Okay, so… now what?
The Milwaukee Bucks and Phoenix Suns met in the NBA Finals last season, and each roster had high hopes of returning this June. Instead, both lost the seventh game on Sunday and go into the offseason with some structural issues.
In a way, this is normal. The reality of the NBA is that almost every team sees their season ending at least slightly disappointing and with their weaknesses blatantly exposed. While this has tiers, the reality is that four teams have ended their seasons in the past few days after very strong seasons; 20 other teams long to have their problems.
Unfortunately, “let’s rewind it and lose again in round two” isn’t much of a rallying cry. As the teams get better, the stakes get higher; Win a championship (like Milwaukee) and the goal instantly repeats. Winning just 50 and losing a tough streak against another top contender feels like a failure.
So let’s not overreact to what happened. The Bucks still have Giannis Antetokounmpo, and the Suns still have Devin Booker, Chris Paul and (we think) Deandre Ayton. You will be back.
However, underlying the failings of the 2022 postseason is a potential flaw that was common to both teams: They couldn’t handle spread lineups. This isn’t so much a “little ball” as it is a “space ball.”
Space Ball is what happens when it’s not about the size of the players on the court, it’s about where they stand. That’s what happens when the Mavericks sideline five capable 3-point shooters, leaving Rudy Gobert and Ayton in no man’s land, or when the Bucks’ defensive ethos of protecting the rim first leads them to challenge Grant Williams, basically, them to eliminate .
It’s the latest evolution in a tactical postseason game that’s evolving at a dizzying pace: put five players on the sidelines, switch everything to defense, go head-to-head against a defense that can’t easily send help, and indulge in either Open 3s or come to the rim. Forget pick and roll, this is more like pick and run. Space ball teams might put up a screen to get a switch, but the endgame is isolation for the dribbler after the screener gets out of dodge and moves along the 3-point line.
While other coaches have likely tried this at some point, the real turning point for space ball came a year ago on the Clippers jazz series. LA coach Tyronn Lue used it to neutralize Gobert in a streak that has left the Clippers without superstar forward Kawhi Leonard and had an excess of guard talent. It worked so well that they came back in Game 6 of 25 to stun the Jazz and win the series.
It’s an advancement that takes a step beyond the Golden State Warriors’ infamous small-ball “death lineup,” as it relies on five mostly-reversible players who take out opponent’s 3-pointers while simultaneously using countless drive-and-balls of their own. Create kick opportunities. The Warriors’ grouping worked because they had the best 3-point shooter in history; In contrast, Space Ball works because the 3-point threat is spread across the entire lineup.
Just look at the massive 3-point differences in the first two rounds. Dallas and Boston are respectively first and second in playoff 3-point frequency and second and third in opposing 3-point boundaries. For the entire postseason, Dallas requires 12.9 3 seconds per 100 possessions more than the opposition and Boston 11.0.
Over the course of a series, it created an impossible math problem. Utah was in six games against Dallas with 72 tries and 44 makes out-3 after leading the league by 3-point streaks in the regular season. The Mavs’ lead in the same category was 83 tries and 33 makes in seven games against Phoenix. Meanwhile, Boston nearly doubled Milwaukee to triples in seven games in the east in the second round, 110 to 57.
Phoenix, Milwaukee and Utah all tripped over themselves trying to handle the space ball with traditional fives. In contrast, it might have looked odd when the Nets played against three small guards in the first round against Boston and were swept for their efforts. The core of the truth in Brooklyn’s odd lineup, however, was that it had to face Boston’s space-ball pairings and was running out of big forwards.
Milwaukee tried to make it big against Boston and it went well for five games — the Bucks had a lot of rim protection and they had Giannis to carry offense. Ditto for Phoenix, who held a 3-2 lead in the series and hoped to tire Dallas star Luka Dončić. Instead, the Suns lost the last two games by 60 points. The longer the streak went on, the more Boston and Dallas expressed their advantage with space ball.
The individual data further underscores these trends. The Bucks were topped at 19.2 points per 100 possessions with Brook Lopez on court in the Boston Series, giving up a staggering 47.1 3-point attempts per 100 possessions in his minutes. Meanwhile, in Maxi Kleber’s playoff minutes, Dallas is averaging 46.9 triples per 100 versus just 28.1 allowed.
I’m, of course, overly reductive about the 3’s; Both Dallas and Boston have outstanding individual talents in Dončić and Jayson Tatum to center their attacks. The Mavs and Celtics also played great individual defense on Sunday and during the playoffs and that was a big factor in their wins.
