Film Study: On Anthony Davis' dominance, Al Horford's rough night and Greg Monroe's defensive woes

https://celticswire.usatoday.com/2018/03/18/film-study-on-anthony-davis-dominance-al-horfords-rough-night-and-greg-monroes-defensive-woes/




Film Study: On Anthony Davis' dominance, Al Horford's rough night and Greg Monroe's defensive woes










By: Jared Weiss | 17 hours ago



Down a few key rotation players, the Boston Celtics had a slew of defensive miscues that buried them in their loss to Anthony Davis and the New Orleans Pelicans. Breaking down how he picked apart Al Horford while the Pelicans targeted Greg Monroe.
There was a certain point in Sunday’s 108-89 win over the Boston Celtics where the New Orleans Pelicans realized Anthony Davis was going to do whatever he wanted.

That’s not a rare occurrence for a team who is riding the wave of a historic few months from the Brow, but it meant something against Boston. Rajon Rondo called them the best defensive team in the NBA, after all.

But by the time the final buzzer blew, Boston had their third worst offensive rating of the season at 89.9 per Cleaning the Glass, making every blown switch a dagger through the core. They’re now 13-13 since the midway point of the season and are struggling to show consistency through injury.

“A lot of games shots aren’t gonna fall, but we still have to show effort,” Terry Rozier told reporters in New Orleans. “We didn’t show that.”

But it wasn’t all just poor effort. New Orleans had a tremendous gameplan that could either punish Boston for being too short or too slow. Whenever Boston switched on a Davis screen, it led to a length mismatch which New Orleans was able to exploit time and time again. Even when Boston would defend flex actions well, with Horford trying to straddle off the screen to not lose sight of Davis, the Pelicans found a way.

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“I just think that he was able to get behind our defense a lot,” Horford told reporters in New Orleans after the game. “The post-ups, those were tough shots, but he got behind our defense a lot and some mistakes on my end. We gotta give him credit, he dominated tonight. I’ll definitely take the blame for that.”

Boston did their best to avoid switching when Horford was on Davis, but it wasn’t always possible. Ironically, injuries have flipped the script for Boston where they are going big most of the time now. They’re usually a two or three guard team, but in New Orleans, they had plenty of length. But length under 6’10” doesn’t appear to affect Davis anyway, so they didn’t have a better answer on him than Horford or the occasional double team.

Because they were in big lineups, they could choose which Celtics bigs they wanted near the hoop. Boston had poor defensive communication across the board Sunday, with Greg Monroe getting lost most of the time

Horford struggled with Davis, who is just about the only player in the league with the length and athleticism to get around and over him. While Davis is able to break into plenty of low and high-post moves to get around Horford, his most impressive ability is to read leverage off the ball.

Ironically, Boston’s lack of length was supposedly partially cured when they signed 6’11” Greg Monroe midseason. But Sunday’s loss held a bright light up to Monroe’s defensive weaknesses and New Orleans executed a gameplan that successfully exposed them.

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This was a good tone-setter early in the game, where Davis posted up Horford out toward the elbow. With Rondo watching Davis establish position from the top of the key, a veteran Celtics observer could see what was coming next. Right when it looked like Davis was establishing post position and knew that Horford would lean in to gain leverage for the entry pass and try to hold him out high, Davis spun int he blink of an eye.

The brilliance of the play is that it’s triggered by a simple turn of the head by Rajon Rondo. Greg Monroe, who is engaging Emeka Okafor on the weak-side baseline, is watching Rondo’s eyes to figure out if he needs to rotate over to double the lane for Davis or prepare for a strong-side action. When Rondo looks to the strong side, Monroe turns his gaze away from Davis. As soon as Davis sees Rondo turn his head, he makes his move. By the time Monroe looks back, Rondo is making the alley-oop pass to Davis and Monroe is too slow to rotate over and contest.

