1) Getting Brook Lopez More Involved
“If we had to depend on Brook (Lopez) to get 20 shots, we were going to lose by 25,” Hollins said, clarifying that statement Monday after he was told by a reporter that the Nets were 7-0 in games since the All-Star Break when Lopez took 20 or more shots.
“Maybe I should just go out there and say Brook just shoot anywhere, everywhere, any time, and we’ll win, right?” Hollins countered, with a hint of derision in his voice. “Come on, man. It’s deeper than that. We’re going to try to get Brook more shots, but that’s the game of cat-and-mouse.”
Lopez had just three shots and 16 frontcourt touches that weren’t direct the result of offensive rebounds in 36 minutes, per the NBA’s SportVU data.[note]He had seven shot attempts and 22 frontcourt touches overall.[/note] During the regular season, Lopez averaged over 20 touches in under 30 minutes per game.
Many of Lopez’s touches come as the end of a play, either when lurking under the basket for dump-offs, or when Deron Williams or Joe Johnson finds him rolling to the basket with a “pocket pass” in between two defenders, and Lopez takes a short floater or layup. But the Nets have had less success with the pick-and-roll lately, which has limited Lopez’s effectiveness.
“When you play good teams, their defense takes away what you’re trying to do,” Lionel Hollins said of Lopez’s lack of success in the pick-and-roll. “We just have to be better at executing. The pocket pass was still there yesterday, we didn’t do as good a job executing offensively, but we also have to do some other things as well.”
Lopez finished with 17 points and 14 rebounds despite taking just seven shots. It was the first time Lopez had played more than 35 minutes and taken seven shots or fewer than 2010, during his second year in the league.[note]Stats courtesy of Basketball-Reference.[/note]
Lopez said he was going to be “a bit more aggressive” within the gameplan in Game 2, and hoped the team would make better decisions offensively. “We need to take advantage of what they’re giving up, and take advantage of their second and third options, (the) second side, and moving the ball,” Lopez said. “Make them play defense the way they want us to play. Scrambling and helping each other. … I think we (made them do that) for parts. I think we had lots of possessions where we got up a quick shot that we didn’t really need to take, or a shot over three guys where we could’ve moved the ball more and got them scrambling.”
2) Limiting Turnovers
Prior to Game 1, Lionel Hollins stressed the importance of limiting turnovers against the Hawks. “You can blink and be down 10,” he added.
He may not have known how to prevent them, but he sure knew they were coming. The Hawks took their first double-digit lead fewer than seven minutes into the first quarter, and four Nets turnovers led directly to nine of Atlanta’s points.
The Hawks finished the game with 24 points off 17 Nets turnovers, which swung the game. “That’s a big number,” Williams said of the points off turnovers. “A lot of the games we played them in the regular season, it’s the same thing. Turnovers killed us. So the better we take care of the ball, the more efficient we’ll be.”
The Nets were 9-22 when they turned the ball over on more than 14 percent of their possessions this season, and 29-22 when they stayed under that mark. But the Hawks run a trapping defense that’s quick to recover and ready to swarm ballhandlers. The Nets weren’t prepared for it, and when Atlanta’s defenders eliminated the pocket pass between Williams & Brook Lopez, the Nets were stuck without another option. “We stayed away from some things that they would normally trap on, just for that reason,” Lionel Hollins said Monday afternoon at Nets practice.
“They do a good job with hands, getting their hands up, getting their hands in the passing lane,” Williams added. “If you’re driving to the lane, if you penetrate too far, you’ll have five guys in there on you. So we have to pass early, move the ball efficiently and then drive and put it back on the floor.”
Though Hollins wouldn’t directly say the type of adjustments they needed to make schematically, he admitted the team wasn’t executing their gameplan. “We’ve got to execute better on offense, and quicker ball movement, earlier passing, stuff that I talked about (Sunday) night after the game,” he said.
Joe Johnson’s Shooting
Joe Johnson swore the boos didn’t get to him.
“No, it didn’t affect me,” Johnson said at the podium following the Nets loss. “I pretty much expected it.”
