The Whiteboard: Embiid’s MVP case, Kings style, Playoffs clinching scenarios

In today’s NBA news — the Joel Embiid MVP case has been made, playoffs clinching scenarios and another look at the Kings offense.

The NBA regular season is coming to a close but there’s still plenty of time for your mind to be blown. Donovan Mitchell dropped another 40-piece for the Cavs building on a franchise record he already stole from LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. Domantas Sabonis racked up another triple-double, his 13th on the season — more than James Harden and Russell Westbrook combined. Oh, and the Lakers bench stole a cringey SNL bit from Jim Bruer, ruining a LeBron James presser.

All that was fun, except the braying, but here is the rest of the NBA news stories I was most interested in today.

Joel Embiid makes his final case for MVP with a mid-range extravaganza

Joel Embiid put up a monstrous line in a statement win over the Boston Celtics — 52 points, 13 rebounds and 6 assists. He outscored all of his teammates combined and, according to Doc Rivers, won himself the MVP: “The MVP race is over. … The man just scored half our points, in an NBA game.”

But the most interesting part of the game, for me, may have been Embiid’s shot distribution. He scored 52 points but just seven of his made baskets came in the restricted area. He was 13-of-17 on all other 2-pointers, including 5-of-6 on mid-range jumpers. A ton of his pick-and-roll actions with James Harden ended with him catching the ball at the top of the key and he seemed to be channeling Kevin Durant in how he handled it.

In The Whiteboard, we’ve dissected a few different changes to Embiid’s game this season, including his willingness to forgo post-up opportunities and spend more screening for Harden. But as Mike Vorkunov pointed out, Embiid’s development as a mid-range shooter might be the most dramatic development in his game this season.

He is averaging 5.4 mid-range attempts per game, fifth-most in the NBA, hitting 48.9 percent of those shots. Among players who average at least 3.0 attempts per game, only Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard and Devin Booker have been more accurate. He’s also been fantastic this year at taking opposing bigs off the dribble from those spaces, shooting 55.7 percent on just over 6.0 drives per game.

Moving Embiid off the low post has helped improve the spacing in the 76ers’ offense. But his ability to score with versatile and efficient from the mid-range area means they haven’t really had to sacrifice anything, particularly in terms of volume. It’s going to make potential playoff matchups against the Celtics, Bucks or Cavs and their defensive-minded big men very, very interesting.

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The evolving offensive style of the Sacramento Kings

The dribble-hand-off-heavy offensive style of the Sacramento Kings has gotten a lot of press over the past few weeks — here at The Step Back and elsewhere. With the regular season coming to a close I thought it would be useful to look at their evolution through the prism of offensive style charts.

These charts are not meant to evaluate whether an offense is good or bad. They are designed to help illustrate how teams go about the goal of trying to put the ball in the basket. Each team’s offense is evaluated on four stylistic spectrums.

Ball movement is measured with the average touch time for each team, from the NBA’s player tracking statistics. A lower average touch time means the ball is moving from player to player more quickly.

Player movement is measured with a combination of different NBA.com tracking statistics and works out to average distance traveled per 24 seconds of offensive possession.

Pace is measured with the average length of an offensive possession from Inpredictable, a more accurate representation of how quickly a team is working than traditional pace.

Shot selection is measured with MoreyBall percentage — in this case the percentage of a team’s true shooting opportunities that came at the rim, from the free-throw line, or on a 3-pointer. It’s a generalized measure but captures something about how much each team hews to the shots that are, on average, the most efficient.

On the graphs below you’ll see a line for each team’s offense. As the line moves away from the center of the graph on each axis you’re seeing more of that stylistic trait. For example, shot selection shows a (hypothetically) more efficient shot selection the further you are from the center.

Here is how the Kings look this year compared to last year:

What we can see is the same basic structure the Kings began forming last year after trading for Domantas Sabonis, but with some tweaks to juice their efficiency. The two biggest changes are in regard to shot selection and ball movement.

Last season, 37.7 percent of Sacramento’s shot attempts came from beyond the arc. This year, they’ve bumped that up to 42.4 percent — a change that took them from 21st in the league in seventh. They also shaved about a tenth of a second off the average length of each touch. That may not seem like much but it was enough to move them from the 10th-shortest touches to the third-shortest in the league. A lot of that was driven by rotation changes — with off-ball threats like Kevin Huerter and Malik Monk replacing more on-ball threats like Tyrese Haliburton and Donte DiVincenzo.

The end result is a Kings offense that works much the same stylistically but with everything running a bit faster and more tilted toward optimal offensive outcomes like catch-and-shoot 3s.

NBA news and content from around the FanSided network

• A hectic and surprising NCAA Tournament set the stage for a summer of excitement around the 2023 NBA Draft class.  Our latest Big Board from Chris Kline breaks it all down.
• Victor Wembanyama is going to show us plenty of things we’ve never seen before on a basketball court. We can now cross “putback dunk on your own missed 3-pointer” off the list.
• In big NBA (media) free agent news, Wes Goldberg is back at FanSided and running All U Can Heat. We could not be more excited.

NBA Playoffs clinching scenarios tonight

The Play-In Tournament keeps more teams in playoff content for longer but it also means half of the first-round playoff matchups aren’t set with when the regular season ends. Right now, the only first-round matchup that is completely locked in is Cavs (No. 4) against the Knicks (No. 5). We won’t get any additional matchups locked in tonight but there are a few other things that can be clinched tonight. Here is what’s on the line:

• Atlanta is locked into a Play-In Tournament game with a loss OR a Brooklyn win OR a Toronto loss
• Boston clinches the No. 2 seed with a win AND a MIL win
• Milwaukee clinches the best record (No. 1 seed) in the East and best overall record in the NBA with a win OR a Boston loss
• Philadelphia clinches the No. 3 seed with a Boston win.
• Denver clinches the best record (No. 1 seed) in the West with a Memphis loss.
• Sacramento clinches the No. 3 seed with a loss AND a Memphis win.

Today’s NBA Trivia

The Sacramento Kings officially ended the longest playoff drought in professional sports, clinching a postseason spot for the first time since 2005-06. Who was the leading scorer on that 2005-06 Kings team?