FanPost

quick analysis of the Mavs game (particularly the starting quarter)




So the Asik / Dwight experiment got underway today , the result especially in the first quarter looked bad, but how did it get there really? we can't really look at just the final line and judge that quickly. so I decided to go back to look at the game a bit more and see what happened in those possessions. specifically for this post, I looked at the first 7:30 min of the first quarter when both side had their starting lineup in there. I'll slowly look over each Dallas bucket and see what happened.

1st bucket (Calderon ) : a 12 footer pull up, Lin was on him, may wanted to contest it bit more but it wasn't horrendous. (Asik also backed off when he might have been able to close.)

2nd bucket (Calderon) : 18 footer pull up : again, Lin was in front of him.

3rd bucket (Calderon ) : transition play 3 on 2 off a Howard miss dunk. not much to say there. Lin and Asik were back but against 3 they had little chance.

4th bucket ( Dalembert) : Pick and roll with Calderon, Lin got through the screen but Asik hedged a bit too much and the Dal scored on the roll .

5th bucket ( Ellis ) : a semi transition Ellis 3 that missed, Marion got the rebound then found Ellis back dooring a layup. Lin should have boxed out Ellis there better but the entire transition D was a bit of a mess.

6th bucket ( Calderon and 1 ) : another backdoor .. sorta, Calderon had Harden on him then handed it off for Dalembert and then Lin and Harden messed up a switch (as Lin was on Ellis) and got to Calderon too late. i'd say both Lin and Harden had some issue there.

7th bucket ( Dalembert) : an Ellis / Dalembert pick and roll, that appears to be Asik messing up badly, ending up with Dalembert rolling to the hoop wide open (well Lin did rotate to cover, but it's not like a PG's going to stop him in that situation.)

8th bucket ( Dirk ) : taking Dwight off the dribble for a 16 footer pull up, that's basically Dirk doing Dirk things.

9th Bucket ( Calderon again ) : multiple PnR 2 man game with Dirk, ended up taking and making a sort of open 20 footer.

So that was the first 9 buckets with the starter group , after that they made switches. (7:34 in, score 19:14 Dallas lead. so amusingly, they gave up 19 in 7:30 with that group and then 14 in just 4:30 with Beverley / Casspi in )

I'd say for the most part if you look at this a lot of it was Calderon long 2s. which isn't exactly a bad shot to give to him and he's not going to be making it at a 80% clip like he did this game. (he missed only once in this stretch.) There's a few switch there that was awful, (both involving Harden.)

In terms of tactic it's interesting that what Dallas essentially did was have Dirk camp at the 3 line and had Dwight follow him there, while they very often also had Dalembert outside for pick and roll or hand offs, so essentially they took both Asik AND Dwight out of the post and capitalized on Lin / Harden's questionable switch . On the other hand, Dirk only took 2 shot and hit one in this sequence, so clearly they were not going to him as a strong point, but rather taking advantage of Calderon's offensive prowess and multiplying it by luring out all the bigs.

So my initial conclusion is that Dwight on PF seems to work , anytime you hold Dirk to just 1 bucket in nearly 8 min your doing good things. But the team's rotation needs to get better, the biggest culprit seem to be Harden in this sequence as he was part of both really bad blown switch, but Asik also looked rusty in terms of judgment and Lin was also a part of a lot of questionable plays, though looking back in closer detail reveal that it wasn't as bad as I initially thought. and we have to keep in mind that Jose Calderon offensively is pretty close to a top 5 PG (too bad he's also a btm 5 defensive PG.) who hit 4 out of 5 16-20 footers.

I'll take another look at the 3rd quarter sequence with this group later.

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