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Quick little thread on something to watch for on Denver's P&R... not every one, but a lot of them are looking a certain way, and it's because Denver knows what the Jazz are trying to do defensively. 1/
Look at this still from a late P&R last night. Murray & Jokic at the top, and the three other Nuggets are all within 6 feet of each other in the ball side corner. On the surface, you see that and go, "omg, horrible spacing." 2/
Thing is, Denver knows that the Jazz really want to play the P&R without extra help. Most teams bring helpers to tag the roller, but when you have the DPOY who is elite at containing the ball and then getting back to the roll man, you get the luxury of guarding this 2-on-2. 3/
That would frustrate some teams' plans. But Mike Malone just says "screw it" and leans into it. OK, he says, you wanna play 2-on-2, let's just clear the floor out and play 2-on-2. Here's the whole play.
A lot of teams will empty the weak side so that there's no place for the help to come from. Here, Denver knows the Jazz are trying to guard this without bringing help, but they empty the weak side anyway. 5/
What I wonder is: if Den is going to be this brazen about it, maybe an option for Utah to consider, just on plays where the floor looks like this, is to let one of those 3 defenders in the strong corner roam. You're never supposed to really dig in from the strong corner, but 6/
...two guys could easily cover the poorly-spaced trio there long enough for someone to freestyle a little soft ball trap and then recover. It's an option. Although here, I think the contain defense actually works perfectly until Murray gets Royce to bite on the upfake. 7/
Here's another from earlier in the game. They like letting Jokic roll into an empty side of the floor. That means Murray has to drive into a crowd, but this is a configuration they like a lot. Again, nobody to tag Jokic on the roll, but that's not what Utah was doing anyway. 8/
Again, a lot of their P&Rs had a more traditional floor balance look to them. But they did this a lot, too, to give their first-team All-NBA center a lot of room to work with. 9/end
