backup big Dexter Pittman seemed to be on the floor late in Game 5 for the express purpose of flattening him (Pittman winked to the Heat bench after the hit across the young Pacers guard’s throat).

Now, it’s Stephenson doing the flattening. Not quite all growed up but making a mad dash in that direction, the 6-foot-5 kid from Brooklyn – from the same Lincoln High that produced the likes of Stephon Marbury and Sebastian Telfair – did New York’s NBA team wrong. He grabbed the game at both ends – grabbed it by the throat, one might say – and scored nine points in the first quarter to ignite Indiana in a game it couldn’t squander, then nine more (in not quite seven minutes) in the fourth when it mattered most.

His 25 were a career playoff high but then, just about everything Stephenson does this postseason is a career high, given how unused he was previously. Twice in the first half, Stephenson snagged rebounds and raced downcourt, going end to end through New York’s defense for buckets.

In the fourth, he picked off a pass by Carmelo Anthony and finished with a three-point play that broke a 92-92 tie. Next time down, he drew Tyson Chandler‘s sixth personal foul and hit two free throws. After an Anthony jumper made it 99-94, Stephenson backed his way first through J.R. Smith, then through Anthony for another layup. It wasn’t over, except that it was.

“Unbelievable,” Pacers coach Frank Vogel said. “He’s got no playoff experience whatsoever, but he’s got some of the best basketball instincts I’ve ever been around. There’s an old phrase – he’s a gamer.

“He’s not always going to look good. He’s not always going to be in the right spots defensively. … But you put him in a situation like this – Game 6, closeout game – the kid’s got a lot of guts and great basketball instincts.” (more…)

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Posted in 2013 Conference Semis: Knicks-Pacers / Comments (56) /

For Knicks-Pacers, Game 6 Comes Down To Rebounds, Turnovers

May 18, 2013  ·  11:13AM

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Knicks-Pacers has been kind of ugly. Eastern Conference playoff basketball at its finest.

The average score of the first five games has been 88-86. They’ve been slow and inefficient. Both teams have shot 41 percent. The Knicks can’t finish at the rim (shooting 48 percent from the restricted area) and the Pacers can’t hit a jump shot (shooting 34 percent from outside the restricted area).

Knicks defensive rebounding
Timeframe DREB% Rank
Reg. season 74.7% 4
First round 86.0% 1
Conf. semis 67.5% 8

DREB% = Percent of available def. reb.

That makes for a lot of missed shots. And if the Knicks had just rebounded a few more of those missed shots, they might be up 3-2, instead of facing elimination for the second straight time in Game 6 on Saturday (8 p.m. ET, ESPN). What was the fourth-best defensive rebounding team in the regular season and the best defensive rebounding team in the first round has been the worst defensive rebounding team in the conference semifinals.

The Pacers were the fourth-best offensive rebounding team in the regular season and have won the battle of the boards on that end of the floor in this series. They’re not the Boston Celtics, who have two jump-shooting bigs, eschew offensive rebounds for the sake of better transition defense, and totaled just 31 offensive boards in six first-round games.

Pacers offensive rebounding
Game OREB OREB% 2CP
Game 1 11 31.4% 20
Game 2 7 22.6% 8
Game 3 18 37.5% 20
Game 4 16 39.0% 19
Game 5 12 28.6% 24
Total 64 32.5% 91

OREB% = Percent of available off. reb.

The Pacers’ two big men play in the paint, they know the Knicks aren’t a fast-break team, and they’ve already grabbed more than twice as many offensive boards (64) as the Celtics did against New York. Roy Hibbert has 10 more offensive rebounds (26) than Tyson Chandler has defensive rebounds (16).

Knicks coach Mike Woodson has repeatedly pointed to the Pacers’ offensive rebounds as the difference between wins and losses. Indeed, the Knicks have won the two games in which they kept the Pacers’ offensive rebounding percentage under 30 percent, though Indy still managed to rack up a ton of second-chance points in Game 5.

Note 1: You can register second-chance points without an offensive rebound. On four occasions in Game 5, the Knicks blocked an Indiana shot out of bounds or committed a loose-ball foul on a defensive rebound, with the Pacers scoring subsequently. That helps account for the 24/12 conversion rate.

