The Rotation: Kyrie makes plays and the Spurs drop the hammer

Welcome to The Rotation, our daily playoff wrap-up of our favorite stories, large and small, from last night’s NBA action.

Kyrie Irving is not your grandfather’s playmaker

By Brandon Jefferson (@pengriffey_jr)

Ever since Kyrie Irving entered the NBA there’s been a common criticism of his game as a point guard — he doesn’t get enough assists. His ball-handling and ability to contort his body around the rim and still finish has dazzled us all, but no matter how many game-winners or one-on-one highlights he makes, the playmaking question keeps coming up.

Irving has underwhelmed as a passer, for his career he’s averaging 5.5 assists per game and his career-high (6.1 assists per game) came the season before LeBron James returned to “win one for The Land.” Yet, his style of play has never lent itself to being a “pure” facilitator in the way we often get boxed into thinking about with point guards.

Kyrie is at his best when he is able to break down a defense in isolation or out of the pick-and-roll. While that would usually mean help defenders and team rotations would leave another teammate open, the thread of Kevin Love, James and a wealth of shooters often keeps those defenders glued to their primary assignments. Irving isn’t incompetent as a playmaker, he often makes the right choice when faced with 2-on-1 situations, but expecting him to control a game with his passing like Steve Nash, Chris Paul and Jason Kidd ignores what he does best. Against the Pacers he totaled 12 assists in the four-game sweep. Through two games versus the Raptors he’s set a playoff career-high in back-to-back games (10 assists in Game 1 and 11 assists in Game 2).

And, of course, Kyrie is a prolific creator of “Kobe Assists” where his forays to the rim draw defensive attention and his misses create offensive rebound opportunities for his teammates. The bottom line is that he makes plays. He can be whatever the team needs him to be.

Leave Ibaka alone

By Brendon Kleen (@BrendonKleen14)

There are so many reasons why the Raptors have struggled to keep pace with the Cavaliers so far in the second round, from a lack of shooting to flawed roster construction to inconsistent stars, but not one of them centers on Serge Ibaka.

Yet scroll through Twitter or watch any number of broadcasts and sidecasts throughout the night and the opposite sentiment will be repeated a dozen times. Analysts and hot-takers will use words like “hesitant” and “tentative” as if they’re vulgarities. Ibaka already is destined to be unfairly scapegoated if the rest of the series follows the same trend as the first two games, in which Cleveland has decisively walloped Toronto. This all despite the fact that Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan have combined for a mere 64 points across Games 1 and 2 in Cleveland.

I get the urge to isolate the differences between the team that pushed the Cavaliers to six games in last year’s Eastern Conference Finals, and this year’s team, which has struggled mightily through the first two playoff rounds. Ibaka is the only big addition to the roster, apart from P.J. Tucker, and so maybe some blame is due for him. However, he’s actually the only player on the roster who can posit a reasonable argument of success against the NBA’s powerhouses in Golden State and Cleveland. As a member of the Thunder for almost a decade, Ibaka was a key part of a yearly contender.

Plus, here’s a quick list of the people that might be slightly squeamish or anxious if matched up against LeBron James’s team in the NBA Playoffs:

Me
You
Every other person that is alive on Earth right now

And on Ibaka’s own team, you have Lowry and DeRozan struggling mightily against Cleveland’s bottom-ten defense. No one can hit a 3-pointer; the team is 15-of-43 on deep balls so far this round. Ibaka’s starting frontcourt mate, Jonas Valanciunas, cannot consistently make the quick decisions necessary to exploit a team like the Cavaliers. It is far from being Ibaka’s fault.

Truly the only reasonable argument I see being made against Ibaka’s offensive performance has been an over-reliance on mid-range shots despite 3-point range. That’s fair, but according to NBA.com, he’s made 6-of-14 mid-range shots in the second round. Five of those makes have been assisted, and Ibaka rarely takes a shot out of rhythm. He was fifth on the team in usage this year.

Serge Ibaka would not even make a Letterman Top Ten of reasons why the Raptors are getting crushed by the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference semifinals. Stop trying to make this a thing.

Play of the Day: San Antonio drops the Hammer on Houston

By Jeff Siegel (@jgsiegel)

The Spurs popularized the hammer screen over the past few years, and while the entire league now has a version of it in their playbook, Popovich’s men still execute as well as anybody. The basic action of a hammer set is to have one player drive toward the baseline on one side of the court while a shooter runs from the opposite wing to the opposite corner, aided by a back screen from one of the Spurs’ big men.

San Antonio has changed how they run the hammer action as their team has evolved from an all-around offensive juggernaut of the early 2010s to a more Kawhi Leonard-centric offensive attack this season. In the past, Tony Parker would often be the ball-handler in this play, but as the team has evolved, Leonard is the man with the ball the majority of the time.

The play begins with Danny Green bringing the ball up on the left side of the floor. LaMarcus Aldridge pops up to the top of the key and swings the ball through to Parker on the other side of the court. So far, the Spurs haven’t given anything away; a lot of their plays start like this. Aldridge cuts toward the basket, helped along his way by a decoy back screen from Leonard. Leonard then cuts toward the right wing, receives the ball from Parker, and drives baseline. Meanwhile, Green cuts toward the opposite corner and finds himself wide open for a 3-pointer.

Next: Meyers Leonard and the battle for confidence

The essential aspect of the hammer set is that Leonard’s baseline drive only opens up the passing angle—he’s not actually looking to score. The defense can’t possibly know this, so as he drives, four Rockets collapse into the paint to try to clog up the Spurs’ offense. Aldridge, who is charged with setting the back screen on Patrick Beverley, barely has to make contact with him, as Green has already caught the ball before Beverley recognizes what is happening. By then, it’s far too late for anybody to recover and close out to Green in the corner.