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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• Very cool charts showing which play types (isolations, post-ups, etc.) various teams use most often, which players get the ball on each type of play, and which plays actually produce points at efficient rates. What makes this post by Ian Levy especially worth reading is his thoughtful, nuanced analysis of the raw numbers. That player X scores at a ho-hum rate on isolation plays, Levy writes, is not necessarily an indication that the player is behaving selfishly or even damaging his team’s offense. Team context is a malleable thing; change one little part of it, and the rest changes along with it in ways that are hard to predict.

• Boston could use more from one slumping bench player.

• A delightful chart of the worst shooters (in a minimum number of attempts) from various spots on the floor. Oh, Amar’e.

• A review of the four regular-season meetings between the Heat and Pacers.

• Potentially bad news involving Chris Andersen.

• At Basketball Prospectus, Kevin Pelton wonders if the playoffs bring unfair criticism of coaches. Read More…

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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Grizzlies coach Lionel Hollins wouldn’t be human if he weren’t frustrated, his team having blown a massive lead in Game 1 of their series with the Clippers and lost two other very winnable games in crunch time. He accused the Clippers of “flopping,” and then on Wednesday, he described Clippers’ strong man Reggie Evans like this, per Chris Herrington of the Memphis Flyer:

“His impact has been pushing, grabbing and throwing people out of the way.”

That’s an oversimplification, of course. Evans has been playing some spirited and effective post defense, and his ability to front the Grizzlies’ post players has made entering the ball a tough task for Memphis’ perimeter guys. He is a dynamite offensive rebounder, even without any subtle cheating. But Hollins is right to suggest Evans is throwing some well-timed shoves into his game, and if the referees aren’t going to call all of them, why wouldn’t he? He  wiped out Zach Randolph with one-handed hook of Randolph’s upper body to snag an offensive rebound in overtime of the Clippers’ Game 4 victory, and we caught him red-handed shoving Marreese Speights out of the way as Speights tried to set a pick for Mike Conley in Game 3.

These are blatantly obvious fouls that somehow go uncalled in an era when point guards can’t lay a hand on their opposite number during dribble drives. And it’s not all that unusual for officials to let pass such contact among big men or at least executed by one. Kevin Garnett is the master at adding a little extra oomph to every one of his interactions with an opposing point guard, and Kendrick Perkins in the Thunder’s opening round series created a driving lane for Russell Westbrook by simply shoving Ian Mahinmi out of the way, in full view of everyone watching the game. Utah’s Paul Millsap is another guy who will occasionally disrupt an opposing pick-and-roll by pushing the screener in the back and nudging him out of position to set a screen.

I’m going to keep singling these out when I notice them, or when alert readers flag them. My interest does not stem from some moral outrage or a vendetta against any particular player. Basketball is and should be a physical game, especially on the block, and part of being good at basketball is being able to withstand physical play. It’s more that I think the shoves are funny. They are just so obvious, out there in open space along the perimeter, blatant uncalled fouls that have a real impact on whether a team scores on a particular possession. I find it curious big men are so easily able to get away with them.

To wit: Step right up, Greg Stiemsma! Here’s Boston’s backup center laying a nice one on poor old Erick Dampier Tuesday night in Atlanta’s thrilling Game 5 win:

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Rookie Kenneth Faried (right) outworked Pau Gasol and the Lakers in Game 5. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Before the playoffs, I predicted that the Lakers would beat the Nuggets in seven games. And so while I’m not entirely surprised that the younger, deeper Nuggets have a chance to tie the first-round series at three games apiece with a victory in Denver on Thursday, the manner in which we’ve arrived here has been unexpected. Five reasons this series is still going on:

• The Nuggets, in the most basic sense, are winning or at least “tying” the major trade-offs they have to make because of the Lakers’ massive size advantage. One such trade-off: scoring enough fast-break points by outrunning the Lakers’ big men to compensate for all of Los Angeles’ post-up scores, offensive rebounds and easy buckets that come with pounding the ball inside. Denver has pulled the trick so far, in part because it is simply outhustling the Lakers.

The Nuggets averaged a league-high 19.8 fast-break points during the regular season, according to NBA.com. They’ve increased that number to 21 per game in this series, an even better accomplishment than it appears when you consider two things:

1. The Lakers are winning the tempo battle in general. The teams have averaged about 90 possessions per game in the series, almost exactly what L.A. averaged in the regular season and down substantially from the league-leading 94 possessions per game for the roadrunner Nuggets.

