The criticism of MVP LeBron James for his play down the stretch of Miami’s 78-75 Game 2 loss to Indiana on Tuesday will be much louder than the barbs aimed at Dwyane Wade, who shot 1-of-5 in the last 3:30 of the fourth quarter and missed one of his two free-throw attempts.

It is slightly inaccurate, though, to suggest that James shied away from the ball for the entirety of crunch time. He took a three-pointer with 3:35 to go and attempted a driving layup — snuffed out brilliantly by the Pacers’ Paul George — with less than 90 seconds remaining. He crashed the offensive glass hard on three of those Wade misses. A player who wishes to hide does not chase offensive rebounds, especially when grabbing them often leads to free throws.

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Spurs coach Gregg Popovich probably won’t make Tim Duncan defend Blake Griffin full-time. (D. Clarke Evans/NBAE via Getty Images)

We’ve already got a bang-up preview of the Spurs-Clippers series that begins tonight, and I’ve already given my quick-hitting prediction: Spurs in five. That prediction is based on the idea that the Clippers’ defense, merely average in the regular season, won’t be able to limit the Spurs’ league-best offense enough to win four times in seven tries. The Spurs lit up the Clippers in three regular-season games, scoring nearly 113 points per 100 possessions — about 4.5 points better than San Antonio’s overall mark — and shooting 44 percent from three-point range on nearly 25 attempts per game.

The Clippers struggled to defend the three all season, and their big men are shaky against the pick-and-roll — a deadly combination of flaws against a San Antonio team that, unlike the Grizzlies, does not offer a poor shooter or two off of which the Clippers can help.

That said, the Spurs’ status as big favorites here come with a few caveats:

• The Clippers scored 107.2 points per 100 possessions against the Spurs, a mark that would have nearly led the league, and they would have taken two of three meetings with San Antonio if not for a semi-miraculous Gary Neal game-tying three-pointer. The Spurs, surprisingly, ranked as one of the league’s worst teams at defending the pick-and-roll, per Synergy Sports. They ranked dead last in points allowed per possession on pick-and-rolls in which the ball-handler finished the play, and the Clippers have a pretty decent point guard–provided Chris Paul’s groin allows him to be something close to the usual Chris Paul. For the season, about 15.9 percent of San Antonio possessions ended via a pick-and-roll ball-handler finishing the play, the largest figure for any playoff team, per Synergy.

That probably says at least a little bit about how the Spurs prioritize defending various shot types over others, but it also suggests Paul could feast on open mid-range shots and driving lanes.

• The Clippers’ defense improved as the season went on and played well against the Grizzlies in the first round. That is partly due to a few bench players (Reggie Evans, Kenyon Martin, Eric Bledsoe) combining for more minutes, but Blake Griffin’s rotations were also a bit zippier during some of the higher-leverage moments of the Memphis series.

• The Clippers’ other huge defensive weakness — a tendency to foul everything in sight — is not something the Spurs are especially good at exploiting. San Antonio ranked a bit below average in earning free throws, though we might see Evans knock Tony Parker beyond mid-court with a hip-check on a pick-and-roll at some point in this series. Read More…

Paul Pierce has produced very little, the Celtics rare get to the line and they often turn over the ball. (AP)

All sorts of crazy things happened in the last five minutes or so of Philadelphia’s huge Game 2 win in Boston on Monday, and I’ll get to them in a second. But first let me say this: I am astonished on a daily basis by how many fans, both in Boston and elsewhere, think the Celtics are a good offensive team, and are thus surprised they have struggled to score against the Hawks and the Sixers. The misunderstanding seems to come from the fact that a) Boston has very famous players on its team; and b) the Celtics rank fifth overall in field-goal percentage and eighth in three-point percentage.

So let me put this as clearly as I can: The Celtics are a bad offensive team. They were so-so last season and in 2009-10, and have been in continuing decline on offense for three seasons now. It’s wonderful that they shoot with great accuracy, especially from three-point range, but accurate shooting does not alone make a team good at scoring points. Field-goal percentage is no way to judge offense. It does not account for how many shots a team generates, how often it gets to the foul line and what sorts of shots it attempts. And in news that broke three years ago, this is where Boston fails.

The Celtics get to the foul line at a below-average rate, meaning they don’t generate many of the game’s easiest points. Only six teams attempted fewer three-pointers than Boston, rendering the Celtics’ very nice accuracy from that range not-so-meaningful. No team in NBA history has ever rebounded fewer of its own misses, which is a fancy way of saying Boston — mostly by choice — gets almost no second-chance points via offensive rebounds.

