miami's beautiful "iverson" set play & danny green's long distance close out
sets with multiple layers are really cool & salute to all the defenders who don't quit on plays
check out this play from game 2 of the 2020 nba finals between the los angeles lakers and the miami heat:
let's break it down.
after inbounding the ball, jimmy butler runs all the way across the court from one wing to the other, using screens by duncan robinson and kelly olynyk:
this is similar to an action that the philadelphia 76ers would often run for allen iverson. it's designed for the receiver to catch the ball and quickly turn the corner as their defender is scrambling back to recover.
see this play where alvin williams takes a poor angle and gets blown by easily:
eventually, teams started catching on and would send the closest big to help.
here iverson's defender goes for the steal and stumbles but his teammate helps, so allen rises for the jumper instead:
another example of the big helping on this action:
alright, back to butler cutting across the court. as mentioned, there were two screens set for him; they just didn't seem very impactful because lebron james and kentavious caldwell-pope switched so smoothly and jimmy was kind of just trotting along instead of sprinting like iverson used to:
but there's a reason why jimmy was moving at the pace he was. the real beauty of this miami set isn't the first half, but the second.
after robinson and olynyk set their screens for jimmy, they run some off-ball action of their own. duncan chills for a while as he waits for jimmy to catch the ball, then moves towards olynyk to sort of subtly set a "pick" for him. miami knows robinson's defender will always stay attached to him given his ability to shoot, so robinson + robinson's defender moving together between olynyk and olynyk's defender will help create air space for kelly as he fades to the three-point-line on the other side of the wing.
it's similar to a rub concept (pick play) in football where two receivers run crossing routes to impede the defensive backs playing man coverage on them to create separation.
see the amount of space this generates for olynyk as dwight howard is caught on the other side of robinson and lebron:
this added off-ball action forces dwight to worry about following kelly to the other side of the court, and removes the big who would have been able to help kcp on butler's drive.
so as long as jimmy is able to beat his man off the dribble - which for most star perimeter players is virtually guaranteed - he has a free lane to the basket as lebron, dwight, and danny green are effectively all out of the play at this point:
this forces anthony davis, who was guarding jae crowder in the corner to rotate into the paint to stop a layup. easy kick out from jimmy to the corner:
when i was watching this game in real-time, i remember thinking that crowder was going to get a wide-open corner 3. look how much space he had in this moment:
the next thing i knew, green fucking flew - like this man teleported out of nowhere to get a pretty decent contest on crowder's jumper:
it's pretty incredible how far danny traveled; like if he started around 19 feet away from the basket at the top of the key, and a corner 3 is 22 feet away from the basket, the pythagorean theorem tells me that he covered 29 feet of distance to get to crowder's shot.
hats off to you, mr. green.
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