The Big 3: Record Offense, Crazy Embiid, Play of Week

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Big Three, where we re-convene each Friday to take a snapshot of three plays, trends or stats we’ve seen in the league over the past week.

Today’s Big Three will feature some notes on the league’s record-setting offense(s), a look at rookie Joel Embiid’s ludicrous per-possession statistics, and a fun Play of the Week from the Jazz that demonstrates the value of passing big men and the ability to leverage defensive expectations against them. Let’s get started! As always, all statistics will be from prior to Friday night’s games.

1. All the Way Up

It shouldn’t surprise you one bit that there’s a legendary offense in the NBA this season. In fact, it shouldn’t even surprise you that as of this writing, it’s the most dominant offense in the history of the league on a per-possession basis.

Okay, maybe this part will surprise you: It’s not the Warriors.

In fairness, that’s a bit of a disingenuous statement. If the season ended today, the Warriors would indeed have posted a better offense than any team in any prior season before this year. But they’d still be second to the Raptors.

That’s right, Toronto is both the top offense in the league and, to this point, the best the NBA has ever seen. Per basketball-reference.com, the Raps and Dubs would rank first and second on the all-time list if they kept up this rate.

It isn’t all that shocking to see the Warriors on this list given their roster, but this has to qualify as a huge surprise in Toronto’s case. We knew the Raptors were a very good offense – they’ve been in the league’s top 10 the last three seasons, and the top five the last two. But they’ve never come anywhere all that close to this level, and with mostly similar personnel returning this year, this was really hard to see coming.

There isn’t one single big reason for the jump, but rather a few small-to-medium ones. The Raptors were already great at taking care of the ball, but they’ve shaved nearly two turnovers per-100-possessions this year and sit decimals away from the league low in giveaways. They also were quite good shooting the three-ball last year, but once again they’ve been even better – 37 percent has jumped up to an even 40 percent, and they’re shooting about one more per game.

They’re nibbling around the margins to trim the fat in a few other areas, too. They’ve gone from a bottom-10 transition scoring team to a top-10 group overnight, adding a few extra points a game the easy way. They’re grabbing a few extra second-chance buckets here and there, a nice surprise with Bismack Biyombo no longer in town, and are generating more points following turnovers than any other team in the league.

The Raptors still have some of the fewest assisted baskets in the league, a sign many like to point to as a concern for an offense, but it hasn’t mattered one bit. Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan have been just as good as ever, and role players are stepping up.

More than anyone, coach Dwane Casey deserves major credit – he’s taken his share of criticism over the years, especially in the playoffs from this pen, but it’s clear few bench bosses in the league reach their group and get more out of them consistently than Casey in Toronto. He’s got this offense humming on continuity and what’s clearly a perfect system for their skill sets, and they’ve been historically good so far.

2. Trust the Awesomeness

Joel Embiid literally nicknamed himself “Trust the Process” earlier this year, and it might not even crack his top-five most entertaining qualities on the season so far. Embiid is running away with the Rookie of the Year race even on a minutes limit for most of the year, and doing it while providing nightly highlights and flashes of his ridiculous potential.

High up on JoJo’s entertainment list are some of his statistical outputs. That aforementioned minutes limit has probably kept him a little fresher, meaning it’s unlikely he’d keep these figures up over the course of a 30-plus minute load nightly, but Embiid’s per-100-possession stats are simply stupid: 36.9 points, 15.7 rebounds, 5.2 blocks and a legitimately awe-inspiring 7.7 (seven-point-seven) turnovers.

Embiid would be the only rookie ever to play at least 100 minutes and average these kinds of figures – shoot, he’d be the only rookie ever to play at least 10 minutes on the season and still post these numbers. You have to significantly lower his point and turnover output to find any other comparables, but once you do, the list is pretty impressive: David Robinson, Shaquille O’Neal, Blake Griffin and Arvydas Sabonis are the only other guys who have even come close to matching Embiid’s output during their first season in the league.

The 76ers have mostly been a mess outside Embiid’s ridiculous nightly performances, but he’s singlehandedly keeping them watchable at this point.

3. Play of the Week

Our Play of the Week this time around comes to us via Salt Lake City – or perhaps via France, if you look at it the right way.

The Jazz under Quin Snyder have been moderately maligned at times for a slow-paced, sometimes bland offense – even at points this season, where they’re a borderline top-five per-possession offense in the league. And make no mistake, there are times where the Jazz play a very deliberate and sometimes repetitive style of offense under Snyder. Of course, in his first year with real talent at every position, the results are beginning to speak for themselves.

In some cases, that reputation is yielding some positive results. A few new personnel additions like George Hill, Boris Diaw and Joe Johnson have allowed Snyder to open up his playbook a bit, and in particular to leverage the expectations he knows his style is sometimes creating in defenses.

On this play against Oklahoma City from Wednesday night, Snyder is leveraging Diaw’s fantastic passing from the four-spot – maybe the best in the entire league (if we count LeBron James as a small forward). It’s something the Jazz have done all year and even more often lately, and it’s easy to see why: Diaw takes a joy in passing most guys his size just don’t.

The bit of leverage we mentioned, however, really isn’t of Diaw’s doing at all. It’s a clever play call from Snyder, and a good bit of recognition from the other two guys involved in the play. Let’s take a look.

The Jazz start the set on the right wing, swinging the ball to Rodney Hood and looking to set up Diaw in post position on the block:

Hood gets the ball in to Diaw, and the Jazz go to work. Notice that even as the pass is just arriving to Diaw in the post, Rudy Gobert and Gordon Hayward (center of the screen) are setting up for some off-ball action.

This is where the little bit of trickery comes in. Look at the above still image again – this is a snapshot opponents see 30 or 40 times a game from Utah, and in almost every case, Hayward (or Hood, or Hill) is about to use a Gobert down screen to fly up to the top of the key. Standard stuff.

Except that’s not what they’re doing here. Within less than a second, Hayward has flipped the script – he’s the one setting the screen on Gobert’s man, Enes Kanter, rather than the other way around. Meanwhile, Gobert is rumbling toward the hoop, already aware of something the Thunder still haven’t noticed.

Kanter is stopped dead in his tracks. Never the most hyper-aware defender in the first place, he’s been completely fooled here, and he’s still at the foul line as Gobert is dunking the ball. Kyle Singler notices what’s happening at the last second and makes a valiant effort to contest, but at that point it’s useless. He’s going up for a lob against a seven-footer with the longest recorded wingspan in league history, and there’s only one way that’s ending.

There’s nothing all that complex here, but the play is a great illustration of how the Jazz’s deliberate style (or other teams with similar ones) can lull some defenses to sleep. This set is snuffed out in a couple moments if everyone in a Thunder uniform is fully engaged, but it’s already tough to do that for every second of an intense NBA game – and it inherently becomes tougher when your brain is conditioned to expect the same thing over and over again.

It’s not even the first time the Jazz have run the set to perfection in the past week, in fact. They got an even cleaner dunk for Gobert against the Kings on Saturday using the exact same play, just inverted to the other side of the floor:

It’s the little details that can make the difference in this league, and the Jazz have been well on top of them this year. Snyder has flown below the radar, but may receive some Coach of the Year buzz before long if the Jazz continue to perform at a top-five per-possession rate in the league despite missing multiple starters most of the year.