And for the fifth straight season, the Celtics have been among the league’s worst teams at turning over the ball. The result: Boston ranked 25th in points per possession, in a virtual tie with the Wizards. Toss in some serious health issues, and no one should be surprised Boston is playing low-scoring slugfests against a Philly defense that was neck-and-neck all season with Boston and Chicago atop the points-allowed-per-possession rankings. Read More…

A few key differences separate Dwight Howard and Andrew Bynum, who is fancied during happy times as the Magic center’s potential equal. But one general disparity is this: No opponent game-plans around exploiting a Howard weakness on defense like it does with Bynum.

For the second straight postseason, a Lakers opponent armed with an elite mid-range shooter — the Thunder this season, the Hornets last season — designed much of its offense around the idea that it could produce relatively easy mid-range shots by attacking Bynum on various pick plays. The Thunder were confident that Bynum would hang back rather than step out to challenge Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant, and that both players — especially Durant — could get clean looks from 15 feet.

The mid-range shot is the worst shot in basketball, a low-percentage attempt that produces few free throws or offensive rebounds. Most teams that shoot a lot of them are bad offensive teams. But it’s a shot every team must have in its arsenal, especially against an opponent like the Lakers, who have two elite wing defenders and two 7-footers capable of blocking everything at the rim.

The Thunder are one of the few teams with the personnel to exploit this mid-range weakness in an efficient way. They have one deadly shooter (Durant), another star fast becoming deadly from that range (Westbrook) and a center — Bynum’s opposite number — who can serve as the final screener on lots of different play types. This stuff destroyed the Lakers their 119-90 loss in Game 1 on Monday. It resulted in some communication breakdowns and a few mid-stream strategy changes in the second half — the kind of defensive chaos that hurt the Lakers against Chris Paul and the Hornets last season and ultimately undid them amid a hail of wide-open shots against Dallas in the second round.

The attack began right away, and, notably, it did not begin with a pick-and-roll:

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The nice thing about having three All-Star players is that you can get by against most teams without one of them, especially when your best All-Star is the most versatile player in the league. The Heat should overcome the Pacers in the second round without Chris Bosh, who is out indefinitely after straining an abdominal muscle in the second quarter of Miami’s 95-86 victory in Game 1 on Sunday. And if the power forward’s absence extends beyond that, the Bosh-less Heat would still be favored in the Eastern Conference finals against a Sixers team that is 1-11 against Miami over the last two seasons and a ferocious Celtics club dealing with its own health issues. The gap is smaller, though, and the chances for an upset against any of those three teams increase. The Heat may still reach the NBA Finals without Bosh in the worst-case scenario, but beating a team like the Spurs or Thunder would require Miami to be at full strength.

Now, LeBron James will play huge minutes at power forward in “smaller” lineups that have done quite well this season, with and without Bosh. Counting only lineups that logged at least 10 minutes together in the regular season, the Heat used James at power forward for 376 minutes and outscored opponents by about 14.5 points per 100 possessions — a number that would have led the league by a long shot, according to Basketball Value. The two such units that recorded the most minutes did not feature Bosh, as the Heat often used James as power forward when one or both of the other stars rested.

David West was unable to punish James in the post in Game 1, both because Miami makes it a chore just to enter the ball, and because LeBron is just as big and strong as the Pacers’ power forward. Miami’s move to sign Shane Battier and retain Mike Miller has it stocked with defenders capable of guarding small forward Danny Granger, sparing each of the LeBron/Battier/Miller trio the full-game burden. The Pacers were unwilling to go small/fast along with Miami on Sunday, forcing West into an awkward matchup on defense with Battier. That pulls West from the paint, opening driving lanes, and over the course of the series it will provide Battier some good looks as West scrambles around in an unfamiliar, perimeter-oriented assignment.

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Carlos Boozer did not sound smart after he tanked in Game 6 against the Sixers. (Gary Dineen/NBAE via Getty Images)

• Nick Friedell of ESPN Chicago dissects another Carlos Boozer postseason disappointment and reports Boozer said this following Chicago’s loss Thursday in Philadelphia:

“I thought I played well, especially with the kind of season it was,” Boozer said, when asked to assess his second season in Chicago. “We had the best record again in basketball, won our division again, had the top seed again, that’s all that matters, yo.”

