Whether or not there are legitimate championship contenders, there is a clear line of demarcation between the NBA’s top three teams and the rest of the field. The top three teams in the league’s pre-Disney regular season by far were the Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Clippers and Milwaukee Bucks. The trio combined to post a record 146-46 before the coronavirus closed the season, and while injuries hampered the Clippers for much of the start, the Lakers and Bucks led their respective conferences in 12 combined games.
Under normal circumstances, the assumption would be that these teams would end up knocking each other out. Annoyances at his level are a rarity in the NBA playoffs, but the unique circumstances of the Disney bubble open the door to unpredictable circumstances. With no advantage on the local court and after four months off, each team is vulnerable. That includes the three giants.
So who is in a position to exploit them? While predicting the changes in Orlando would be premature, based on what we saw before the end of the season, we can at least use stylistic and statistical indicators to suggest who might have the best chance. Aside from each other, these are the worst matchups possible for the top three basketball teams in the postseason.
Milwaukee Bucks: Boston Celtics
Milwaukee’s defensive weaknesses, to the extent that they exist, are largely self-imposed. They are sold to stop specific types of shots with great effect. The Bucks give up the fewest shots on the NBA edge by one mile, and while they’ve allowed the most 3-point attempts in basketball, the 11th-lowest percentage of those 3 come from corners. Take all the mid-range jumpers and all 3 above the break you want, just don’t expect to get analytically backed shots against Milwaukee.
But Boston makes those shots. The Celtics shoot 44.5 percent 10-16 feet from the basket, sixth-best in the league. The Bucks allow most of those shots in the NBA. They move around the league average in terms of total triples, but almost none of them come from the corner. If the fourth quarters of a possible Bucks-Celtics series boils down to isolation bridges on both sides, Jayson Tatum is equipped to deliver daggers that the Milwaukee offense has, thus far, been unable to reciprocate. Although Milwaukee’s clutch defense is significantly better, it should be noted that Boston scores 6.1 more points for every 100 possessions in clutch environments.
The key to a potential pesky Boston offer is to get those clutch adjustments intact, because for the first 40 minutes of most games, Giannis Antetokounmpo is virtually unstoppable for any team that doesn’t employ Kawhi Leonard. The Celtics don’t have a ready-made solution to Giannis’ problem, but they’re also not as helpless as most in the league. At the very least, they can throw bodies at Giannis. Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Daniel Theis, and Gordon Hayward all fall into the overall size range necessary to disturb him. Marcus Smart will try, physical limitations will be condemned. Brad Stevens will throw a trick or two. Walls will be formed.
Milwaukee was the best team in the NBA during the regular season, but its style of play creates the simplest path for possible annoyance against the right opponent. Its weaknesses, if not exactly exploitable, are at least visible. There is a roadmap to beat them. Few teams can follow him. If all goes well, the Celtics could be one of them.
Los Angeles Lakers: Houston Rockets
The irony here is that the Lakers could also be Houston’s worst showdown. That’s how innovative its “centerless” gambit is. At least Golden State could go big when they needed it. The Rockets jumped out of a plane without a parachute and we have no idea if they will land on a mountain or a marshmallow. The Lakers may be too big for the Rockets. The Rockets may be too small for the Lakers. If they are in the playoffs, one of those two things will be true.
If it is the first? No harm, no fault. The Rockets were supposed to lose anyway. If it is the latter? The entire postseason is reversed. Variation is one of the most important elements of an advantage. If all goes well for Houston, there is a version of the Rockets that becomes the best team in the NBA at Disney. That’s particularly scary for the Lakers because they’ve seen it firsthand.
It wasn’t just that the Rockets beat them when the two teams met on the night of the trade deadline. It was that the Lakers tried to accept Houston’s style of play and still lost. About 28 minutes of that game went by without one of their two traditional centers: Dwight Howard and JaVale McGee. They were outplayed by 10 points while playing their small ball version. Anthony Davis scored 32 points on 14-of-21 shooting, a performance worthy of an NBA big man playing against a team with no size, yet the Lakers were outplayed during their minutes.
Houston’s theory is that no matter what any center does against them, the kind of offense big men generate is so inherently inefficient that it reduces the team’s performance to a level that its barrage of triples can handle. Everything they give up inside, they try to make up for it by abusing great men on the perimeter defensively. If it worked at Davis, it could work at anyone, and for a few brief stints, the Lakers played his hands even more by taking him out of the equation and putting LeBron James in the center.
