Help! I Need Someone (to Explain NBA Defense)
By Ted M. Green | L.A. Confidential, Los Angeles Lakers, Column
This might be a better TV story and it will require your imagination, or visualization, but let’s talk about something that is driving me crazy.
To quote the Beatles, Help!, I need somebody. Help!, not just anybody.
I’m so frustrated I want to foul Bruce Bowen six times myself and go in for a hot shower.
What’s undoing me is the joke they call NBA “help” defense.
You know, as in Help!, I’ve left my man and the shooters are wide open!
Or Help!, we look like we’re trying to double-team but we’re really playing Monkey in the Middle.
Or Help!, I look like I’m trying but I’m really saving my legs and energy for the playoffs.
I bring this up because the Lakers “help” defense helped Peja Stojakovic hit 10 three-pointers last Tuesday in an easy Hornets’ win.
Peja was open from here to Serbia as his primary defender, if one could be identified, ran toward the middle to “help” on Chris Paul’s penetration, never helping anything except Peja’s scoring average.
I bring this up because Tuesday night, the Lakers’ “help” defense enabled someone named Matt Bonner to again kill them like Bonner and Clyde (or Bowen and Clyde if you want to toss in Bruce’s six triples) from the 3-point line in a big loss to San Antone.
Maybe someone much smarter than me, a guru of defense like John Bach or Larry Brown or Gregg Popovich, could take a moment from their busy schedules and explain NBA Monkey in the Middle. Break it down for me, guys!
I mean, why would you ever leave Peja Stojakovic open from beyond the arc when he is the best deep shooter on the planet? Unless it’s the playoffs, when Peja joins the bricklayers’ union, but that is a whole other subject.
I know you’ve all seen it. A perimeter wing defender comes over to “help” a teammate guarding an opponant driving toward the basket. Only this second “help” defender almost never actually gets to the spot where the play is being contested. Instead, he gets caught in no man’s land, giving a clear lane for the penetrating player to whip the ball back to the man this “help” defender just left wide open at the 3-point line.
While the “help” defender is guarding nothing except the floor.
Final tally: Peja 10 threes, but the floor was held scoreless. Bruce Bowen, 6-6, but again, nothing for the floor.
So I ask: Who is this defensive wizardry helping? C’mon, Phil. Like Dumbo, I’m all ears. If it’s not the primary defender it’s helping, and it’s not the end result it’s helping, and it’s not the win column it’s helping and it’s not my sanity it’s helping, let me ask one more time for emphasis:
Who is this helping?
For $10 mil a year you’ve devised a brilliant scheme to leave Peja Stojakovic wide open?
If you’re banking on the 3-point shooter missing, at least help off of a lousy shooter. Not Peja or Bruce Bowen, or even Matt Bonner.
The more I watch the NBA, and I’ve been watching and covering and writing and broadcasting, I have to confess, for 40 years, the more I am confounded by this concept of what I believe to actually be some kind of soft zone.
Soft being the operative word.
Why can’t the wing defenders stay home and guard their men? Why can’t those perimeter defenders stay home and take the challenge of stopping the man they’re assigned to? Why can’t the centers and power forwards, the big guys, come over and challenge or put a hard foul on a driver at the conclusion of the play?
I remember Michael Cooper taking the challenge of guarding Larry Bird and it would take three picks from Parish and McHale, plus 12 angry men, to keep Coop out of Bird’s jockstrap.
Cooper didn’t help, he didn’t roam, he didn’t wander, he didn’t get lost, he didn’t play Monkey in the Middle. He got in Bird’s face until they literally hated each other.
It seems to me that NBA “help” defense is easy to play but hard to watch.
I would tell you more about this but I have to go help a colleague. If you’re looking for me, I’ll be halfway between his desk and mine.
Ted Green is Senior Sports Producer for KTLA Prime News and a former sportswriter for the L.A. Times and National Sports Daily
Discuss:
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Why do you pin this on Phil? He’s not the one out there failing to execute on the floor - do you think he tells Fish/Farmar “Hey, make sure you don’t stay in front of your guy so that a wing defender has to come down and wave his arms at your man and leave his shooter open”
The Lakers just don’t have any quick perimeter defenders, thus everyone pays the price when Paul/Parker easily gets by Fish/Farmar and the “help” defense begins.
If you want someone to blame, Jim/Jerry/Mitch would be my target, they’re the ones who put this no-defense team together.
It’s about time someone said it. I was ready to tie Walton to Peja with a leather strap.
Finally, someone in the L.A. media who’s trying to bring PJ into accountability. Nice piece.
mike
The problem with blaming management on this one is as follows:
A year and a half ago the Lakers beat the Detroit Pistons and found a new sense of defensive identity for themselves. They were excited at the prospect of what defense can do for a team.
A week later the Lakers got a beat down at the hands of the Spurs. That game was exactly how the Lakers played last night.
The Lakers then played the Spurs in less a week and we beat them soundly. What the Lakers did in that game was have Kwame Brown play Tim Duncan one on one in the post. That left everyone else to stay on their man. It worked.
The next year we won 2 out of the 3 games we played against the Spurs. The game we lost was an overtime game that we should have won in regulation.
Again, in those wins, the Lakers played with the philosophy of one on one play against Tim Duncan.
So, until last night, the Lakers have had the Spurs number over the last 4 games we’ve played them.
For Phil Jackson to go away from that game stragity, last night, is downright questionable.
More than questionable…it defies logic and brings into question: What are Phil Jackson’s motives?
mike