Steph Curry & Warriors shine, LeBron James & Lakers need help, 76ers-Celtics notes | Hoops Tonight

All right, welcome to Hoops Tonight, presented by FanDuel here at The Volume. Happy Wednesday, everybody. Halfway through the week. Hope you guys are having a good one so far. Really short today, maybe 15, 20 minutes. We're just gonna basically go over the film from last night's games, the Warriors and the Lakers and the Celtics and the Sixers. I'm gonna be referencing a bunch of clips from these games. You can find them on my Twitter feed at underscore JasonLT for the Celtics-Sixers game. I put together like a three-minute clip that goes over a bunch of things with a voiceover. And then for the Lakers-Warriors game, I just put a thread together with like a dozen or more clips from that game. So you're gonna wanna be on the Twitter feed to see the actual video stuff. You guys know the drill before we get started. Subscribe to The Volume's YouTube channel so you don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter at underscore JasonLT so you guys don't miss show announcements as well as the video content that I was just referencing. And last but not least, if for whatever reason you miss one of these shows and you can't get back over to YouTube to finish, you can find them wherever you get your podcasts under hoops tonight. One other scheduling note. So today we have this video coming out. There's a full slate of games tonight, but we're not going live tonight. I will have a video tomorrow morning that will be breaking down tonight's game. So keep an eye on the feed tomorrow morning to cover pretty much, I think the rest of the league is in action tonight, if not by tomorrow night. And then on Thursday night, we're going to be doing another live show after the final buzzer of Clippers-Lakers. So we got this video today, tonight's games will be covered tomorrow morning, and then tomorrow night we have another live show. So on that note, let's talk some basketball. So I talked a lot last night at the beginning of the show about how the switching ability of Andrew Wiggins, Draymond Green, and Kevon Looney did a lot to disrupt the Lakers in their horn sets, which is the primary structure of their offense that they run when they decide to get into sets on specific possessions down the floor. But as is always the case, you learn more watching the film than you do live watching a game. There's just a ton going on, and I kind of like actually dropped the video footage into iMovie so I can scroll back and forth through a play, and I'll watch the same play five or six times to just see all the different angles of it, to see what specific off-ball defenders are doing, what specific off-ball offensive players are doing, and just the way that a play can either work or not work based on one guy messing up or a specific stunt or play that one of the players on one of the teams makes. I find that I learn a lot more that way. And one of the big things that stood out to me on the replay, on the rewatch, was it wasn't just Wiggins, Draymond, and Looney who were doing a great job switching. Jordan Poole and Klay Thompson had multiple possessions where they aggressively switched onto LeBron on a dribble handoff or a ball screen and applied ball pressure, and rather than LeBron trying to attack those guys, he just got rid of the basketball. And a couple of different things there, like that's good on Jordan Poole and Klay Thompson because one of the best ways for a small player to attempt to hold his own against a bigger player is to attack the basketball. You're not going to contain him on the drive because he can just rip through and he's too big and strong. You're not going to be able to hold your own in a post-up situation because he can just shoot over the top of you. But like I always talk about, one of the best ways to lead stars to having a bad night is to make them feel uncomfortable. One of the easiest ways to make a star feel uncomfortable is to attack the basketball with ball pressure and just make everything difficult. And a lot of that's on LeBron for not punishing the Warriors for making those types of switches. But if you're going to do that kind of switch with that type of personnel, you need to be aggressive towards the basketball. Good on Jordan Poole and Klay Thompson for doing it like that. One of the other big things that was just glaring on tape, and it's glaring on tape every time I watch the Lakers. Last night, like we talked about, Reggie Miller was preaching the gospel of Russell Westbrook's box score numbers. Had another 18-point game last night. I think he averaged 18 points a game last year. If you look at the box score, you're going to find production from Russ. It's never been a weakness of his. It's always been a give and a take with him. There's a bunch of things he does to hurt your basketball team, and there's a bunch of things he does to help your basketball team. And when he was younger, he used to be so nuclear, he used to be such a nuclear athlete that he generated so much good on that front that he was a huge net positive for a basketball team. But at this point, that scale has shifted in the opposite direction. And I actually think he does a lot more damage than good. Consistently in this game, the Warriors were digging off of Russ. A lot of times Steph as the initial matchup, and then whoever ended up getting switched onto him, they're just coming down to the elbow and completely ignoring Russ. Early in the game, when the Lakers were running their horn sets and the switches were getting LeBron and AD out of whack, they weren't switching with Lonnie. And Lonnie was able to come off those curls and get downhill. The problem is, is he would come over the curl and get downhill, and there would be Russ's man, sitting at the nail, ready to contain that drive. There's a clip like that that's in the thread that I