Despite living in Toronto, I’ve never been inside the CN Tower. I have, however, been inside the John Hancock Center in Chicago for a tremendous brunch. A super skyscraper of the structural expressionist variety. The Raptors offense wouldn’t typically be referred to as structural. In fact, those who promote it call it a “motion” offense — expressive in its motion? maybe — which could be seen as generous. However, with Nick Nurse away for personal reasons, Adrian Griffin went to a different late game action than the Raptors usually do. My brunch in Chicago? Good eating. Looks like the Raptors found food in the same place.
The Raptors were able to keep the Pistons at bay late in their win because of the ‘Chicago’ action. ‘Chicago’ action is a DHO (dribble hand-off) with a pin-down in-between it. It’s an absolute staple of every single offense in the NBA, and so much so that my pointing it out might make you say something like “something that simple has a name?”. Well, everything has a name in basketball.
It’s not necessarily scripted for Scottie Barnes to cut through/clear out here, so a nice heads up from him to create more space on the wing and muddy some of the Pistons help-side principles by dragging Ivey into the paint, when Siakam clearly wants space to work in the middle. Siakam was 8-10 from the floor in the second half, a decent chunk with his pull-up, so the Raps followed that impulse.
A trend that held from earlier this season? The Raptors halfcourt offense is still really good with Siakam on the court. Almost 13 points better per 100 possessions, which is one of the largest swings for any one player in the NBA. Nice to see them focus on getting him looks late in the game.
Jakob Poeltl is the exciting, new addition to the Raptors. A big man who not only immediately helps them wall off the rim (and defend better in general), but also provides a steady handle to move them between actions and a passing verve that you can trust to make reads in tight spots. In other words, a perfectly suitable hand-off guy late in games. A lot of times the Raptors will opt to run their ghost series for Pascal Siakam & Fred VanVleet to manipulate mismatches, downhill penetration, and VanVleet’s shooting late in games, but they opted to include Poeltl here for the aforementioned reasons – not to mention some friendship synergy between he and Pascal.
In the first clip you saw the Pistons avoided switching any of their three guys in the action. Siakam found his space and scored, but the reason they didn’t switch? Because of what happened one play before:
Hamidou Diallo wants to play goalie in the lane, probably because he remembers Siakam beating Stewart in space earlier in the game. The solution? Find the open shooter. Bang. Bucket. Great shot prep from VanVleet here, too.
When they ran it with the trio of Siakam-VanVleet-Poeltl they scored 7 points in pretty quick succession. However, Poeltl fouled out with three (!!) quick fouls — the first time he’s fouled out this season — down the stretch. Where do they go from here?
Well, they flipped the play and moved some pieces around. Initially, they stacked the strong-side with 4 players. Thaddeus Young as the trigger man (after checking in for Poeltl), VanVleet as the pin-down screen setter, Siakam coming to grab the ball, and this time they brought Precious Achiuwa into the strong-side corner – I would assume they did that so Siakam could run an empty-side action with Barnes if he took it wide out of the action. Regardless, he flipped the ball back to VanVleet for a pick n’ roll, where he eventually missed a shot at the rim.
So, they scrap that. Exclude Siakam from the action entirely, and keep him on the weak-side. Why? Well, empty-sides usually mean doubles have to come from farther away and they’re easier for players to see and make decisions against. In some cases, you’ll just get a guy on an island – which Siakam loves. Anyway, Barnes came out of the corner, and gave it up to Young to move onto Siakam’s empty-side possession and this is how that looked:
This one is too easy, quite honestly. In an empty-side, Alec Burks tries to jump a DHO with a really good trigger man in Young, and a very gifted mover in Siakam. Over-pursued the ball way too hard here, and gives up a lane to the bucket with no help to come and cover Siakam’s left hand attempt. You should make these ones Pascal, but you know that. It’s also nice that a little bit of meandering motion from Barnes-Achiuwa-VanVleet completely occupied everyone on the Pistons in help-side.
The Raptors also ran Horns Chin a couple times to try and introduce mismatches onto Siakam in the post — the chin screen gets switched a lot because it’s downhill and towards the basket — but, we’ll talk about that another day. The key point is this: if the Raptors want to be able to close games out (and they hardly managed in this one) they need a wide variety of things to go to, and Poeltl making them more confident in this particular one? That’s good. I’ll keep looking out for additional wrinkles that come along with Poeltl’s game. Not necessarily new packages, because this one isn’t, but different usage is notable as well.
Have a blessed day.