This quote is so off the wall, so ridiculous, that it’s almost hard to imagine any player actually saying it in this context. What is Boozer thinking? If this were baseball, we could imagine Boozer making a statistics-based argument about the random nature of the short series format, but this isn’t baseball, and the outcomes in the NBA are far less random. Perhaps Boozer is merely reflecting the ideology of his team and his coach, Tom Thibodeau, who clearly values regular-season games more highly than, say, Gregg Popovich. (Ironically, Popovich’s devaluing of the regular-season might be the main reason he edged out Thibodeau for Coach of the Year, an award meant to honor regular-season performance).

In any case, Friedell has been with this Chicago team all season, and his take on Boozer’s future in Chicago is well worth your time.

• More evidence the Knicks appear to have settled on Mike Woodson as their next coach: The New York Post reports James Dolan, New York’s owner, has asked Woodson to change agents, since Woodson’s current agency also represented Larry Brown during Brown’s ugly contract dispute a half-decade ago with the Knicks.

• Kevin Arnovitz of ESPN.com with a wonderful of Clippers’ personnel chief Neil Olshey, a.k.a. the man that got Chris Paul. Read More…

Carlos Boozer made 1-of-11 from the field in Chicago’s season-ending Game 6 loss. (Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images)

Carlos Boozer quaked under the burden of being the Bulls’ first scoring option after Derrick Rose tore his ACL in Game 1 against the 76ers. This isn’t shocking: Boozer is not an NBA first option, even if he made $13.5 million this season and will make only about $500,000 less than what Chicago’s real first option will receive next season when Rose’s five-year contract extension kicks in. That tiny 2012-13 salary gap between Boozer ($15 million) and Rose ($15.5 million) speaks more to the difficulty of building an NBA team and signing the right kind of second option, at the right price and at the right time, than it does about Chicago’s management or Boozer’s place in the league.

Boozer just couldn’t do enough on offense to carry Chicago past a scoring-challenged Philadelphia team that is about to start a seven-game race to 80 points against the Celtics. The 30-year-old power forward wasn’t really bad until Game 6 on Thursday, when he shot just 1-of-11 and sat the last 16 minutes as coach Tom Thibodeau rode the same lineup into the ground. He was a combined 2o-of-44 in Games 4 and 5, with 10 assists, and had Chicago in position to win Game 4 in Philadelphia before getting swatted out of a pick-and-roll in crunch time and then fumbling the ball out of another one less than a minute later.

[Ian Thomsen: Iguodala delivers for Sixers]

The Bulls ran those plays for Boozer for a reason, though: He is skilled enough and threatening enough to shift defenses a bit his way, creating space for others. Some of those open jumpers that power forward Taj Gibson got flashing to the foul line or hanging around the baseline, for instance, came in part because defenses converged on Boozer during pick-and-rolls or as Boozer slithered around picks near the rim. Point guard C.J. Watson got open looks down the stretch of Game 4 because Philadelphia was more worried about containing Boozer on the roll. Sixers forward Thaddeus Young was late helping on Luol Deng’s “and-one” play late in the third quarter Thursday in part because he had to think twice about leaving Boozer near the basket.

These things happen, if you care to look, and they have real value to an offense that isn’t exactly teeming with dangerous players beyond Rose. Despite missing Rose for nearly half the season, Chicago built a top-10 offense largely on the back of two versatile big men, Boozer and Joakim Noah, who screen, pass and move around the floor in smart ways. Then Rose got hurt, and Noah joined him on the sideline, and it all fell apart, with Boozer as the fall guy.

That “fall guy” status is not totally undeserved. Boozer took seven foul shots in six games, and his chronically soft finishing ability came back to haunt Chicago at the worst times. He piled up a playoff-high 23 turnovers, dropping passes, losing the ball near the basket or just throwing it into the stands. He missed so, so many mid-range jumpers.

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Pau Gasol (left) and Andrew Bynum struggled in the Lakers’ Game 6 loss. (Justin Edmonds/Getty Images)

Kobe Bryant played an efficient, effective game Thursday while battling the aftereffects of a stomach ailment. But his teammates imploded around him, and the Nuggets played with a fury and polish that the Lakers could not match in Denver’s 113-96 victory. Bryant was understandably upset afterward. First, there was this on small forward Metta World Peace, who is set to return from his seven-game suspension for Game 7 on Saturday in Los Angeles:

“He’s the one guy that I can rely on night in and night out to compete and play hard and play with that sense of urgency and no fear,” Bryant said of World Peace. “I’m looking forward to having that by my side again.”