Despite all the offensive rebounds, the Pacers have still attempted far fewer shots (367) than the Knicks have (406) in this series. Part of the reason is that Indiana has gone to the free-throw line a lot more (130-89), but turnovers are also a big story.

The Pacers ranked 29th in turnover percentage in the regular season, committing 16.2 turnovers per 100 possessions. That number is at 19.8 in this series. If it was any lower, Indiana would be preparing for the Heat right now.

Pacers turnovers
Game TO Live-ball NYK Pts Off
Game 1 16 4 13
Game 2 21 11 32
Game 3 17 7 20
Game 4 16 7 12
Game 5 19 12 12
Total 89 41 89

This is what the Knicks’ defense is meant to do. They pressure the ball, trap pick-and-rolls, and double-team the post, trying to force their opponent into miscues and willing to concede weak-side 3-point attempts if the opponent can move the ball quickly enough. Against this opponent, it’s a sound strategy (though, with defenders out of position, it also contributes to the defensive rebounding issue).

The Pacers have committed a lot of turnovers in every game of the series, but there’s a difference between dead-ball turnovers (offensive fouls, traveling, throwing the ball out of bounds — which the Pacers are very good at) and live-ball turnovers (strips, pass deflections, interceptions, etc). And not coincidentally, the Knicks have won the two games in which the Pacers have committed more than 10 live-ball turnovers.

Note 2: Live-ball turnovers are always recorded as a steal for the opponent. Dead-ball turnovers are not. This makes it easy to tell how many of each there were.

Paul George, as great as he’s been defensively, has as many turnovers (25) as his next two teammates combined (David West has 13 and George Hill has 12). And if Hill is still out with a concussion, George will need to handle the ball more, which is obviously not a good thing for the Pacers’ offense.

Neither team is going to shoot well in this series. That fact has clearly been established. The Pacers just aren’t a good shooting team in the first place, and the Knicks are going against the No. 1 defense in the league.

For New York, staying alive is about cleaning the glass. For Indiana, finishing the series off is about taking care of the ball.

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Posted in 2013 Conference Semis: Knicks-Pacers / Comments (13) /

Hill’s Absence And Copeland’s Emergence Keep Knicks Alive

May 17, 2013  ·  1:44AM

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NEW YORK – Here’s the thing about the Indiana Pacers: Their bench stinks.

They have the league’s best defense, a terrific starting lineup, and a pretty smart coach. But their lack of depth (or just one guy off the bench they can rely on for consistent production) is a major problem. There’s a reason why only one lineup played more minutes than Indiana’s starting group in the regular season.

With one starter out and another in foul trouble, the Pacers’ Achilles heel was on full display in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference semifinals on Thursday, an 85-75 victory for the New York Knicks that sends the series back to Indianapolis for Game 6 on Saturday (8 p.m. ET, ESPN).

The Pacers now look a lot more vulnerable than they did just hours before Game 5, not just because their 3-1 series lead is now 3-2, but because starting point guard George Hill is out with a concussion he suffered in Game 4 on Tuesday. Hill’s status for Game 6 is unknown, but he must pass the NBA’s concussion testing before he can play again. (And if you read that link, you’ll probably guess that he won’t play again in this series, no matter who wins Saturday.)

D.J. Augustin, who started in Hill’s place on Thursday, is a decent back-up point guard and came up with a huge performance (16 points, 4-for-5 from 3-point range) in Game 1 of this series. But at 40 minutes per game, he’s a big step down from Hill. He scored 12 points on nine shots on Thursday, but didn’t record a single assist in 39 minutes.

Hill’s 26 points helped the Pacers win an ugly Game 4. And more important than his scoring is his ability to get his team into its offense. With one less point guard to call on, Paul George was needed to bring the ball up the floor at times, and the Pacers struggled to get much going offensively. They shot 36 percent and committed 19 turnovers (12 of them live balls), making things even worse by shooting 19-for-33 from the free throw line.

Hill’s absence was felt more on defense, where his size and tenacity has been a key to the Pacers’ ability to defend the Knicks’ pick-and-roll attack. Raymond Felton had a little more space on those pick-and-rolls in Game 5, with Augustin as his primary defender. And Indiana’s league-best defense was further compromised when Roy Hibbert picked up his second foul midway through the first quarter and his fourth foul early in the third.

