Doc Rivers’ Death Valley: Lineup Imbalances In Action
By Seth Partnow
Wednesday night saw one of the more anticipated matchups of the new season, with the undefeated, defending champion Golden State Warriors taking on one of their most bitter rivals, the Los Angeles Clippers, also sporting a 4-0 record. Given some extra spice by a long-running war of words between players and coaches, the game delivered, with the Warriors eeking out a 112-108 victory.
The story of the contest, rightfully, will be the heroics of Steph Curry, who scored 31 points largely on the back of 7-11 from three-point range. Several of those bombs were his patented off-the-dribble jobs with hands in his face, including the final go ahead bucket over DeAndre Jordan with 1:08 remaining in the fourth.
However, a segment of the game which came way before may have had as much if not more to do with the final outcome. When Austin Rivers checked in for Chris Paul with 3:29 left in the first quarter, the Clippers had a 23-21 lead. At that point, Los Angeles had four bench players on the court, and when Wes Johnson subbed for Blake Griffin with 1:59 left, coach Doc Rivers was rolling with five substitutes. By the time Griffin returned with 9:12 left in the second, Golden State had sprinted to a 43-29 lead of their own.
Big runs happen every night in the NBA, and there is little reason to suggest strategic error caused any single flurry. However, if a trend emerges, questions must be asked, and the Clippers allowing large runs during this portion of games is nothing new. Naturally, bench-heavy lineups tend to be worse than a team’s starters in terms of absolute quality. Starters play more minutes as a team’s best players should. The drop off from starters to bench is far from uniform. In recent years, Los Angeles has been infamous for their paper-thin roster, relying on a cast of minimum salary has-beens and never-was’s to try to spell Griffin and Paul and the rest of the first unit.
Instead of staggering units, intermixing Paul or Griffin with a few bench players while first one and then the other rests, Rivers likes to to pack all of the reserve minutes together in one cluster, as if to get it out of the way, like unwanted veggies on a child’s dinner plate. There is some logic behind this. As I noted earlier this week, most NBA teams follow a similar timing pattern when going to their bench:
If the Clippers can “steal” a few minutes against opposing benches, everything should work out. Sounds fine in theory. In practice several things can go wrong. First, if the timing of the subs is off, the Clips can get stuck with these “throwaway” lineups matched up against opposition starters. This is a no-good, very-bad thing, as
the greater the starter-bench mismatch, the larger the scoring margin tends to be
. On Wednesday, the number of starters on the floor wasn’t stacked too badly. That is, if Curry only counts for one. After sitting much of the first quarter with two fouls, the reigning MVP got to have a free run at a lineup featuring a backcourt of the younger Rivers and Jamal Crawford. This is not ideal from L.A.’s perspective. And even if this sort of player-role mismatch does not occur, these all-bench lineups might be so weak that even against opposition benches, they tend to get gashed for quick scoring flurries. Certainly, a look at the Clipper’s net scoring margin by game minute suggests something is not right:
That’s a big ugly during what tends to be the “dead” time of NBA games, the first bench rotation at the end of the first quarter and beginning of the second quarter. Still, a lot of teams could be as top heavy as the Clips, and see similar dips at certain moments in the game. Or maybe not. The chart below shows the net scoring margin for all NBA teams for the last three minutes of the first quarter and the first three of the 2nd, as well as that margin extrapolated out over a full 48 minutes:
That’s not
great
company the Clippers find themselves in[1.
, San Antonio crushed in this period by bringing their starters back in just that little bit earlier in a nice bit of lineup management by Gregg Popovich.] To further illustrate the point, below is a comparison of the per 48 extrapolated margin during the quarter valley period and the teams overall scoring margin per game:
As bad as Philly’s sub-NBA calibre bench units turned out to be, the Clippers had, by far, a larger drop off in effectiveness and even basic competitiveness, during this time period. Some of this is personnel, a coach can’t magic up competent 7th through 10th men[2. A coach who is also the GM, however…] but questions almost have to be asked if giving up big margins for half-a-quarter’s worth of action is the best method for maximizing the effectiveness even of a thin team.
Falling behind during that time period won’t show up quite the same was as Curry’s pyrotechnics, and the degree to which a second quarter possession is equally valuable to one in the fourth is an open question[4. All points count the same, yet it’s easy to see the game on the floor is played in a far different fashion late in a close game than in a what tends to be a rather free flowing period at the start of the second quarter.], but it’s hard not to wonder if through more balanced deployment of talent earlier in the game, those Curry daggers might have instead been made in a futile attempts at a comeback which fell just short.