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Any time you include Cleveland and Oklahoma City in the first sentence of your blog, you can be reasonably sure that no one from either coast of North America will read it to the end. The pressure is off! I can fill this blog with whatever I want! Therefore, I choose to dedicate the following paragraphs to preaching about the god-like abilities of Cleveland great man Evan Mobley. Mobley and the Cavaliers prevailed Wednesday night over the visiting Thunder in a matchup of teams riding combined active winning streaks of 25 games. This was a great game, from start to finish, and if you ignored it because you consider them to be a flyover team, you deserve to feel bad this morning.
Mobley was amazing. Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson is putting him everywhere on the court and using him in as many ways as possible. The Cavaliers do normal things to get the ball moving to the basket, but Mobley’s particular gifts make every action one or two more dangerous than they would be if they replaced him with a normal NBA big man. Consider the dribble handoff, or DHO. It’s a staple of the modern game, but NBA defenses are getting better at defending, so it often feels less like a power option and more like shit your team does out of habit or lack of better ideas. In a DHO, the ball is passed to a tall man on the court, near the free throw line. Guards and shooters circle the arch; The big man makes one or two strong dribbles parallel to the free throw line and passes the ball to one of his friends, who pushes a running defender into a collision with the big man, freeing himself to cut down the middle. middle of the ball. the ground. All the quick-moving action around the perimeter creates secondary opportunities, but this is the basic action: a big guy lumbering to the side and slamming the ball into a teammate’s belly while sucking the defender into his own belly. of his partner.
Mobley does not work with wood. We are not talking about Domantas Sabonis. When the Cavs use him as a transfer man, they throw him beyond the arc and then Mobley runs, like a huge gazelle, into the action. His own defender often can’t keep up. The proven method of defending the DHO involves harassing the ball handler in a big way while simultaneously attacking and cutting off his teammates’ attack angles, forcing the offense to burn seconds off the clock with the ball in hands of a fool. But Mobley’s DHOs can’t be defended this way, because they start so far from the basket and develop at such a ferocious pace, often in semi-transition while the defense is still getting its bearings. The speed is disconcerting. The Cavs executed a DHO from Mobley to Max Strus in the first quarter Wednesday that developed so quickly that a good shot was fired before either of the two defenders involved in the action had time to raise their hands. Atkinson’s offense doesn’t usually call many DHOs, but when it does, those DHOs work: the Cavs post the second-highest rate in the NBA in handoffs; They produce the fourth-best effective field goal percentage and score the fourth-most points per possession.
Another preference of the modern defense is to blitz and trap the opponent’s best ball handler on high pick-and-rolls. The Thunder love to do this. Watch what happens when they blitz and trap Luka Doncic on high screens. He’ll throw it over the top to Derek Lively II or Daniel Gafford, located somewhere near the top of the bracket. These are two very sweet, well-intentioned galoots, and they’re both pretty fast for big guys, but they have the open-court guard skills of little kids that are barely impressive. It’s a win for the defense to get Doncic to get the ball to any of these guys, really anywhere but inside the restricted area, let alone far above the fast break, where they are least useful. In their last meeting, in the NBA Cup quarterfinals, the Thunder limited Doncic to 15 shots and five assists in 40 minutes and won easily.
The Thunder wanted to bother the Cavs’ ball handlers this way Wednesday night, and they did, actually harassing Donovan Mitchell into a pretty poor performance. But Mobley has become a short-term killer, in that small offload space left open by a trap above the three-point line. A useful package of guard skills is what made Draymond Green a deadly short-range operator, even as he moved with the athletic grace of an armadillo. Brick-handed galoots fail in NBA rotations if they can’t handle the ball on a short run at least without blowing up the building; If all Andre Drummond does as a short player is freeze with the ball like a cartoon thief in a spotlight, that’s a good result for his own team.
Mobley is very fast and agile. You can gain a lot of distance from the trap in the split second after it is activated, creating more and better passing angles for your retreating ball carrier. And that quickness makes Mobley a little more dangerous than the average blocker once he catches the pass, because none of the defenders who catch him can hope to chase him from behind.
The defense must rotate, and Mobley has become a very fluid operator against a gnarly defense. The Cavs exploited a 5-on-4 situation in the second quarter when Darius Garland threw it to Mobley around the free throw line. Mobley caught the ball and turned over his left shoulder. His eyes were raised, so he saw a defender approaching his teammate in the strongside corner. His eyes were still up when he saw a rotated guy (the Thunder’s last defender) in the restricted arc; Without needing to look further, Mobley launched the ball toward the corner of the backboard, where it was caught by a rising Allen and lofted home. Later, to break down a zone defense, Mobley quickly headed to the free throw line and received a pass. With a strong dribble into the paint, he drew a defender who helped him and instantly threw the ball to his left, where Allen again completed the alley-oop. In the third quarter, with the game tied, Mobley stepped away from a trap and threw a short elevated pass in motion. In a much shorter period of time than it took me, a person who writes for a living, to write the words “in a much shorter period of time,” Mobley assessed the Thunder’s final rotated line of defenders and launched the ball into the far corner, where it became an open three-pointer for a deadly shooter.
Additionally, Mobley is no longer shy of contact and is now built like a Humvee. Twice he scored by hitting Isaiah Hartenstein directly, who is on the Thunder precisely because they need at least one defender whose midsection can’t collapse and pulverize with a shoulder charge. Mobley finished the game with 21 points, 13 shots, 10 rebounds and seven assists, in addition to his usual excellent defense. He and Allen tormented the shorthanded Thunder on the offensive glass, had hair-raising two-man offensive chemistry (Allen at one point hit a 3-pointer from Mobley), and kept the Cavs respectable on defense while sharing lineups with a handful of players. vulnerable and undersized. and/or slow shooters. Before you write off the Cavs as a hyped upstart or roll your eyes at their 72-win pace, ask yourself how your team is going to prevent these lovable giants from reshaping a game or series in their own image. Which of your weak elastic 4s or heavy screeners will stop Mobley from taking advantage of every small opening?
It’s so funny to me that the team with the best record in the NBA today is killing everyone with traditional big two lineups. The basketball played by the Cavs is magnificent, combining the best parts of modern three-point optimization with the more complex interior work of a couple of eras ago, when competent big-to-big passing was a requirement for high-level offense. We find ourselves in a situation where the best team in the NBA is doing something significantly different from the rest of the basketball world, which is the kind of thing that tends to inspire imitation. The NBA could do much worse in its next aesthetic revolution. Unfortunately for potential imitators, there aren’t many players like Evan Mobley.