That, in part, allowed the Knicks to awake from their offensive slumber, which is a scary thing for Indiana going forward. Mike Woodson‘s use of his own bench was another key.

Jason Kidd and Amar’e Stoudemire each played less than seven minutes, and neither saw the floor in the second half. Chris Copeland, who provided a (too-little, too-late) spark in Game 4, played a postseason-high 19:25, giving the Knicks some much-needed 3-point shooting and scoring 13 points.

“Copeland just has a knack for scoring,” Tyson Chandler said. “Anytime you get him in the game, he’s going to make something happen offensively. He’s been doing it all year. He came up huge for us tonight.”

After reaching for answers and coming up empty in Game 4, Woodson found something that worked on Thursday. The Knicks barely scored a point per possession, but that was plenty enough against what the Pacers were doing on the other end of the floor. J.R. Smith (4-for-11) didn’t shoot quite as poorly as he had been over the previous six games, and the New York bench outscored the Indiana bench 35-10.

Having a good bench isn’t necessarily about the points it scores, but rather the drop-off suffered when one or more starters are resting. And while the Pacers weren’t making any excuses after Game 5 – “I don’t think it has anything to do with it,” Frank Vogel said of Hill’s absence – the numbers speak for themselves.

In the regular season, Indiana’s regular starting lineup (with Hill at PG) scored 108.6 points per 100 possessions, while all other lineups scored just 98.5. That’s like the difference between the league’s third best offense and the league’s third worst offense. In this series, their regular starting lineup is a plus-21 in 92 minutes, while all other lineups are now a minus-28 in 148 minutes.

That’s a big drop-off. And with Hill likely out at least another game, Indiana must find a way to nudge that minus-28 closer to zero on Saturday. Otherwise, this series is coming back to New York for Game 7.

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Posted in 2013 Conference Semis: Knicks-Pacers, 2013 NBA Playoffs / Comments (36) /

Pacers Up 3-1, But Knicks Still Dangerous

May 16, 2013  ·  11:08AM

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NEW YORK – The Miami Heat are waiting.

The Indiana Pacers know they have what it takes to challenge the defending champs. In Paul George, they have a guy to guard LeBron James. In Roy Hibbert, they have a guy to protect the rim. They have the size to take advantage of the Heat on the glass. They won the season series, 2-1.

But the Pacers have to take care of business against the New York Knicks first. Only eight teams in NBA history have come back from a 3-1 deficit to win a series, but the Knicks might not be an easy opponent to keep down.

As bad as things have looked for New York over the last two games — and they’ve looked really bad — this is a dangerous team. The Knicks ranked third in offensive efficiency in the regular season and we saw a glimpse of their potency in Game 2.

At the same time, we saw how bad the Pacers can look offensively. Turnovers, bad spacing, missed shots. It was all there. Over the course of the four games thus far, the Knicks (who were a below-average defensive team) have held them under a point per possession.

The Pacers’ defense has been terrific in this series, particularly in Game 4, when the Knicks tried to throw the kitchen sink at them. But it’s been terrific because there’s been no let-up. It takes both effort and focus to defend on that level, and it would be easy to think a Game 6 at home allows Indy to not bring their best in Game 5 on Thursday (8 p.m. ET, TNT).

Written on the board in the Knicks’ locker room after Game 4 was, “Win one, change everything.” And that might be right. New York is desperately searching for answers right now, but if they can find them on Thursday, it could get the ball rolling.

All you have to do is look back to mid-March, when the Knicks had lost four straight and 10 of their last 16 games. Their offense was in a funk, having scored less than 90 points per 100 possessions during the four-game losing streak. Carmelo Anthony was out and J.R. Smith was struggling.

Then, in Utah, Mike Woodson made a lineup change. The Knicks broke out of their slump, won 13 straight games and pulled ahead of the Pacers in the standings.

Woodson is likely to go back to the lineup that sparked that run — with Pablo Prigioni in the backcourt — after going away from it in Game 4. Nothing will come easy against the Pacers’ defense, nothing looks good when the shots don’t go in and the Knicks must find a way to keep Indiana off the glass. But small-ball is how the Knicks won 54 games this season and how they got past the Boston Celtics in the first round.

