bojan bogdanovic's nice backdoor cut & donovan mitchell's dime
countering your opponent's counter
i was watching the preseason game between the utah jazz and los angeles clippers last night (i know, i have no life) and the first two jazz possessions were a delight.
utah opened up the game with some nice ball movement that led to a bojan bogdanovic corner 3:
nothing wild here, but it's important to note that nicolas batum was the clipper who flew by bogey on the closeout.
off of lac's next miss, donovan mitchell brings the ball down and sets up another play for bogdanovic. he motions for mike conley to space out to the corner and calls for a high pindown for bojan:
rudy gobert comes to set the screen, and ivica zubac makes it known to batum that it's coming. right at this moment, batum has a decision to make:
he can either try to
go through the screen
go over the screen
go under the screen
deny the screen
the clippers typically play the drop coverage with zubac on the floor, so going through or over the screen probably puts ivica in a tough situation defending bojan in a mismatch with a lot of time on the shot clock.
going under the screen is a no-go, particularly because bogey splashed a three from the corner just seconds ago right in nic's face.
so to counter, batum decides to deny the screen completely, putting his body in a position between bogdanovic and gobert:
bojan reads the situation perfectly, counters batum's counter, and cuts backdoor. mitchell connects with him perfectly and drops a dime of a bounce pass to him for an open layup:
here's the full play:
i'm really excited to watch utah this season. one of the jazz's biggest problems on offense last year without bogdanovic was stagnation; they'd run around in some motion but inevitably be forced into a mitchell iso with <8 seconds on the shot clock. a healthy bogey truly makes the difference for that team. he can obviously shoot, but he's also super intelligent without the ball.
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