Johnson touched the ball 79 times in the 99-92 defeat, so once you include his name announcement in the starting lineup, it’s safe to say he was booed 80 times at Philips Arena Sunday night. The Atlanta Hawks crowd was equal parts raucous for their team and angry at Johnson, for reasons unclear: Johnson was a six-time All-Star in Atlanta, led them to the playoffs in five straight seasons, signed a contract offered to him by the team, and in the end was traded in the deal that kicked off a Hawks rebuild leading to their current status as a 60-win Eastern Conference behemoth.
Still, the booing worked, even if it didn’t. Johnson missed all six of his three-point attempts, the last a wide-open corner three with 68 seconds left that would’ve cut Atlanta’s lead to 95-92, and only made one shot outside of eight feet all night.
In Brooklyn’s final playoff game two years ago, Johnson had a similar, albeit worse, night, shooting 2-14 in a 99-93 Game 7 loss to the Chicago Bulls. Johnson suffered plantar fasciitis in that game and it was a series-clincher, so the circumstances were a bit different. but if the Nets will only go as far as Deron Williams leads them, it’s still Joe Johnson’s role to close the door.
Running Off Kyle Korver
Perhaps no shot is more terrifying to an NBA defense than Kyle Korver pulling up from 25 feet. With his understated size (Korver is 6’7″), frenetic off-ball movement, and lightning-quick trigger, it’s no surprise Korver led the NBA in three-point shooting marksmanship this season, hitting a ridiculous 49.2 percent of his three-pointers, including 13 of 21 (61.9 percent) against the Nets in the regular season. He didn’t disappoint the Hawks in Game 1, hitting five of 11 attempts en route to a team-high 21 points. The 11 three-point attempts tied a season high for Korver.
“We just got to be aware (of him),” Deron Williams said. “We have a certain way we want to play him. I think a couple of times we didn’t do that and as a result he got free. It’s something you just have to pay attention to because he’s constantly moving. When you look at the film, there’s never a time when he’s just stagnant. It’s tough to guard him. You have to give a lot of help. We’ll do that next time.”
Williams played with Korver when the two were on the Utah Jazz, and lobbied for him to join the Nets before Korver elected to sign with the Hawks in the 2012 offseason. The two remain friends: Williams’s celebrity dodgeball tournament was originally Korver’s idea, and Korver got Williams involved with the End It Movement, an organization dedicated to eradicating worldwide slavery.
“I just think he’s in the right situation,” Williams said. “He just has freedom here, complete freedom. A lot of coaches don’t like early shots. But for him to get open, that’s what he has to take because guys are sitting on him in the halfcourt. And so when he comes down in transition, he’s firing. When you’re shooting 60 percent from 3, that’s a pretty good shot.”
Korver has hit the second-most three-pointers in the NBA since the 2009-2010 season, behind just MVP candidate Stephen Curry, and has the best three-point percentage of any player in that time. Hollins, however, would only go so far in his praise of the shooter.
“How many shots did (Korver) take (Sunday) and how many did he miss?” Hollins asked rhetorically. “See, if he’s that good, he’d make all of them! Everybody misses, man. He’s a good shooter, I acknowledge that, we acknowledge that as a team, we game plan for him because he is a great shooter. But until he starts shooting 100 percent, we’ve got to play and be in position to help, and then recover, and close out, we just have to do a better job of not letting him go backdoor, getting layups, we’ve got to do a better job of closing back out to him right into his numbers versus short and letting him shoot in the face.”
“It wasn’t like … we’re talking (Stephen) Curry, Korver in terms of what they do,” Hollins continued. “He’s a great come-off-the-screen guy, he’s great with moving without the ball, but he rarely puts the ball on the floor like Curry and shakes you up. Now, you start talking about Curry, and trying to gameplan for him, it’s a lot different than gameplanning for Korver. I said it last time, we have to gameplan for their whole team. They have a really good team. They won 60-plus games. If we start just gameplanning strictly for Korver, all those other guys are going to wreck us, too. We’ve got to gameplan for their team and do a better job on each individual. Whether it be Horford, whether it be Teague, whoever it is, we have to do a better job. Korver’s certainly one of those guys.”