If they’re going to send this series back to Indiana, the Knicks must remember how they got here.

If they’re going to finish it in five, the Pacers need to do the same.

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Posted in 2013 Conference Semis: Knicks-Pacers, 2013 NBA Playoffs, HT News / Comments (23) /

Woodson Searches For Answers, Comes Up Empty

May 15, 2013  ·  12:08AM

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INDIANAPOLIS – One of the most interesting things about playoff basketball is a team changing gears and abandoning something — a lineup or a style of play — that worked all season because it’s outmatched in a series.

The New York Knicks went there in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference semifinals on Tuesday. And it didn’t work.

With his team down 2-1 to the Indiana Pacers and shooting blanks offensively against the league’s best defense, Knicks coach Mike Woodson abandoned the starting lineup that had sparked the Knicks to 13 straight wins late in the season. It hadn’t performed poorly (plus-1 in 22 minutes) in the first two games of the series, but did struggle (minus-7 in 13 minutes) in Game 3. The new starting lineup, meanwhile, had never played together.

Woodson abandoned more than a lineup. He abandoned his team’s whole small-ball, two-point-guard, Melo-and-shooters mantra that was so critical to the Knicks’ success. Out was point guard Pablo Prigioni and in was big man Kenyon Martin, sliding Carmelo Anthony to small forward, where he had played just six minutes through the first three games.

It was a sign of desperation, and the hope was that an extra big on the floor would keep the Knicks from getting crushed on the boards like they did in Games 1 and 3. It would also allow them to run secondary pick-and-rolls (instead of isolations) on the weak side of the floor after the Pacers stopped the primary one.

The Knicks did run more pick-and-rolls, they ran more of them with Anthony as the ball handler, and they got the ball up the floor and into their offense more quickly. But the result — a 93-82 Indiana victory — was basically the same as Game 3 three nights earlier. New York got off to a slow start, trailed by 14 at halftime, shot 36 percent, scored less than a point per possession and got crushed on the glass again.

“I thought our offensive flow wasn’t bad tonight,” Woodson said. “I thought the ball movement was a little bit better, but we couldn’t make shots.”

Credit the Indiana defense. It was phenomenal for the second straight game. While the Knicks looked somewhat crisper offensively, they still couldn’t get to the basket. When they looked to attack off the dribble, Roy Hibbert and the Pacers simply shut off the paint, where New York shot a miserable 13-for-34.

“Our effort was just off the charts,” Pacers coach Frank Vogel said afterward. “I couldn’t be more proud of our defensive effort, our rebounding effort, and our willingness to share the ball offensively.”

The Knicks got some decent looks at the basket and shot decently (10-for-25) from mid-range, but you can’t win with mid-range shots. They got more 3-point attempts off then they did in Game 3, but many of them were rushed or contested.

Truly, the Knicks are in a funk, having lost five of their last seven games. Anthony and J.R. Smith have combined to shoot 33 percent in that stretch. Jason Kidd has missed his last 17 shots, his last basket coming three weeks ago. And Tyson Chandler looks nothing like the inside force that won Defensive Player of the Year last season.

It’s a bad time to be playing so poorly. And you can’t blame Woodson for trying something different. But he didn’t quite reach all the way down into his bag of tricks.

Kidd still played 16 minutes off the bench, even though his two misses looked awful and took place in the first 7:20 he was on the floor. Meanwhile, two guys who could have provided an offensive spark, Chris Copeland and Steve Novak, rode the pine until late in the third quarter and the final minute, respectively. The Knicks outscored the Pacers by 12 points in Copeland’s 12 minutes, and he and Novak combined to shoot 3-for-4 from 3-point range.

There was also the curious case of Prigioni’s playing time. The numbers have shown that the Knicks are better both offensively and defensively with the 35-year-old rookie on the floor, a phenomenon that Woodson has acknowledged often and as recently as Game 2 of this series. But Prigioni played less than 3 1/2 minutes on Tuesday, and Woodson didn’t have much of an explanation.

“Right now,” Woodson said, “I’m reaching, trying to find combinations that will work.”