But here’s the thing: Your space ball lineups made a lot of that possible. Playing this way allowed both teams to keep multiple elite 3-and-D wings on the ground, switch everything, and not leave vulnerable true fives lying around for opposing pick-and-rolls. Kleber, who I scouted as a small forward in Germany five years ago (where he happened to have a teammate named Devin Booker), played most minutes at center that series against a 7-footer who was the top pick in the 2018 draft and against the giant Gobert in the preliminary round.
What happened to the Bucks and Suns on Sunday appears to have important implications for how teams build their rosters going forward.
Now you thought centers were dinosaurs? just wait Gobert has been one of the league’s most valuable players in recent regular seasons, but the Mavs’ space-ball approach, similar to that of the Clippers a year earlier, rendered him irrelevant. It wasn’t that he sucked; it was that he was no longer able to make up for the carnage at the border. The Mavs beat Utah twice, even without Dončić, using this approach.
Ayton met a similar fate to his backup JaVale McGee in the conference semifinals. Ironically, a Phoenix team that lost in the NBA Finals a year ago because they didn’t have enough quality size lost this year because they lacked the perimeter groupings to compete against Space Ball. The Suns’ only good player between 6-foot-7 and 6-foot-11 was Cameron Johnson; When they tried to go small without one of their traditional centers, they ended up being too small. (For the second straight postseason, it might have helped to have Dario Saric.)
Boston, meanwhile, ruthlessly exposed the Bucks’ limits against Space Ball, starting with Al Horford’s 30-point breakout in Game 4. Horford was so effective at standing on the sidelines and waiting for Lopez to walk away that the Bucks guarded Lopez instead Grant Williams for Game 7. He and Derrick White were awarded as many open 3s as they could handle, the Celtics took an absurd 55 and the Bucks were toasted.
Grant Williams. (Winslow Townson / USA today)
What made this difficult for opponents was that space ball turned out not to be a bad defensive strategy either, especially if you have the right forwards. A converted collegiate center, Williams defends the interior much better than its 6ft 6 height would suggest, with the help of a barrel chest and tremendous lower body strength. Horford is tall enough to stand up to Giannis – a player he’s always defended well – or even the deceptively tall Lopez.
So what does this mean for Milwaukee and Phoenix? Do they just dare to go back and hope to play better next year? Or has this postseason uncovered a more significant gap in their rosters?
Neither team is well equipped to play or defend post-season space ball. Milwaukee’s best way of dealing with it is to play Giannis at five and keep both Bobby Portis and Lopez on the pine, but the Bucks didn’t have enough high-quality perimeter talent to trust lineups like that for long. (Having Kris Middleton would have helped, of course.)
Contrast this to a year ago: Without their own go-to space ball forward in PJ Tucker, Milwaukee in particular didn’t have the right perimeter talent. Tucker will now take part in the conference finals against Boston as part of a more space ball-friendly squad in Miami that may see him in stints at center when Bam Adebayo is off the floor.
The other problem with Space Ball is that it forces you to have five good perimeter players, not just two or three, and therefore pushes your depth to the limit – something that doesn’t typically happen often in the playoffs. The Bucks eventually relied on George Hill and Grayson Allen and paid for it. Phoenix attempted to dust off Torrey Craig in Game 7 to disastrous effect.
So we’re in the offseason. Ayton is up for a new contract as a restricted free agent in Phoenix. Meanwhile, Lopez is perhaps the Bucks’ most tradable piece if they look to add more space ball players to a roster with limited cap flexibility. The Bucks and Suns reached the Finals this way just a year ago and are fairly firmly attached to their current groups, but it already seems that without some changes they will be at a tactical disadvantage in future postseasons.
It could also dictate movements in other places. For example, if you’re Memphis, playing playoff space ball with Jaren Jackson Jr. at five years old will make you feel a lot better than putting a traditional center next to him. When you’re Brooklyn, it feels like folly to give it back with Andre Drummond and LaMarcus Aldridge. What the Nets need is their own version of Tucker, Kleber or Williams.
Finally, with the entire league heading to Chicago for the NBA Draft Combine this week, one wonders what this might mean for space-ball type forwards in the draft. Players like Colorado State’s David Roddy or Ohio State’s EJ Lidell might look like minor picks in some respects, but could be of great use as space ball forwards.
Of course, the narrative on this trend could still shift gears depending on what happens in the next two rounds. For now, however, it seems worth noting that last year’s finalists were eliminated this weekend largely because of a tactical style they were unable to match. Space Ball is the biggest story of the 2022 post-season and could become the story of the 2022 off-season as well.
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(Top photo of Luka Doncic and Deandre Ayton: Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports)