Never before have teams, fans and analysts had so much access to information about what’s really happening during the basketball games we’re watching. Thanks to the NBA’s deeper efforts to bring analytics to the masses, and in particular the work of SportVU, writers and video analysts are able to dig down deep to find hidden truths about killer lineups, unstoppable plays and secret weapons. Basketball analytics used to be a cottage industry. (How I know the truth of that.) Now it dominates the conversation.
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This is a good thing. Informed discourse is better than the alternative. But one effect of deep, serious analysis is dampening the element of surprise. If you’ve looked at the data or read a cogent analysis about Channing Frye’s extraordinary efficiency in the corner off LeBron set-ups, it won’t be anything but expected and ordinary when Frye hits that next corner three. When the Warriors‘ push out their Death Lineup, you know what’s happening next.
In some ways, this is what happens in other art forms. Consider Game of Thrones, where legions of the most obsessive fans pore over textual evidence to find hints of little twists to come. When those twists come, these fans are well-prepared and ready to advance to the next investigation. That doesn’t mean deep, obsessive analysis is bad; it just has a minor pitfall.
Yet, even in the age of big data, serendipity can still find us. Perhaps we can credit the God of the Small Sample Size, who rewards us for jumping to conclusions by flipping the script when we least expect it. (This cuts both ways: perhaps the thing we think we know is actually suffering from sample size issues — that 25-minute data set can’t prove an unstoppable offensive juggernaut lineup — or perhaps that which stuns us is unsustainable.) Perhaps instead we can shout out Socrates and acknowledge that even when we know more than ever, we still know nothing.
This was all a preamble, of course, to the Thunder’s smallball domination in Game 3. There has been no analytic truth as widely accepted over the past year as the ineffable power of the Warriors’ Death Lineup, a centerless maelstrom starring the Splash Brothers, Draymond Green, Harrison Barnes and Andre Iguodala.
The Death Lineup fully destroyed the Cavaliers in the NBA Finals, allowing Golden State to rattle off three straight wins, and buoyed the Warriors’ 73-win season. The lineup was +166 in 172 minutes during the regular season. Put the unit on the floor for five minutes, and you’d expect the Warriors’ lead to grow about five points like clockwork. Or, in those rare cases where Golden State trails, you’d expect the lineup to make up about a point a minute.
The Thunder’s most obvious small-ball lineup does not have that sort of reputation. In fact, Oklahoma City is more likely to go big and force small-skewing teams to try to handle two of Steven Adams, Serge Ibaka and Enes Kanter on the glass. OKC has a size advantage against most teams, and they press it.
OKC’s direct answer to the Warriors’ Death Lineup in Game 3 instead included Kevin Durant and Serge Ibaka up front with Dion Waiters, Andre Roberson and Russell Westbrook around the horn. That unit played 46 minutes in the regular season, and was a minus-31. It puts a different meaning on the phrase “Death Lineup.” But in the first half of Game 3 on Sunday, that small Thunder lineup outscored the Warriors 31-10 in roughly nine minutes of action. Much of that work in the second quarter came directly against the Warriors vaunted five.
The Dubs’ Death Lineup is versatile, smooth and has loads of range. The Thunder Death Lineup is … not. It’s aggressive. It’s hungry. It’s … weird. (In fairness, any lineup with Dion Waiters is necessarily weird. He’s truly the New Iverson.) The one similarity the lineups share is wild athleticism. If you need a unit who can not only fly with Golden State, but push the tempo harder, you couldn’t ask for a better squad than a scaled-down OKC.
Of course, no one could have anticipated the Thunder sonning the Warriors’ Death Lineup like this. The data suggested the opposite would happen. When Andrew Bogut or Festus Ezeli leave the game for Iguodala, teams get scared and usually scarred. The Thunder didn’t. Serendipity lives.
This is what makes sports so enthralling. As soon as we think we’ve figured it out, we are reminded that we know nothing.
This article was written by Tom Ziller from SB Nation and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