Nothing has. And the bottom line is that the Pacers are the better team. The best player in the series hasn’t been Anthony, but rather Paul George. And while Woodson can’t find anyone who can make a shot, the Pacers have someone new step up every night. On Tuesday, it was George Hill, who led all scorers with 26 points on 9-for-14 shooting.

The Pacers can now close the series out in New York on Thursday (8 p.m. ET, TNT). Woodson will still be searching for answers.

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Posted in 2013 Conference Semis: Knicks-Pacers, 2013 NBA Playoffs / Comments (71) /

Film Study: To Help Or Not To Help Is The Question For Knicks And Pacers

May 13, 2013  ·  12:24PM

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INDIANAPOLIS – Knicks-Pacers isn’t just a series between a great offensive team (New York) and a great defensive team (Indiana). It’s also a contrast in two different defensive styles, and that contrast is a big reason the Pacers have a 2-1 series lead heading into Game 4 on Tuesday (7 p.m. ET, TNT).

The Knicks, who set an NBA record with 2,371 3-point attempts (28.9 per game) this season, took just 11 threes in Game 3, their worst offensive game of the playoffs. Both coach Mike Woodson and center Tyson Chandler talked a lot on Sunday about the need to move the ball more, but the Pacers’ defense had a lot to do with the lack of ball movement and open shots.

The Pacers led the league in 3-point percentage defense and only one team (Chicago) allowed their opponents to take a lower percentage of their shots from beyond the arc. The Knicks have made five or fewer threes seven times this season. They’re 0-7 in those games and three of them were against Indiana.

The key to the Pacers’ 3-point defense is their ability to stay at home on shooters. The Knicks get 3-point attempts by drawing an extra defender to the guy with the ball, whether he’s in the post or running a pick-and-roll, and then moving the ball to the open shooter. The Pacers make that difficult by not sending the extra defender, either as a double-team in the post or as a helper on the pick-and-roll.

The two most important players in this scheme are Paul George and Roy Hibbert, the one-on-one defender and the rim-protector.

In this series, George has the Carmelo Anthony assignment, and he needs no help. Anthony will get his points, but George is a good enough defender to make it difficult (Anthony has shot 39.7 percent in six games against the Pacers this season) and, more important, he allows his teammates to stay with their man. That’s a huge part of the Pacers’ success and an argument for George as their most important player in this series, even though his box score numbers (17.7 points, 5.4 rebounds and 4.3 assists per game, 36 percent shooting) haven’t been that impressive.

Here’s a post-up for Anthony from the first quarter of Game 3. George handles the assignment by himself and his teammates stay at home, giving Anthony little choice but to force a tough turnaround jumper …


Hibbert, of course, is the guy keeping the Knicks away from the basket. On pick-and-rolls, he has the length and smarts to both stay within reach of the roll man and challenge the ball handler if he gets too close to the rim. This is why 16 of Raymond Felton‘s 29 shots in the series have been low-efficiency attempts, coming from outside the restricted area and from inside the 3-point line.

So while the Knicks can talk about better ball movement, it’s easier said than done against the No. 1 defense. Here’s an example of a play where the ball moves quite a bit (four passes in about six seconds), it gets swung to the weak side, and the Knicks still aren’t able to get an open look. The Pacers all stay at home on their man, Hibbert hangs in the paint on the Jason Kidd/Kenyon Martin pick-and-roll, George denies Anthony in the post, and the ball eventually sticks in the hands of Iman Shumpert, who forces a tough shot over Hibbert in the lane…


The Knicks had their best offensive performance of the postseason in Game 2, and Woodson believes that they just need to get back to the way they played in their 105-79 victory.

“In a playoff series, when teams start locking in, you can’t play on one side of the floor,” the coach said Sunday. “That’s what, last night, we went back to that again. So I got to keep screaming and pushing and guys got to recognize that we got to get the ball moving from side to side. That’s the only way we can play and perhaps get out of this series. We can’t just play on one side of the floor with it.”

