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Tag Archive - Big Baby

NBA Finals: Celtics Need To Attack The Lakers Bigs With Rabies

June 13, 2010 in by with 0 Comments

“You should attack their big man like you’re trying to give him rabies.”

Earlier in our season (did you forget I coach JV high school basketball?), we faced a team that built their offense and defense around one of the lankiest 15-year olds you could ever see. He wasn’t abnormally tall by any means. He was about 6’3”, which is sort of incredibly tall for a 15-year old, but it’s not like he was Manute Bol out there. For the sake of the story and keeping anonymity, we’ll call this player Seal.

We’re going to call him Seal for a couple of reasons. First, he sort of looked like Seal without all of that facial scarring. Second, it gives me a tangential opening to mention that I was in Chicago last weekend and in Chicago I got to sing Kiss From A Rose with Trey Kerby while driving around. It was pretty great.

Anyway, Seal was a very sound, fundamental defender against our team. His arm length was almost cartoonish and he used it to perfectly defend a lot of shots coming into the painted area. He rarely went for the pump fakes, he kept his arms high in the air to intimidate our players and he timed every passive aggressive shot taken around him perfectly. He blocked at least nine shots in the first half of the game, as our guys were scared to challenge him.

And he wasn’t just protecting the rim well either. He kept the ball high on offense and put it up only when the shot was there. He also controlled the boards against our guys. It sounds simple but he just jumped as high as he could and secured the ball. He didn’t tap it all over the place before grabbing it. He just grabbed it.

At halftime, we ripped into our guys for being afraid of Seal. Our big men were better than him and we all knew it. They were just playing scared. And by being scared of his length and shot-blocking ability, they allowed him to dictate everything inside. I told our team the same quote that sits atop this post. Attack Seal like you’re trying to give him rabies. Be the more aggressive dog in the fight. It actually took the smallest player on our team to turn things around.

He gave up more than a foot in height to Seal but he had no fear. He went right at Seal on the first couple possessions of the second half and perfectly used his floater to protect shots. He jumped into him to create contact and knock him back a little. He gave Seal a different look than what he had seen all game long – aggressiveness. This aggressiveness not only showed the team that getting your shot blocked was nothing to be afraid of, it also got Seal out of position inside. All of a sudden we were grabbing rebounds and getting putbacks inside. Seal had to reach over our players to protect his rim and he was getting into foul trouble the other team couldn’t afford to have him in.

By the end of the game, Seal was on the bench with about 16 blocked shots and five fouls. He fouled out because we attacked him with purpose. We ended up dominating the boards in the second half because we didn’t allow him to control everything. It was an easy win with a good lesson to our guys that they shouldn’t let the other team’s big man control the interior.

When I look at this Celtics-Lakers Finals so far, the overall message rings true throughout. Now there are a couple of differences. I don’t think the Celtics are afraid of the length inside. The Celtics are a big team on their own. KG, Perk, Sheed and Big Baby provide a formidable frontline. The problem is the size of the Lakers frontcourt with Gasol and Bynum can completely neutralize that. Also, there is no Dikembe Mutombo or Mark Eaton (what up, Devine?) protecting the basket. But the Lakers have still done a pretty incredible job of protecting the basket. They’ve blocked 31 shots in the first four games of this series with 28 of them coming in the first three games.

The Lakers length presents a problem that the Celtics can fix in three ways and it’s all about Boston being aggressive in the way they do things.

1) Don’t Be Afraid to Attack the Basket
I don’t know that I’d say the Celtics were afraid to attack the basket in the first three games. They were blocked 28 times and actually won the points in the paint battle 116-112. But whenever Gasol and Bynum are in there together, there seems to be a bit of trepidation. Part of that could be the good team defense the Lakers are playing. With the way they’re helping, it’s easy to think twice about attacking and if you’re hesitating then it’s going to kill a lot of advantages.

This biggest way to fix this is to find ways to get Rajon Rondo to the basket without a lot of long limbs challenging his layups. Big Baby was great in Game Four in the way he smothered the interior. But that can be defended pretty easily with better effort and positioning by the Lakers bigs. Also, Lamar Odom pretending he cares would also be a great way to combat Davis. The more important thing is getting Rondo into the paint with good opportunities to score. Assuming the Lakers can’t block his shot so easily (six times in the first three games), even if Rondo misses the Celtics should be in a great position to grab the offensive boards and get good putback opportunities.

