Brad Stevens' Read-and-React Offense

This is an excerpt from SI's Ian Thomsen article.   The title of the thread and gist was borrowed from celticsblog.




http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nba/news/20131220/detroit-pistons-andre-drummond-kobe-bryant-lebron-james-brad-stevens/index.html#all




Jared Wickerham
Doc Rivers had one way of doing things on offense. Brad Stevens has a different approach.


An NBA advance scout on the Celtics and rookie coach Brad Stevens:
"They play hard and they play the way they have to with their people. There are no real post-up players on that team, and not looking to put it in the post and gives them more freedom. So it's a lot of ball movement, attacking with the dribble, pick and roll and dribble-handoffs.

"Jordan Crawford is decent at pushing it in transition. He's not really making plays as a traditional point guard; the plays he's making are in transition when the defense isn't set. There are a lot of drag screens in transition where he can attack on the dribble, and he has the green light to shoot.

"If you watch it really closely, you can see times in the game where Stevens is asking questions of the referee which are obvious to me -- which tells me he's still learning the NBA game as he's going. He's not making a fool of himself, but you can see him inquiring about different rules. But he's got a great demeanor and guys play hard for him - they don't question him and they're not disrespectful of him.

"I haven't seen him go off on the referees at all. There have been a couple of instances where he's been pretty calm even though it was a bad call against him, and the referees I talk to respect him -- they think he's good for the league.

"The sets they run are more read-and-react type things than the normal execution of go from point A to B and then go on with this. He's got terminology of actions. But he's not going to play the two-man game or three-man game to see what the defense is going to give him. Instead he'll run an action and leave it to his players to read the defense.

"That has made it difficult to get a handle on what he's doing, because he might get three different things on three possessions all on the same play call. What they ran the first time with that terminology isn't going to be the same thing they run the second time he makes that call.

"I don't think that style has as much to do with the players he has; I think that's who he is and how he wants to play. He must be explaining himself well because the players aren't questioning. Nobody's pulling their hair out because he didn't do what he was told to do; both the coach and his players are working with it. The players are understanding what he's trying to accomplish, and he's understanding what the players are able to get out of it.

"The main thing he wants is to push the ball up the floor and score in transition, and they do get a lot of that because their defense is good, they play hard, they do some trapping and they're pretty athletic. It's important to their offense that they pass the ball ahead on the break.

"When Rajon Rondo comes back, my question is going to be whether he'll push it up the floor and pass the ball ahead. Because we know he's going to want to get his assists."




bob
MY NOTE:  One of my beefs with Crawford is that he doesn't push the ball enough and we need to run run run.  If his strength is transition, then he has to to do better than an easy jog up court with the ball.  Personally, I don't see what this scout says he's seeing, I see Crawford excelling in the half court, not fast break or transition.  This might help to explain why I'm not a pro scout. On transition baskets I'd rather have the ball in Wallace's or Green's hands than Crawford's.  They bring it up faster and Green will break down the defense when he gets to the 3 point line better. Let Crawford trail the break and get the ball back at the 3pt line for a shot or reset and run the half court offense.  A blogger at celticsblog pointed out that Red Auerbach used to run an offense with only 6 plays and let the players run several options off of any of them.  He'd keep running the same play all game long, daring the other team to stop it.  Perhaps Sam or someone else can confirm that.  That sounds a lot like what this scout is saying Stevens is doing, running a few plays and letting the players option off them. Running, ball movement, fewer plays with more options off them. Everything old is new again.


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Auerbach did have a limited playbook, but with these caveats:

• The "plays" were more like "sets." People think of a play as one thing with a couple of options. Sets start out a certain way and can have dozens of options, where each option or group of options could be considered a play.

• Auerbach knew he had superior talent at every position in almost every instance and superior chemistry in every instance. That makes running fewer plays possible because the opponent can't overcome the superiority in talent and chemistry. It's like Lombardi's power sweep with the Packers -- everyone knew it was coming, and no one could stop it.

• Play number 1 was to run the ball. A basic tenet of my "career" coaching kids was to get out and run. It's fun, it's infectious, it can be demoralizing to the other team, and above all, it means you rely less on running set plays, which kids do not generally excel at.

• Ah, those days of yesteryear, when men were men and defense was man to man and you fought through a screen or yelled "switch" (or "Russ"). Defenses are far, far more complex today, with rotations and assignments that take away the easy stuff and force offenses to become more complex in return. Defenses also fall back by default to prevent fast breaks. Auerbach's running game and limited playbook would be less effective today. (He'd adapt just fine, but he couldn't use now what he used then.)

One other thing -- the description of Stevens' offense as "read and react" brought to mind the triangle offense, because that's essentially what it does. I don't know the Celtics offense, but it would be interesting to see if it has similarities to the triangle.

Bob, I believe it was 7 plays.  At one point during the Tyranny, I recall estimating that, with the various options (more on some plays than on others), they had as many as 20-30 play/option alternatives.  What made it work more than raw talent (which certainly didn't hurt) was an extension of Russell Rule# 9: Imagination, or Seeing the Unseeable.

At one point, Russ writes, "We as Celtics supported each other, watched each other, incorporated into our imaginations the thinking, the practices of others.  We were able to visualize for each other."  The fact is that those teams had a collective thought process that, in turn, led to collective instincts.

Brad's read and react approach implies to me that there's a sequence of synapses occurring in players' minds: read, think, select option; react.  The Russell Celtics short-cut this process by operating almost totally from instinct and bypassing the conscious "think" and "select option" elements.

But that wasn't the amazing part.  The amazing part was that it was a collective instinct, without any signals or winks of the eye being needed.  A situation would arise—let's say thwarting one option—and they'd immediately segue into another of several possible options instinctively, with every one of them on the same page because they knew one another so well and had such a great group feel for what worked in what circumstances. 

Combine that with their volume approach in which they tended to go through the first option early in the shot clock, and they were seldom left with time running out and a hero shot required.

I think Brad's read and react approach has real merit.  The degree to which it will be optimally successful will depend very largely on how well-developed the shared instincts of the players will become over time.  I think of it as a post-graduate course in chemistry.

Sam