But the Pacers believe that those 105 points in Game 2 were more about the way they were defending than about what the Knicks were doing offensively. (more…)

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Posted in 2013 Conference Semis: Knicks-Pacers, 2013 NBA Playoffs, Film Study, HT News / Comments (15) /

Hibbert’s Offense The Difference In Pacers’ Game 3 Victory

May 12, 2013  ·  1:34AM

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Series hub | Game 3: Notebook | Box score

INDIANAPOLIS – For the second time in the conference semifinals series between the New York Knicks and Indiana Pacers, Indy center Roy Hibbert was the best player on the floor. And this time, he didn’t block a single shot. In fact, he barely contested any. And he had fewer defensive rebounds (four) than any of the Pacers’ other four starters.

Now, let’s get this straight. It’s not like Hibbert didn’t have a defensive impact in the Pacers’ 82-71, Game 3 victory. It was New York’s second-lowest scoring output of the season. The Knicks’ three 3-pointers and 11 3-point attempts were both season lows. And the 7-foot-2 center obviously had a lot to do with that.

But guess what? The Pacers are the best defensive team in the league. This is what they do. They don’t double team and they stay at home on New York’s shooters. The Knicks have now attempted 20 or fewer threes in seven games this season, and three of the seven were against Indiana.

So while Hibbert was as much of a rim protector as he’s been all year and Paul George deserves a ton of credit for his defense on Carmelo Anthony in Game 3, it was Hibbert’s work on the offensive end of the floor that made the difference in what was a very ugly 48 minutes of Eastern Conference playoff basketball. Emphasis on the word “work.”

Remember Hibbert’s brutal offense at the start of this season? Through Dec. 31, he was shooting 39 percent, with the free throw rate of a pass-first point guard. Though he was the most critical part of the Pacers’ No. 1 defense, he wasn’t exactly living up to the max contract extension he received last summer.

Hibbert will never be mistaken for Hakeem Olajuwon in the post. He’s neither quick nor smooth. But his offense is getting better. He averaged 16.7 points on 50 percent shooting in March and April. He scored at least 14 points in six of the Pacers’ first seven playoff games.

And in Game 3 of the conference semifinals, a game in which the league’s leading scorer played 37 minutes, Roy Hibbert had more points than anybody.

Hibbert looked comfortable in the low post, using his height to launch jump hooks with either hand over Tyson Chandler and Kenyon Martin. He made quick decisions and he even took Chandler off the dribble from the elbow a couple of times. He was a true post presence, creating his own offense, not really benefiting from his teammates’ penetration.

“He made some good moves down low,” Chandler said, “but we were supposed to trap him when he got the ball, and we didn’t do that.”

Still, the Knicks forced the Pacers to shoot just 35 percent and commit another 17 turnovers. Their primary defense was pretty good. But a defensive possession doesn’t end until the rebound is secured. And that was the difference on Saturday.

Both teams shot 35 percent. The Knicks had two fewer turnovers and two more free throw attempts. But their 3-point shooting was absent and they got beat up on the glass.

It helped that the Knicks were double-teaming (well, except when they weren’t, according to Chandler) and leaving themselves vulnerable underneath. But they were the fourth best defensive rebounding team in the league in the regular season, even though they rarely had two bigs on the floor at the same time.

The Pacers were the league’s fourth best offensive rebounding team, and that ranking has clearly held up better in this series. They’ve totaled 20 second-chance points in each of their two wins, and they already have more offensive rebounds in the three games (36) than Boston had in its six playoff games against New York (31).

Size matters. The Pacers are the bigger team and they’re showing it. Hibbert is leading the way with 16 of those 36 offensive boards, eight of them in Game 3.

“He got a lot of his stuff just out of pure effort on the offensive glass,” Pacers coach Frank Vogel said. “We know he’s going to dominate on the defensive end. When he has offensive production like he did tonight, then we’re pretty good.”

They’re pretty good and they’re now up 2-1.

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Posted in 2013 Conference Semis: Knicks-Pacers, 2013 NBA Playoffs / Comments (22) /

Lot On Pacers’ Plate In Game 3

May 11, 2013  ·  10:34AM

INDIANAPOLIS – The Indiana Pacers got the split they needed in New York. They took home-court advantage in the conference semifinals by winning Game 1 on Sunday. But things went much differently in Game 2, when the New York Knicks used a 36-4 run to turn a Pacers lead into a lopsided victory.