“This group brought a different challenge and I just think in transition, we were a little off balance and they did a good job of pushing the pace and we weren’t getting matched up quick enough,” Horford said. “And then for whatever reason, we ha slippage communicating on the defensive end. They made us pay.

It wasn’t just Monroe. Although Abdel Nader has been with the team all year, the lack of game reps shows up on occasion when he struggles with defensive communication. New Orleans put him in some side pick-and-roll actions, where the rim run is so close to the hoop that a switch is the only way to prevent a free roll.

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When Jayson Tatum called for a switch and Nader missed it, it was up to Aron Baynes to straddle the corner shooter while filling the lane. But Baynes stepped toward the shooter just at the worst moment and the weak-side tag defender, Semi Ojeleye, was playing with his back to the ball. It’s a positive to see that Tatum is able to call out the defensive assignments with the vets out. But both Nader and Baynes were lost on this play, leaving Baynes in a compromised position.

“We missed a ton of switches,” Brad Stevens told reporters after the game.

“We missed a ton of things that we have to control, so that that’s not a twenty point game, it’s an eight-point game and we have a chance to win it at the end. It’s easy to point to one or two plays, but there were a number of them tonight.”

Moose was victimized plenty by these actions. He doesn’t have a feel for the elbow switches yet, so he gets left ball-watching too often while the guy he is supposed to be switching on to is enjoying a free roll to the basket like Nikola Mirotic in the first video below. On ballscreens, he defends on the balls of his feet, unable to get up when he needs to or drop down when the roll man gets by like in this second video.

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But it wasn’t until the fourth when the defense really fell apart. New Orleans’ two main objectives were to either get Greg Monroe on an island against a guard or to post up Shane Larkin. Boston’s weak side switches constantly left them vulnerable to one or the other, with the Celtics being unwilling for some reason to reset the switch when the ball was out of Rajon Rondo’s hands.

This led to some easy shots for New Orleans to use their speed against Monroe, with nobody trapping the box to stuff the drive. On this Rondo drive, everyone on the strong side stays home on the shooters while Marcus Morris is leveraged out of position to contain the drive.

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New Orleans established they could draw Boston’s bigs out a few plays earlier when they got the weak-side switch to move Larkin from Rondo to Mirotic. The right defensive decision here would be for Ojeleye to call a switch back so he can go down to Mirotic on the block. Even if that means leaving Rondo open for a couple seconds, Rondo is not much of a spot-up threat. But Ojeleye is focused on containing the high pick-and-roll and Larkin gets left alone underneath. Easy conversion for Mirotic.

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“I didn’t think our team did a very good job on him,” Stevens said of Mirotic. “They put us in a tough spot where, obviously, part of our depth right now is in the, is with real bigs, is with guys that most night would play fives for us. So we’re playing two fives together some against teams that make it difficult to do that. But I think that Mirotic was tough for everybody.”

After the five minute mark in the third quarter, the Pelicans shot 13-for-2 to the Celtics’ 10-for-31. They outscored Boston in that timeframe 39-26 as Davis led the charge.

“They saw a lot of mismatches that they liked and they moved the ball a lot,” Rozier said. “Anthony Davis is a tough cover and they pushed the ball every chance they get. Our effort just has to get better.”

The personnel was clearly an issue, but the lack of active communication buried them far more than the supposed fit. The Celtics always refuse to make excuses about injuries limiting their capability, but Rozier made it clear that they’re not even going to worry about it behind closed doors.

“That’s something I’m not even thinking about no more. We’re not trying to make excuses for that. That’s something we don’t even address no more. We just go out and go to war with who we’ve got.”

“We gotta make the best of it and it just can’t happen like how it did tonight.”

The good news about the war of the NBA season is that it takes 82 battles to determine who you are in the playoffs. Boston can walk away from this one with a big battle scar, but turn things around Tuesday against Oklahoma City. If their defensive cohesiveness is as sloppy then as it was Sunday, they may appear a few cuts short of a thousand on their way to a premature end.




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