put together from the Lakers-Warriors game today. Again, you can find that on my Twitter feed. But there's a play where Steph gets switched onto Lonnie. They run the dribble handoff. Lonnie, Steph has to go over the top of the screen. So because he went over the top of the screen, because they don't want to switch Steph onto Anthony Davis, Lonnie gets downhill. Unlike what LeBron and AD were doing in their DHOs. So Lonnie gets downhill, but Russ is on the right wing, and Andrew Wiggins just digs down. And on this particular play, Lonnie makes the kick to Russ, and he misses the three. But on a lot of plays, they don't even hit him, because they don't trust him to make the shot. And it's the kind of thing that doesn't show up in the box score. There's no box score stat for how many driving lanes a player closes up without being an off-ball threat. There's a play in the second half where LeBron got in the run, in the big run. There was a 25-4 run in this game where the Warriors put the Lakers away. It went from 66-60 to 91-64. And it was over at that point. I don't care about the fake comeback that took place later in the game. And we're gonna go through a couple plays from that game. And I have a thread that's, that thread has almost every major play from that run. So you can get a really good feel of how the Warriors won that game just by going to my Twitter feed and scrolling through those video clips. But there was a play in that run where LeBron gets Kevon Looney on a switch. And he's dancing with the basketball at the top of the key. And he's got Lonnie Walker in the strong side corner where Steph is guarding him. And Steph's kind of off of Lonnie a little bit, but not too much. Anthony Davis is in the dunker spot. Draymond Green's ignoring him and he's underneath the basket. And one of the downsides of having a player in the dunker spot is you don't get a defensive three seconds call because you're technically in guarding position for your man. So Draymond's sitting under the basket. You had Kendrick Nunn in the opposite corner. And you had Russell Westbrook on the left wing with Andrew Wiggins guarding him. And on the play, LeBron dances around with the basketball for like five seconds, takes a bunch of dribbles and takes a tough contested leaning pull-up jump shot that he misses over Kevon Looney. Now, if you watch the play live, it's gonna look like LeBron's settling for a jump shot. But when you go back over the film and you look, on that play, Andrew Wiggins is completely ignoring Russ and he's digging down to the elbow, sitting on LeBron's left-handed drive. That allows Kevon Looney to position himself like this on LeBron's right hand. Effectively, if he funnels him to the left, there's Andrew. And if he takes a hard dribble to the right, Kevon's already in position to slide because he's already bought himself an extra step by shading LeBron's right hand. So essentially on that play, if that's Buddy Heald on the left wing and Andrew Wiggins can't dig that far off, now LeBron is driving left right past Kevon Looney into Draymond Green and likely dropping it off to Anthony Davis for a dunk. Or if Klay Thompson helps on Anthony Davis, he's kicking to Kendrick Nunn for a wide open three. Notice how that mismatch is a functional play for the Lakers, if that's a good shooter on the left wing or even a passable shooter on the left wing. But with Russell Westbrook, it's a broken play that leads to a contested pull-up jumper. Again, that's the kind of stuff that's not gonna show up in the box score, but that legitimately is a painful experience that comes with having Russell Westbrook on your team. One of the big downsides of that 25 to four run for the Lakers perspective was just sloppy passing. There was a pick and roll where LeBron rolled and Russ was the ball handler and Russ just literally launched like a fastball at LeBron's head, bounced off of his skull and they went down the other way and Andrew Wiggins got a layup. On the play, Russ didn't even attempt to get back in transition defense as Andrew Wiggins is laying up the ball. There are four Lakers there, including LeBron who was downhill just like Russ was. LeBron got back into the play, Russ didn't even come back into the picture. There was another play where on a broken play, Kendrick Nunn ended up with the ball about 35 feet from the basket and rather than setting up the offense because they had time still, he launched a lob pass that damn near hit the top of the backboard against Russ. That led to another turnover in a basket. I think that one ended in a Steph corner three. Then there was a play, one of those aggressive switches I was talking about with Jordan Poole. LeBron comes off of a, I think it was a dribble handoff or a ball screen. Jordan Poole just aggressively comes up and attacks LeBron with the basketball. He has to pull it back over his head and he just quickly whips a swing pass to Anthony Davis, but it's a sloppy swing pass and it catches Anthony Davis on the short hop and just goes out of bounds. Those turnovers were really damaging to the Lakers, particularly in that run. Golden State scored 27 points in this game off of Laker turnovers, which was a plus 10 advantage in that category. One other note on the Lakers before we get to some good Warrior stuff, LeBron and Russ were doing a lot of overhelping in this run. There was a play early in the third quarter, at the beginning of the run actually, where Klay Thompson was being guarded by Kendrick Nunn and he curled off of a down screen from Andrew Wiggins. And on the play, Kendrick Nunn is chasing Klay and he's applying back pressure. And on that play, if Klay Thompson wants to pull up, it'll be a tough shot because he's gonna be thinking about Kendrick behind him. Kendrick might be able to swipe at the ball from behind. It was defended well, but instead of trusting Kendrick Nunn to make that defensive