It will be difficult for New York to carry any momentum across a change in venue and a three-day layoff, but the Pacers obviously have some adjustments to make on both ends of the floor if they want to get back into the win column in Game 3 Saturday (8 p.m. ET, ABC).

During that 36-4 run, the Knicks finally got their offense running as efficiently as it was at the end of the regular season and the Pacers looked nothing like the league’s No 1 defense. But the seeds for that explosion had really been planted in the first half, when the Knicks came out with a lot more variety and movement in their offense and scored 47 points on their first 37 possessions to build a 13-point lead. Some of the different things they did…

  • They moved Carmelo Anthony around. He caught the ball off curls and flares, and he was used as both the screener and ball-handler in pick-and-rolls. The Knicks actually had some success with Anthony as the ball-handler in pick-and-rolls in the fourth quarter of Game 1, but it was too little, too late. In the final few minutes of the first quarter of Game 2, they ran five Anthony/Tyson Chandler pick-and-rolls on four possessions, producing a couple of open 3s for Jason Kidd (who missed) and J.R. Smith (who didn’t miss), as well as a couple of open foul-line jumpers for Anthony himself. Wisely, he didn’t try to challenge Roy Hibbert at the rim nearly as much as he did in Game 1.
  • They ran the flex offense (popularized by the Utah Jazz) on a couple of possessions, resulting in two post-ups for Smith. He traveled on one and passed to Kenyon Martin for an open jumper on another (this was actually the first possession of the second quarter). Neither of those were great results (Martin’s jumper went in, but a Kenyon Martin jumper isn’t a great shot), but you have to like the variety.
  • They attacked the defense from the baseline. On a couple of side pick-and-rolls, Raymond Felton and Iman Shumpert went away from the screen, toward the baseline and under the basket. Felton got Anthony an open elbow jumper, while Shumpert found Chandler under the basket for a dunk. If you get the ball on the baseline like that, you have defenders turning their heads and losing their man.
  • They moved without the ball and didn’t just stand around. Both Smith and Shumpert got layups in the second quarter by just cutting to the basket, something we really didn’t see from the Knicks over the previous four games.
  • From New York’s perspective, the best thing they did was keep running their offense after the Pacers cut off the first option or two. Rather than letting the ball stick in Anthony’s or Smith’s hands, they kept moving, kept setting screens, and made the Pacers defend them for the full possession.

That’s a lot of things for Indiana to worry about. They have the No. 1 defense in the league and they’ll surely be better in Game 3, but the more variety the Knicks throw at them, the more difficult it will be to get stops consistently. Nothing’s easier to defend than one guy with the ball and four teammates standing around.

“I thought we over-helped a little bit, overreacted to some of their penetration, and allowed them to get some easy, catch-and-shoot threes,” David West said at shootaround on Saturday. “We can’t overreact. We’re a help-defense team, but obviously guys guard their guy and we got to let the two guys in the pick-and-roll take care of their business in the pick-and-roll.”

Iso-ball isn’t a problem with the Pacers’ offense, but turnovers are. They ranked 29th in the regular season in turnover rate, committing 16.2 miscues per 100 possessions, they’ve committed more than that (17.4) in the playoffs, and they’ve committed more than that (20.5) in this series.

That 36-4 run got started with three Indiana turnovers in a four-possession stretch. And the Knicks clearly know now that pressure defense will force their opponent into mistakes. Indiana was lucky that only eight of their first 28 turnovers in this series were live balls, and that luck ran out in the second half of Game 2, when seven of their nine turnovers were of the live-ball variety.

There’s no real adjustment to make when you’re turning the ball over a lot. The Pacers will just have to make better decisions and be ready to move the ball quickly when the Knicks look to trap them in Game 3.

“We practiced against post double-teams and pick-and-roll traps as much as possible,” Pacers coach Frank Vogel said. “Other than that, a lot of has just got to be your ball-toughness. Ball-toughness and spacing is really the two best areas where we can eliminate turnovers.”

This may be the most important game of the series, not only because it’s tied at 1-1, but because the Knicks found things that work in Game 2, and the Pacers must find a way to stop them.

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Posted in 2013 Conference Semis: Knicks-Pacers, 2013 NBA Playoffs / Comments (2) /

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