There are two constants in the theoretical foundation of modern basketball: evolution and mimicry. A team will evolve to exploit a market inefficiency or analytic finding and find success, others teams will mimic that shift with varying degrees of success, a new paradigm will calcify, another team will evolve to exploit the new market inefficiency or a new analytic finding. The process is cyclical.
Hero Ball 2.0: How the NBA Playoffs has revived isolation basketball
What’s old is new again in the NBA.
Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports
And sometimes, the process is more than cyclical: it’s totally circular.
That’s the case with the current Revenge of Hero Ball we’re witnessing in the 2018 NBA Playoffs. All four teams still alive in the NBA playoffs are resorting to isolation-heavy offense much more than what we’d seen in recent years.
Here’s the funny part: you can trace this back to the recent three-point explosion kickstarted by Mike D’Antoni with the Suns in the 2000s, juiced by the Warriors of the mid-2010s, and stretched to its logical conclusion by D’Antoni with the Rockets today.
A byproduct of the three-pointer revolution that made Stephen Curry a two-time MVP and James Harden one of the most potent scorers ever was, for a time, a sport with more flow, passing, and movement as teams prioritized space and rhythm. Instead, all that is dying a quick and brutal death in the crunch time of the 2018 season. This is classic evolution and mimicry.
How?
Start with the three-point revolution, which had been a slow, ongoing burn for decades until the Warriors stormed the proverbial Bastille in 2015.
While teams like the Rockets had been purposefully increasing their share of shots that came from long-range, Golden State winning the title on the backs of shooters convinced most other teams to buy in.
And buy in they did. So almost the entire league (everyone say hi to weird ol’ Memphis!) started taking a ridiculous number of threes.
The Warriors are credited with the subsequent shift to smallball with their infamous Death Lineup of that 2015-16 era, leaving all traditional centers on the bench and thereby making traditional centers unplayable against stretched-out, shooter-packed offenses. But there was a related exploit perhaps more important than smallball: the switch-everything defense. This has been around for a while, but it was made truly famous by Ty Lue’s Cavaliers in the 2016 Finals.
The switch-everything defense requires playing a small lineup or a highly mobile big man. Cleveland had Tristan Thompson, and didn’t fear letting him switch onto players like Curry. (One wonders how much the fact that Curry cooked everyone you stuck on him factored into this. If he turns Thompson into a statue and scores, is it any worse than if he’d down the same to Kyrie Irving or J.R. Smith?)
The switch-everything defense is meant to close air space between defenders and shooters, and eliminate that dreaded age-old pick-and-roll defense equation — go under or over the screen? — from the calculus. In theory, switching means fewer open threes off the pick-and-roll, which minimizes the need for help, which minimizes open catch-and-shoot threes off the swing pass. Switching is the solution for the problem of open air space for shooters unafraid to take any open shot.
Because the three-point revolution has been so complete (even Memphis takes threes now!), the switch-everything defense has become more widely used. The Rockets, the true vanguard of modern basketball evolution, have adopted the practice most stridently. But all four teams still alive — the Rockets, Warriors, Cavaliers, and Celtics — switch a ton. It’s common practice now.
Of course, switching everything opens up a new exploit: the mismatch.
This is where we find ourselves now. The Rockets have played an isolation-heavy style all year because they have two of the best playmakers in league history. But because of the reliance on switching, every offense has mismatches to exploit ... and they are exploiting them.
The Cavaliers are constantly trying to get Terry Rozier (who is comparatively small) or Aron Baynes (who is comparatively slow) switched onto LeBron James. The Warriors are constantly working to get Harden (who is a fine size but is just a lackluster defender) switched onto Curry or Kevin Durant, or Chris Paul (a great defender but small) switched onto Durant. The Celtics are trying to get Kevin Love switched out to small, quicker guards. The Rockets, of course, are bringing Curry into on-ball defense as frequently as possible.
When you switch everything on defense, you can’t hide anyone anywhere. Everyone is now exploiting that by abandoning their rhythm-focused offenses for a grip of isolation work.
That’s why hero ball is back in our lives every single night. It’s as if Kobe Bryant never left.
There have been some reactions to the reactions. The Celtics do this funky thing where, after switching on the perimeter, defenders switch back onto more natural marks while a post entry pass is made. (ESPN’s Zach Lowe coined this the “scram switch”). But that doesn’t work when the player with the mismatch doesn’t post up, and it looks incredibly tricky to pull off.
Teams have also denied switches here and there, though that often leads to confusion: communication in the throes of elite competition is difficult and one blink of confusion means points on the board at this level.
Eventually, should this keep up, there will be a major reaction to this new paradigm, like a new defensive strategy less reliant on switches. And like clockwork, teams will adopt whatever successful evolution takes root, and then another exploit will be found, and so on.
Something tells me that no matter where the sport goes next, though, we’ll end up back in the loving embrace of hero ball again. In an ever-changing league, it would appear to be the only style we can rely on to survive everything that succeeds it.