play, Russ abandoned Andrew Wiggins to help on Klay's curl, even though Kendrick didn't need it and Klay just hit Andrew Wiggins slipping to the basket. Golden State lives on that stuff. Steph, Klay, and Jordan, it's almost one of their first reads when they come off of those curls. They're coming off of that curl and they're looking for the screen defender to step up so that they can hit the guy slipping to the rim. That's so baked into what they do offensively that they're gonna make you pay for that every time. You have to choose to live with Klay Thompson taking back-contested pull-up jumpers over Andrew Wiggins dunking the basketball completely uncontested under the rim. And then there was another play where Andrew Wiggins got switched onto Lonnie Walker, or Lonnie Walker got switched on Andrew Wiggins, they immediately go to a post-up. And again, I don't like that matchup. It's gonna end up in Andrew shooting over the top in all likelihood. But LeBron was guarding Jermichael Green and he was way back in the paint, kind of sitting in the middle waiting for Wiggins to kind of come towards him. Except for Andrew Wiggins is a smart basketball player and he just made a simple swing pass out to Jermichael Green who nailed the three. And look, Jermichael Green's not a perfect basketball player. He's a little bit slow-footed. He's gonna struggle sometimes for the Warriors in specific matchups, but the dude can knock down catch and shoot jump shots. He's been doing that for years. And my thing with that kind of thing, if you're LeBron in that case, you need to just either hard double Andrew or stay home. When you're in no man's land like that, you're not accomplishing anything. Because like I always talk about, you beat double teams with passes that are on time and on target. Andrew Wiggins can throw a simple chess pass to Jermichael Green. He has plenty of time to get the shot off. If LeBron doubles and applies pressure on the basketball, Andrew Wiggins is gonna have to throw some kind of looping pass over LeBron's arms. That buys you time for the Lakers' backside defenders to rotate to Jermichael Green and maybe you take the shot away. That is how you double and recover. Not just sitting back camping into the paint. I thought it was just a lazy defensive play from LeBron. Again, all of these plays I'm mentioning are in that thread that you can find on my Twitter feed. Steph and Jordan Poole in that run were fantastic. Specifically attacking Matt Ryan on switches. A shooter that the Lakers picked up late in training camp or kept after he had a nice burst at the end of training camp. And the kid's a good shooter. He made seven threes I believe in one preseason game but he hasn't been able to make anything much since then. Missed a lot of shots tonight and really struggled on the defensive end of the floor. There was a play where Steph got him on a switch and inexplicably he just gave him like seven feet of space and Steph just pulled up in his face and knocked down like a 28-footer. And then a couple possessions later, Jordan Poole gets him and just beats him with a dribble drive to the right. Actually misses a layup but Anthony Davis has to come over to try to block him. And as a result, I believe Jermichael Green got an offensive rebound put back. Again, benefit of rim pressure. When you drive the basketball to the rim, even when you miss layups, good things happen. But when you've got Steph and Jordan Poole on the court, the two guys that lead the Golden State Warriors in drives and two players that can persistently attack and punish bad perimeter defenders, it just makes it really hard to keep a guy like Matt Ryan out there on the floor. And then James Wiseman finished the run with a really nice finish rolling to the basket on a Jordan Poole pick and roll. And Matt Ryan actually did a nice job defending this one, stepped up and walled up. He's actually got pretty decent size, but Wiseman all game long and really all preseason long has showed great hands and great finishing as a role man. I mean, look, the Warriors looked fantastic. They look deep. Their young players look prepared to take the reins in a lot of ways. So they have some leeway here because it's kind of like the perfect bridge year where Steph, Klay, Draymond, Wiggins, the core group is still good enough to carry you to a title, but these young guys look ready. I thought James Wiseman, now Draymond's a better player and he will be better over the course of the season. But last night, James Wiseman was better in his minutes than Draymond was in his. Jonathan Kaminga's defense on LeBron was really impressive, just sliding his feet and kind of baiting LeBron into playing bully ball. He actually drew an offensive foul at one point, although it did get overturned. And then Jordan Poole, he had a rough shooting night. I think he was like four for 15 or something like that, but he made important plays, big shots, momentum shots. He made a couple of huge threes to put him up 19 to 10 early on. Made that big driving layup play that goes into the box where it's a miss for him, but it effectively is a bucket he scored for Jermichael Green by drawing Anthony Davis and help. And then he had seven assists in this game, which anytime you're getting seven assists off the bench, that's a huge, huge boost. The Lakers might get embarrassed on Thursday. This could get ugly. They absolutely have to make a deal before it's too late. I've talked about this, nine of their first 13 games are against teams that I think are better than the Lakers right now. Even the four games that they have a chance to win, it's like beating Damian Lillard and Gary Payton second and Jeremy Grant's not going to be easy. There's two games against the Pistons in there. Yeah, sounds like the Pistons, but it's the Pistons with Jaden Ivey now and Kay Cunningham. They have a lot of talent on that roster. It's going to be tough games, as night in and night out to start the season. If they don't make a deal, they're going to find themselves so far behind in the standings that it might not even be worth it. And so I hope they feel some urgency. A couple of quick notes on Sixers Celtics on my rewatch. Again, I did about a three and a half minute video you can find on my Twitter feed that's voiced over that kind of goes over a lot of these concepts. The Celtics did a lot more switching than I expected in the Harden and Bede pick and roll, especially with Noah Vonley on the court. This is interesting because they just refused to do that kind of switching against Golden State in the finals. But when they did that, it stagnated the Embiid Harden pick and roll and baited them into a lot of ISO basketball. This stopped Harden from getting downhill as often, which led to that stagnation we were talking about. Also in the video, I talked about Boston mixing up the double teams. Talked about this last night, so I'm not going to talk about it again, but you can see some video evidence of that. I also talked about pre-switching last night. There's a video clip in the video that I did as well there. For Philly, the big thing that stood out to me on tape is their dribble contain was just awful. I put about six clips together of them just giving up straight line drives during that second half run. A couple things, you know, obviously they just need to put in better effort to contain the basketball, but also you can do what Golden State does and what all the good defenses in the league do. Instead of just leaving those guys on an island, dig down hard out of one pass away from the two defenders that are around you. At the very least, you're forcing them to swing the basketball maybe to a lesser ball handler, and you might have a better chance of containing that guy off the dribble. But they were leaving those guys on an island. That's setting them up to fail because they're not quick players that are going to be able to slide their feet well enough. I'd like to see them just kind of dig into those driving lanes more to just make that more difficult. And then their transition D was just awful. Again, there's a half dozen clips in that video that I placed that just show time and time again, a cross-court pass that gets picked off, a post-entry pass that gets picked off. Specifically cross-court passes when they get intercepted are almost always layups. Now, the Celtics led in fast break points 24 to two in this game. That was basically the difference in the game. It's kind of like basketball's version of a pick six because this isn't like, oh, I drove to the basket and I tried to do a drop-off pass to Joel Embiid and it got picked off. They got it. We all ran back on defense and we got to stop. No, no. This is like James Harden rising up for a jumper, thinking he's going to get a foul, realizing he didn't get touched and then just throwing the ball across the court and Derek White grabbing it and running the other way for a layup. It's a lot of that kind of crap. Or Joel Embiid just bringing the ball up in transition and just throwing a lazy skip ahead pass that Jalen Brown just rips away and takes the other way for a layup. Those pick sixes are just killer. And it's just laziness. You just have to be disciplined and smart. Look for a pass fake. Be strong with the basketball. Little basic stuff like that that'll go a long way to setting them up. And then when they did turn the ball over, there was a lot of jogging and just not getting matched up entirely. They're a bad transition defense. They've always been. But man, that's something that they can fix over the course of the season. And then last but not least on the negative side, just navigating screen actions better. I put three plays together there in the fourth quarter where basically the Celtics were just putting Marcus Smart on the right wing and then running kind of like three-man interchanges on the back side. You know, it'd be like Jalen Brown and Jason Tatum setting a screen for, you know, Al Horford setting a screen for Jason Tatum or something along those lines. And they looked like they had no idea what they were doing. There was one where James Harden was just clueless as Jason Tatum just back cut him for a layup. There was another one where P.J. Tucker was chasing Tatum over the top of the screen and got caught on the screen. And on the play, three sixers stepped up to help on the Tatum curl. And it ended up in a wide open Al Horford three-pointer. There was another one where Grant Williams set a pin screen on James Harden when he was a little too far in help. And rather than trying to get on the other side of that screen so he can get out to Jalen Brown the shooter, he just kind of leaned on Grant Williams. And then all of a sudden the pass got thrown and he was like, oh ----, I better get out there too late. Jalen Brown makes the shot. Just really sloppy stuff there. And a lot of that's coaching. A lot of that's Doc Rivers just has to be better. If you're looking for one big positive, if you're a Sixers fan, they didn't shoot well. They were four for 15 on wide open threes in this game, including a lot of looks for good shooters, especially in that second half. Shots that the Sixers will live with and will like their chances if they continue to generate. So if you're looking for upside if you're the Sixers, take care of the basketball, be better in your transition defense and knock down your open shots. That goes a long way towards making this a different outcome. All right guys, that's all I have for today. You guys know the drill. We're going to be going tomorrow morning for tonight's games and then tomorrow night after Lakers Clippers, we're going live and then we'll have another film session on Friday. As always, I sincerely appreciate your guys' support and I will see you tomorrow morning.