The Clippers should reap huge benefits from hiring Rex Kalamian
New hire Rex Kalamian should bring the same strategic voice on defense to the Clippers but make them more effective.
The Los Angeles Clippers poached defensive guru Rex Kalamian from the remnants of the former Dwane Casey coaching staff in Toronto on Thursday. Kalamian should be an excellent candidate to extend concepts of the Clippers defense that are already in use and turn them into a stronger defensive team over the context of the league.
Kalamian’s resume speaks for itself. The Raptors were the 25th best defense in 2014-15, posting a defensive rating of 107.7. Kalamian was hired in the offseason of 2015, and over the next three seasons, the Raptors posted defensive ratings ranking 11th, 11th and fifth despite no major shifts in core personnel. Similarly, in Oklahoma City, his prior stop, the Thunder went from 20th the year before Kalamian joined to ninth, 15th, fourth, fourth, sixth and 16th over his tenure with the team. That, admittedly, can be more directly tied to the development of the Thunder’s young core from that time frame, but is an impressive set of results regardless.
Those numbers speak to how effective Kalamian’s teams tend to be at making the opponents miss shots. In nine years in his last two stops, Kalamian’s teams have been top 10 league-wide in opposing effective field goal percentage seven times. The other two years, they were 11th and 14th. For how much variance there is in opponent shooting, that level of consistency is remarkable.
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Specifically, however, the thing that makes Kalamian so respected on the defensive end is his installation of a much more ICE-heavy system in Toronto. ICE is a method of defending the sideline pick-and-roll where the ball handler’s defender leaves no path to dribble but towards the baseline, and is popular because it doesn’t force the defending team to bring a help defender.
Last year, according to Synergy Sports, the Raptors were the 10th-best team at defending possessions ended by the pick-and-roll ball handler, and the second-best team league-wide at defending possessions ended by a roll man. And that’s in spite of relatively weak defensive personnel for handling sideline pick-and-rolls. For example, the teams that finished first and third in defending the roll man were the 76ers and Jazz. Those two teams employ centers that will likely be the top two for Defensive Player of the Year voting. The Raptors employ the fairly slow-footed Jonas Valanciunas.
The Clippers, then, should benefit from Kalamian’s presence. They already run a fairly ICE-heavy scheme — ICE was originally popularized by Tom Thibodeau when he was an assistant under Doc Rivers in Boston — so the way they defend individual actions likely won’t change drastically, but the level of effectiveness should increase.
The Clippers were the 20th-best defensive team last year. That would rank the worst Kalamian defense in the last 10 years. The Clippers were the 12th-best team at causing opponents to miss shots last year. That would rank as the second-worst Kalamian defense in the last 10 years. The Clippers ranked eighth and 19th in defending the two individual components of the pick-and-roll last year. While there’s not a historical point of comparison there, that should improve with the addition of Kalamian as well.
Overall, the addition of Rex Kalamian should allow the Clippers to continue doing what they were already doing on defense and make them more effective at it.