The LeBron-plus-shooters model is tested without a doubt and could probably work against Houston in a significant sample, but that’s not the point. Davis is arguably the best big man in the NBA. The Lakers invested most of their resources off-season to acquire it. Even if LeBron’s center lineups work, they’re inherently compromised by the fact that they can’t include the Lakers’ top five players. It would be LeBron plus the role players that the Lakers could provide with the few resources that were left over after adding Davis. His list is based on having two players in the top five, and the Rockets could knock one of them off the floor. Houston cannot be compromised. They don’t have centers on their list to use, even if they wanted to.
The samples of a game are ridiculously unpredictable. Nothing is final yet, and the Lakers needed to be driven to a smaller ball anyway. If the Rockets can stop seven LeBron-Davis pick-and-roll games without the center hindering space, more power to them. But unlike most other teams on the field, they have an answer. It’s going to be very good or very bad, but it’s thoughtful and it’s backed by numbers. At least, that game in February was a proof of concept. The Rockets have a viable strategy. If it can be successfully run in more than seven games it is something completely different.
Los Angeles Clippers: Philadelphia 76ers and Miami Heat
Two teams are not listed here because the Clippers are especially vulnerable. Two teams are listed because they are not. Instead of a good answer, here are two decent ones.
Even the best typical contenders tend to have a kryptonite. The Clippers, at least in playoff terms, don’t seem like it. The common response to “who the Clippers fear” throughout the season has been the Lakers because of their superior size, but there has simply been no evidence that considers it a true vulnerability. The Clippers won the rebounding battle in their three games this season. They allow the seventh number of shots within three feet of the hoop in the NBA, and opponents make those shots in the eighth lowest percentage. They allow just 0.861 points per post, the fifth-best mark in basketball. These numbers are not strictly the result of an underestimated front court. The Clippers are so good at the point of attack that almost any look an opponent can get in the basket has been altered somewhere along the way. But that’s not going to go away, and nothing that has happened on the court this season suggests that the Clippers will be intimidated on the inside.
His lack of passing is troubling, but late-stage playoff basketball is almost universally pick-and-roll and driven by isolation anyway. They never score in transition, but no one does in the playoffs. Doc Rivers will not leave Lou Williams on the ground long enough to be hunted to death. They give up too many 3s, but so do the Bucks. It is a consequence of the protection of the tires by the committee, and they are stingy in the corners where it counts. Opposing coaches will find scabs to choose from, but there are none obvious. If the Clippers are defeated in the bubble, it will probably have to be at their own game. The two remotely equipped computers to do so are on the other side of the bracket.
The main contenders in the Western Conference lack defenders capable of deterring Kawhi Leonard alone. Miami (Jimmy Butler, Derrick Jones Jr., Jae Crowder, potentially Andre Iguodala) and Philadelphia (Ben Simmons, Matisse Thybulle) have multiple wings potentially up to squirting. Butler-Bam Adebayo’s pick-and-roll isn’t as dangerous as the many variants the Clippers throw, but they’re defensively good enough to keep up the serve. Shake Milton tortured them to the tune of 39 points with 70 percent shooting the last time he arrived in town. The heat party in the 3 deepest that the Clippers don’t want to defend.
Both are imperfect solutions. Miami’s path to changing its defense to trial involves removing almost everything that works on offense. The Sixers are unfamiliar with the concept of things that work in attack to begin with, and the Clippers would have no problem packing the paint against them. Neither of them has a late shot creator in Leonard’s class (spoiler alert: hardly anyone does). These are simply teams equipped to match the Clippers’ staff in a series of seven games. In reality, beating the Clippers would require an extremely favorable firing variation. One or both teams are more likely to be out after the first round.
It is one of the many perks that the Clippers are bringing to Disney. The teams they will likely find are not the best equipped to beat them. His recent fights with the best players and teams on the field have followed his path almost universally. That does not make them unbeatable. Rivers, Leonard, and Paul George have seen LeBron go supernova enough times that they don’t feel safe. Giannis will be there sooner or later. Surprises are expected in Orlando. But if there is a nuisance against the Clippers, there is no obvious way to predict it.
