Cavs Big Win, Tebow Back and Patent Trolls: While We’re Waiting…
April 20, 2015The Casual Fan’s Guide to Hating the 2014-15 Boston Celtics
April 20, 2015Both the Cleveland Cavaliers and their power forward Kevin Love looked a little dicey in the first half of Game 1 on Sunday afternoon at The Q. The team with half of its rotation experiencing its first playoff minutes looked the part. Love, however, showed some drastic improvement to his approach in the post during the second half. He scored 13 of his 19 points after the break with a scrappier and more determined effort in the post.
We’re going to run through a couple of examples where Love didn’t take it strong enough in the post. Then, we’ll look at three beautiful possessions where he did everything Coach Blatt and company could ask of him in the low post.
Right off the bat, the Cavs looked to establish Love in the post against Brandon Bass. Bass is a solid defender and doesn’t let Love bulldoze his way into the paint. Love catches the ball outside of the paint, and he makes no real progress toward the bucket.
As a result, Love settles for a reverse pivot fadeaway after Bass stops his left shoulder move. Love airballs the shot. This is a classic example of what we’ve seen far too much when it comes to Love’s post work this season. He has been prone to settling for an off-balance shot due in large part to a lack of foul calls and frustration at not getting his shot off.
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Moving right along, here’s another rough sequence for the Cavalier stretch four. This time, Love has a slightly more favorable matchup with the 6-foot-10, 231-pound Jonas Jerebko checking him. Once again, Love is looking to create space and a shot with his left shoulder for the right half of his body.
Love creates some space with his elbow, but when he goes up to shoot, he’s off balance once again. Love falls back but shoots it as if he’s still expecting some contact. The result is an awkward-looking shot attempt that falls short. You can even see Love’s body language expecting that foul call after the shot. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Love isn’t getting beat up by the officials, because he is to a point. However, he’s not doing himself any favors with effort like that on the block.
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Now, we move on to accentuating the positive. Something very profound changed in Love’s approach underneath in that third quarter. On this play, Kyrie Irving pulls up from the corner off an offensive rebound and reversal. Watch Love work his way into position for the offensive rebound against Jae Crowder. Love works through Crowder’s resistance, and with a little hand-to-hand combat wins the battle for the offensive board.
After he wrestles away the rebound, Love quickly and efficiently gets the ball up and in. He doesn’t worry about drawing contact or clearing space. He avoids the swipe attempt from Isaiah Thomas and puts the ball in the hoop. With one dribble, a spin straight to the bucket, and a point-blank layup, Love righted his ship.
Love’s offensive rebounding has decreased every year in the NBA as he spends more time around the perimeter. His 6.5 offense rebounding percentage is a career low, and seems tiny compared to Tristan Thompson’s 14.5 percent and Timofey Mozgov’s 11.4 percent. Of course, there are less offensive boards to be had when either Thompson or Mozgov is on the floor with him at the same time.
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On this underneath inbound, LeBron throws a poor pass to Tristan Thompson with too much heat on it that skates by him. Love is in the right place at the right time to go right up with it strong.
This time, it’s Kelly Olynyk defending Love, and K-Love takes his body right into him. Love uses one hand to clear and the other to get the shot up. By staying vertical and leaning into the defender — rather than falling away — Love is able to concentrate and score the basket despite getting jostled.
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Finally, this one is the best play of all. Here we see Love take a halfcourt post feed and aggressively work through contact to draw the foul rather than waiting for it. Once again, he does this against Jerebko, who knocks the post entry out initially. Posting up often takes the effort of re-posting to be successful, and Love doesn’t give up on position with Jerebko even after the ball goes to James at the top of the key. In the past, we’ve seen Love retreat to the corner to spot up rather than stay on the block.
This time, Love operates over his right shoulder, taking a few strong dribbles with his left hand. Love and Jerebko lock arms, and Love works up into and through Jerebko’s chest and arms to draw plenty of contact for the foul. The officials are more likely to award strong moves such as this one rather than fadeaways looking for a brush of contact. Love went to the line and made 7-of-8 attempts in this game. As an 80 percent free throw shooter, Love should get to the line that much nearly every game if he can work effectively in the post. His 4.3 attempts per game were his lowest since his rookie year in the association.
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With the Kevin Love on display in the third quarter, the Cavaliers become even more of an offensive menace. With James and Irving willing and able to slice and dice you from everywhere on the floor, adding a third cog that is ready to do the same becomes too much for a defense to handle. Let’s hope we see a lot more of K-Love posting up on the block through this Boston series and beyond.
Until next time, the film room is closed!
6 Comments
Nice stuff, Kirk. Looked to me that those early airballs were from him being too amped early on. Regarding his fight for position, appeared Love learned during the course of the afternoon that these games are more physical and that the refs (generally) are going to permit some more banging. At one point you could see Marion telling him from the bench to let the ref-griping go and just play.
Really liked that Love made so many smart decisions with the ball, meaning that (unlike J.R.) he was keeping his head. By the 3rd quarter he was letting it fly when he had an opening.
Noticed that from Marion as well. That sort of thing, plus LeBron calming the guys early as well, give me hope that our relative inexperience at this level isn’t fatal.
Great breakdown.
Only note: I couldn’t actually see the GIFs, though I remembered most of the plays. The auto-play on the GIFs made the page very annoying, loading-wise, and now it looks like I’m seeing a zoomed in portion of them. Any way to do it like you guys have done for Browns’ stuff and other places where the GIFs only play when you click on them to do so?
try double-clicking on it, worked for me
Thanks, Harv and Ezzie. They were displaying fine for me this am, but I did notice clicking on them will adjust the size. Also, they are supposed to resize after loading completely.
There is a bit of a division among us WFNY writers on which gif host is king. Gfycat is making me look bad!
Agree with all. This was a different Love than most of the regular season. More physical and aggressive both offense and defense. When he plays like this, we are very hard to beat. Lebron just facilitated and made sure that he did not have to take over the game. I expect there will be a few games in this playoff run when he will need to shift into beast mode and go for 35-40. JR saddled with foul trouble, and he wasn’t really missed. Good first win. I think Boston played as well as they can, and still they couldn’t keep up.