2) Grab the freaking ball!
Kevin Garnett used to be THE standard for NBA rebounding. During his days in Minnesota (chest pains for me right now), he had to do it all and a lot of the Wolves rebounding advantages were because of KG’s insistence on owning the boards. Since he’s been in Boston, the Celtics have been a good enough team to not need so much effort out of him. He’s able to concentrate on defense first, defense second and everything else third. Perhaps that lack of need for his boarding has turned him into a slightly above average rebounder instead of the all-world specimen he used to be. I’m sure the ravaging his knee took over the course of a couple of years hasn’t helped either.

KG used to be so great at tipping the boards to himself because he’s always been longer and more athletic than his opponents. He was able to tip the ball until it was safe to just grab it so he could fire a good outlet pass to his guards. With the declining athleticism and the great length of the holy Bynum-Gasol-Odom triumvirate, Garnett and the rest of the Celtics no longer have that luxury. When KG taps the ball to himself, Gasol and Odom have the length and the athleticism to match him or overwhelm him on the boards. They’re able to steal a lot of 50/50 balls because it’s still up for grabs. When Big Baby was dominating the offensive glass in Game Four, he just went after the ball and snatched it out of the air. He didn’t play badminton with it.

Kevin Garnett’s rebounding is really important to the Celtics success. They need to win two out of the next three games for banner number 18. That’s a 66.7 win percentage needed. Well, it’s no coincidence that since Garnett has joined the Celtics in 2007, they’re winning 69.8% of their games (including playoffs) when KG grabs nine rebounds or more in a game. He has to simply go grab the basketball.

Tipping the ball to yourself probably works against Boris Diaw, Kenny Thomas and Amare Stoudemire. But against the length of the Lakers and thieves like Kobe Bryant, it widens the margin for error on closing out defensive stops for Boston.

3) Be quick but don’t hurry… actually, Kendrick, you need to hurry
One of the most frustrating things for me to watch in the NBA is Kendrick Perkins in possessions of the ball around the basket. He’s the epitome of what you don’t want to teach young big men do around the rim. Especially against a frontline like the Lakers employ, you have to be quick to the basket. Kendrick Perkins moves around like the Tin Man when he hasn’t seen an oil can in months (insert BP joke I wasn’t clever enough to think of here).

Perkins could get a lot of easy buckets in this game and put a lot of pressure on the Lakers by racking up these easy points. Instead, he gets the ball and then allows someone to hit the slow motion button on him as he tries to get the ball up to the basket. Perk isn’t taller than most big men he faces and he isn’t all that athletic so it’s easy to see why he’d be careful around the basket. But he has to find ways go up quickly with the ball. He’s like one of those chattering teeth you wind up. Except, whenever you want to show someone how they move you always forget to wind it up enough for a full show. It ends up stopping abruptly and anti-climactically. So you have to wind it up a second time and by then the mystique of a spring loaded toy has been washed away in disappointment.

Well, Perk seems to always need that second wind up around the rim. Except when he finally gets it, there is a Laker around to block or challenge his shot. Kendrick has only taken 18 shots in this series but he’s been blocked five times. That’s an absurd percentage that would make Carlos Boozer blush.

Overall, the Celtics aren’t exactly getting killed in this series. It’s 2-2 and they have a chance to protect their homecourt and head back to Los Angeles tonight with a 3-2 lead. The easiest way for them to do this is to attack the paint much like Glen Davis did and find ways to get the Lakers size and length out of position.

In other words, go out and give them rabies.

NBA Finals Celtics-Lakers Game 4: Big Baby Drools And The Rest Of The Bench Rules

June 11, 2010 in by with 0 Comments


(via Truth About It)

Back around the turn of the millennium, the Sacramento Kings were trying to establish themselves as a force to be reckoned with. While they were building an evolving squad that was trying to find the balance between a veteran bench and a growing core of really incredible players, they had a certain group of players called “The Bench Mob.” The Bench Mob was comprised of an unusual band of brothers for Sacramento. The leaders of the mob were Jon Barry and Darrick Martin. They had Peja Stojakovic before he was Peja Stojakovic. They had scrappy guys like Lawrence Funderburke, Scot Pollard and Tony Delk. Hell, even Tyrone Corbin and Bill Wennington made an appearance from time to time.

