Harden’s Rockets vs. Jokic’s Nuggets is the playoff series we deserve

In their second meeting in three days, the Nuggets and Rockets took the floor again on Monday night in another up-and-down, high-scoring affair. Both Denver and Houston boast top-five offenses and leave quite a bit to be desired on the other end of the floor, which always makes for fireworks between the two teams.

To enhance the fireworks, neither team matches up particularly well with the other — the Nuggets don’t have a perimeter defender who can stay with James Harden, and while Clint Capela and Nene are a formidable starter/backup center combination, neither are adept at the type of defensive work required to contain Nikola Jokic.

The pace was blistering as both teams ran in transition at every opportunity, even pushing the ball after makes to try to unsettle the defense and produce an easy basket. Neither team is a stranger to transition: Houston runs on 18.4 percent of its possessions, tied with Golden State for the highest portion of a team’s offense in the league, and Denver gets out on the break 14.4 percent of the time, above the league average. Neither team ranks in the top half of the league in transition efficiency, but transition opportunities are generally much better than any other type of offense. The worst transition team in the league, Philadelphia, scores exactly 1.00 points per possession in transition.

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Compare that to halfcourt offenses: across the entire league only Houston scores more than 1 point per possession in the halfcourt; even the Warriors’ halfcourt offense can’t match what the lowly 76ers can do in transition. Teams that push the ball down the court quickly and often are almost always among the best offenses in the league, as Houston and Denver are showing again this year.

Jokic might have already sealed his spot as the best passing big man in the league and the Nuggets give him the leash to experiment and learn on the fly, a luxury afforded to very few young players and even fewer second-round picks. A few times per game, Jokic will grab a rebound and lead the break himself as shooters and cutters surround him. Most importantly, Jokic’s ability to make good decisions in transition frees up the Denver wings and guards to run with him, as opposed to having to wait for the outlet pass and push the ball themselves.

Against an up-and-down opponent like the Rockets, having that extra advantage is the difference between an easy layup and having to pull the ball out and run something in the half court.

You’d be hard-pressed to find another offense in the league that is as center-centric as Denver’s. When Jokic is on the floor, everything revolves around him and opposing centers have no idea what to do with him. If they pressure up on him, he’ll fake a dribble hand-off and spin into the lane for a smooth finish. If they lay back, he’ll pull up for a jumper in their eye. If they try to split the difference, he’ll find one of the Nuggets’ orbiting planets on a hand-off or a cut to the basket. You can’t put a smaller guy on him to try to take away his passing and ball handling unless you want to peel that guy off the basket support after Jokic has scored again. Houston opened with Ryan Anderson drawing the assignment before cycling through their stable of big men, never quite finding the right answer. Multiple times throughout the game, Capela and the Rockets were visibly frustrated with Jokic, who even ran the point guard for Denver at times.

Down the stretch, the Nuggets went to Jokic on almost every play, using him as a screener and forcing the Rockets to switch, putting a guard on Jokic. To their credit, Houston came at Jokic in the post every way they knew how, leaving him 1-on-1 and taking away the passing lanes, doubling him from the baseline, doubling him from the top of the key. And to his credit, none of that mattered. He made the right play every time, scoring when they left him alone and finding the open shooter or cutter when the defense collapsed on him.

Jokic wasn’t perfect by any means, but he still brings such a unique skillset to the table that you can almost see defenders calculating in their heads rather than playing on instinct. Many big men haven’t defended anybody their size who can pass and handle like Jokic since they were children and by the time they figure out what they’re supposed to do, he’s already skinned them for another layup or thrown a one-handed cross-court pass to an open shooter.

When Jokic didn’t have the ball, Houston frequently went under his ball screens to try to combat the Nuggets’ desire to have the defense switch a smaller defender onto Jokic. Denver had their fair share of open 3s as a result, but only one went down when Jameer Nelson finally got one to go with three minutes left in the game. It’s a strategy that not many teams employ against Denver; defenders go under on just 10.5 percent of all of the Nuggets’ pick-and-roll possessions, the fourth-lowest number in the league. Just above them, at 10.6 percent, is Golden State.

The Rockets’ offense, for its beauty and effectiveness, is not particularly complicated. There are early drag screens for Harden to get him into the lane, there are down screens and hand-offs for any of the multiple shooters Houston employs on the perimeter, and there’s Mike D’Antoni’s Old Faithful: the high pick-and-roll. The vast majority of Houston’s possessions will include at least one of these, if not all three.

Houston’s favorite action is to get a quick pick-and-pop with Harden and Anderson, which almost always forces the defense to switch a big onto Harden. Then, Capela will step up into a ball screen for Harden, allowing them to work the pick-and-roll against two traditional big men. Mason Plumlee and Jokic found themselves making desperate attempts to contain Harden in space and prevent the lob over the top to Capela more than a few times. Neither one are particularly adept pick-and-roll defenders in the best of circumstances, so the Nuggets were scrambling when the two were trying to combine to stop the best attack in the league. On multiple possessions, it seemed as though Plumlee and Jokic had things covered, yet one of Denver’s wings would get nervous and make a late foray into the paint to bump Capela and prevent the lob, opening up an easy pass for Harden to a 3-point shooter.

Houston’s crunch-time offense is predicated almost entirely on getting switches from the defense and punishing them with Harden’s immense driving and foul-drawing talent. Late in games, teams are so wary to give up open 3-pointers that they’re more likely to switch ball screens, which feeds right into what Harden wants to do. In the last few minutes against Denver, Harden attacked Juancho Hernangomez without mercy, using his man, Trevor Ariza, as the screener on a handful of possessions in a row. Whether it was Mike Malone’s game plan or Hernangomez had a couple rookie mistakes in the final minutes of the game, Houston took full advantage, swinging the ball to Ariza on the pick-and-pop and letting him attack and find shooters.

When Denver finally stopped trapping Harden after an open Patrick Beverley 3-pointer went down, Harden had the opportunity to dance with the Nuggets’ rookie, showing him the full repertoire of dribble moves and head fakes.

Despite the relative gulf between these two teams in the standings, each provides a difficult matchup for the other, leading to an open, up-and-down game with a ton of scoring. Harden won this game on a fantastic slaloming run through all five Denver defenders (with a little help from a Nene screen on Nelson so egregious there was a flag thrown at NRG Stadium across town) with fewer than 10 seconds on the clock to give Houston yet another win in this series.

Next: Quantifying the impact of length

But don’t let the one-sided record between these two teams this year fool you. All three games this year have been fantastic contests and we’ll get somewhere between four and seven of these in April and May in the next few years if we’re lucky.

All stats are courtesy of Synergy.