The Lakers obviously are missing World Peace, for reasons I outlined toward the end of this piece Wednesday. Small forwards Devin Ebanks and Matt Barnes have been mostly awful, and the Nuggets are ignoring them on offense to bottle up the Lakers’ post game. World Peace is an average NBA player at this point even at his best, but he’s a better three-point shooter, by a healthy margin, than Ebanks or Barnes, and he has a tough post game only one Denver wing player, Danilo Gallinari, is really equipped to defend. With Barnes and Ebanks failing, the Lakers have played a ton of minutes with point guards Ramon Sessions and Steve Blake sharing the floor. Both are subpar defenders whom the Nuggets have torched. The Lakers have allowed 104.4 points per 100 possessions when Blake and Sessions play together, a mark that would have ranked 25th in the regular season.

[Chris Ballard: Kobe got competitive fire from unexpected source]

But in the most obvious sense, Bryant’s lionizing of World Peace is ridiculous. He is the one Laker whom Bryant has literally not been able to count on in these playoffs, having removed himself with an irresponsible elbow to James Harden’s head in the team’s second-to-last regular-season game. The NBA suspended World Peace for the first six games of the playoffs, and given the trickle-down effect of his absence, it’s fair to wonder if L.A. would have wrapped up this series by now had he been available. Some reliable teammate.

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David West will be the difference-maker for the Pacers in the second-round series against Miami. (Ron Hoskins/NBAE via Getty Images)

I spent the regular season watching the Pacers and asking two questions:

1. Will this team ever score efficiently enough to be a real threat to the league’s best teams?

2. When is Darren Collison going to make a leap?

The second question basically amounted to: Why doesn’t Collison look more like Tony Parker on the pick-and-roll? Why is he always pulling up for long jump shots? Why can’t he see the passing lane open for just a beat? Or: Why doesn’t he keep his dribble alive a bit longer to create passing lanes that don’t otherwise exist?

But these were the wrong questions, and not just because the Pacers replaced Collison in the starting lineup with a less traditional point guard in George Hill and got even better. Indiana could use an ace point guard — any team could — but it doesn’t really need one, because it’s built to create offense in a different way. The Pacers are not all that different from the Lakers, both the Phil Jackson and Mike Brown versions, in that they use their big men instead of their point guards to get into the teeth of the defense and create shots.

Among playoff teams, only the behemoth Lakers devoted a higher percentage of their possessions to post-up plays than the Pacers, per Synergy Sports. Roy Hibbert will have a huge height advantage over every Miami big man in this series, and how he responds to the quickness of Miami’s bigs and help defenders will be a key factor in how this series goes.

Again, one way to penetrate a defense is simply to toss the ball to a tall person close to the hoop. But over the last 25 games or so, the Pacers have gotten very good at creating penetration through a second method. And with that in mind, I present the player who gives Indiana the best shot at giving Miami an honest run: David West, and his passing skills.

West has been slipping screens for nearly a decade in the NBA, which is a fancy hoops guru way of saying that when West sets a screen in a pick-and-roll, he cuts straight toward the basket almost before he actually sets the pick. He is not interested in lingering there or nailing an opposing point guard with a cement wall pick. He wants to get in the way for a second and then leave, hoping to catch the ball in an open space somewhere just below the foul line and to the left of the paint. This is penetration via the pass. Read More…

It can be frustrating sometimes when fans and media give into easy narratives in explaining what happens in a complicated game involving 10 players interacting at a fast pace over 180 possessions. And then there are times when one team really does “impose its will” and its physicality on an opponent. The Grizzlies’ season-saving 92-80 win in Game 5 was one of those times, especially during the first quarter, when they ran up a big lead they would never surrender, despite the late-game scoring hiccups that are coming to define this series.

Don’t get me wrong: Lots of things contributed to this Memphis win — some fun Xs-and-Os designed to get the ball inside, the brief appearance of 2011 Zach Randolph, stifling perimeter defense that shut off the Clippers’ pick-and-roll attack and late-game injuries to the Clippers’ star players. But at a basic level, the Grizzlies committed themselves to outworking L.A. inside. Randolph fought harder against Reggie Evans’ fronting defense, and the Memphis bigs ran the floor hard, got into Blake Griffin’s chest early and overpowered him in the post.

Let’s look at some of the ways this happened:

• More screening action

One way to beat a fronting defense and generally open lanes  for entry passes is to get big guys moving around screens in the half-court offense. Here is the first Memphis possession of the game:

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