This wasn’t the best bench in the league by any means. In fact, they had a bunch of specialists and not really anything resembling a tried and true group of proven contributors. And that’s sort of why it worked. Nobody expected much out of them. Maybe they weren’t going to make a good percentage of their shots. Maybe they weren’t going to execute with the flair and grace of Webber, Vlade and Jason Williams. But they were probably going to outwork you no matter who you threw at them.

This Boston group of pine-sitters reminds me of the same thing. It’s not so much a Bench Mob as it is a swarm. In the fourth game of the 2010 NBA Finals, the Boston bench managed to swarm the Lakers players and hit them with a deluge of energy and effort. The Lakers couldn’t help but hope for mistakes by the men in green. Rather than outwork them and exude their talents and dominance over this group, the Lakers just sort of took it. The Boston bench didn’t just outplay the Lakers bench. For much of the fourth quarter, they outplayed the Lakers starters and put on a show in doing so.

“We were like Shrek and Donkey.” – Nate Robinson on the Game Four performance of Glen Davis and himself.

It’s sort of perfect that Nate Robinson made this analogy for him and his bulbous sidekick after they helped the Celtics find a fourth-quarter groove and even up the NBA Finals with a must-win in Game Four. Nate Robinson was the pesky, annoying sidekick that you expected to provide all of the comedic relief while Big Baby bruised his way through the forest, destroying everything in his path. It was entertaining and almost cartoonish.

When Big Baby grabbed his fourth offensive rebound of the game with 8:23 remaining in the fourth quarter and powered his way back up to the basket against Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom, he absorbed the foul, scored the basket and unleashed an outburst of emotion and drool that makes Kevin Garnett look like Tim Duncan on horse tranquilizers. Effort, energy and heart were going to be needed to win the NBA Finals. The Game Four version of the Boston Celtics bench had it and the Lakers simply didn’t.

A lineup of Nate Robinson, Ray Allen, Tony Allen, Glen Davis and Rasheed Wallace played the first 9:10 of the fourth quarter against LA and left the game with an eight-point lead for the starters to play with. They survived a quick run of technical fouls by Rasheed Wallace and Nate Robinson. They survived 12 fourth quarter points from Kobe Bryant. They took control of a game in the NBA Finals, which was as close to a must-win as you can get without having a loss result in elimination.

Big Baby was fantastic. You can say that he excelled because Andrew Bynum nearly sat for the entire second half as his knee swelled up beyond belief because that’s not the entire truth. Big Baby was able to score when Bynum was out there. In fact, he scored on whomever the Lakers employed to plug up the paint. Lamar Odom was absent-minded and couldn’t find the focus to put a body on Big Baby. The Large Infant bounced off Mr. Kardashian and bounced off Pau Gasol. If there was a basketball to be had or a key bucket to be scored, the oversized-undersized power forward from LSU was going to get it done.

And as good as he was in this game, it’s just as important we recognize the rest of the bench players that did their part. Nate Robinson improbably played out of this world again by hitting threes, making plays and being the annoying ball of energy that’s only been replicated by the chicken hawk in Foghorn Leghorn cartoons. Tony Allen played remarkable defense against Kobe Bryant. Did he stop Kobe? Not even close. Kobe ended up with 33 points on 22 shots, which is sort of ridiculous. However, he did turn the ball over seven times and had Allen make some pretty big plays by stripping the ball and challenging jumpers.

You also can’t forget the job that Rasheed Wallace did in this game. Yes, he ran around after a couple of foul calls against him and eventually earned himself a tech. It was absolutely deserved. But it’s just part of the Sheed package. He plays with a fire when he’s into the game and he was definitely into this game. This time the fire gave the Lakers a technical free throw that Kobe promptly missed. One minute later, Wallace hit a three-pointer from the top of the key to give the Celtics a nine-point lead that felt insurmountable. Couple that with some tough defense inside and you’ve got the cherry on top of the sundae the Boston bench served up to their fans Thursday night.

This Celtics bench has been inconsistent all season long. It’s just as likely they’ll follow up this performance in Game Four with the exact same thing in Game Five to help Boston take a commanding three games to two lead in the Finals. It also wouldn’t surprise me to see them come up well short of the needed effort to best the Lakers and essentially give the series to Los Angeles headed back to Hollywood.

But if they’re playing with energy, bringing the fire and brimstone from the pine and playing with such fervor and raw emotion that they can’t control the saliva free-falling down out of their mouths and down their chins, I find it hard to believe the Celitcs won’t head back to Los Angeles needing to split the final two games to take hope their 18th trophy as an NBA franchise.