2. The Lakers are not turning the ball over. Only two teams, Denver and San Antonio, have coughed it up less often per possession in the postseason, meaning the Nuggets are not feasting on an unusual number of steals and run-outs.

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Mike Woodson has won the support of Carmelo Anthony. (Issac Baldizon/NBAE via Getty Images)

• Frank Isola of the New York Daily News reports this morning that the Knicks and Mike Woodson have started discussions about a contract extension that would remove the “interim” tag from Woodson’s title in the big chair. Woodson later denied the talks are happening, which is what good soldiers are supposed to do when things leak, and Woodson knows only good soldiers get considered for big jobs at James Dolan’s Madison Square Garden. Dolan would likely make an exception for Phil Jackson, whom a very loud segment of New York fans insists is waiting by the phone at his ranch in Montana, dying to take this job.

• Matt Moore at CBS Sports is worried Woodson might get the job for the wrong reasons, i.e. his connections with several high-level Knicks employees and associates, and the fact that he has won Carmelo Anthony’s good will in part by letting him do whatever he wants on offense. These are fair concerns, and a full analysis of Woodson’s job in New York is for another day. But the Knicks, in general, have played well for him under trying circumstances, and he has shown a willingness to tweak the rotation and yank guys who don’t go all out on defense. Anthony has worked much harder on defense for Woodson than he did for Mike D’Antoni, and it remains to be seen whether that effort is a lasting thing or the temporary product of a position change (to power forward for a late-season stretch) and the dismissal of a coach Anthony didn’t especially like.

• Any analysis of an overtime game filled with clutch heroics is bound to focus on the end stages, but D.J. Foster of ClipperBlog makes a very good point at the top of his recap: Don’t forget what Caron Butler did at the beginning.

• Raja Bell has one year left on his contract for nearly $3.5 million, but the relationship between Bell and head coach Tyrone Corbin might be broken. Utah has the amnesty provision in hand and could have a medium-sized chunk of cap room by using it on Bell.

• Steve Aschburner of NBA.com takes an in-depth look at the Luol Deng-Andre Iguodala matchup, which is not going so well for the Bulls.

• Brian Robb of CelticsHub digs into the numbers to find one big reason Boston is up 3-1 on the Hawks. Hint: The C’s have so far kicked the worst habit of the Big Three era. Read More…

Battling the Grizzlies’ rugged front line, Blake Griffin had 30 points and seven assists in the Clippers’ victory in Game 4. (Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)

With about 5:40 left and the Clippers leading the Grizzlies by seven points in Game 4 on Monday, Memphis forwards Rudy Gay and Zach Randolph ran a pick-and-roll on the right side of the floor. The pick held up Gay’s defender, Nick Young, forcing Randolph’s man, Kenyon Martin, to slide onto Gay and chase him above the three-point line. Randolph rolled wide open into his sweet spot on the right wing. Randolph’s partner in bruising dominance, Marc Gasol, flashed toward the foul line, putting Gasol’s defender, Blake Griffin, in a terrible position, stuck as the only defender left to monitor two very good, very large players.

Gay took one lefty dribble backward, and with his momentum still moving him slightly toward mid-court, he threw a long bounce pass toward Randolph. The pass was a beat late, thrown with too little pace, and it bounced high off the ground. The play unfolded slowly enough for Griffin, an allegedly poor defender, to read it, dart over to Randolph, slice in front him and steal the ball.

On the ensuing possession, the Clippers went to Griffin on the left block against Randolph, hoping Griffin could use his allegedly unrefined post game to create offense while Chris Paul continued an extended stint on the bench. Griffin turned to face Randolph, brought the ball down to his knee level and faked a lefty drive to the baseline. Randolph leaned that way, and Griffin exploded back to his right and dribbled into the foul line area, drawing Grizzlies point guard Mike Conley off Mo Williams at the top of the three-point arc for some crisis management. Griffin flicked a pass to Williams for a three-pointer, dishing the last of his seven assists (to go with 30 points) during an important stretch in which the Clippers built a lead, on Griffin’s back, as Paul rested up for his late-game heroics.

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After another epic between the Grizzlies and Clippers on Monday, every remaining first-round series stands at 3-1. And in a weird scheduling quirk, four teams have a chance to close out 4-1 victories tonight, a scenario that would leave us with one fait accompli in Miami and one remaining hope for real on-court drama in Memphis. Here’s one key factor to watch in each of the four games:

PACERS VS. MAGIC

Indiana has outscored the Magic by 55 points in the 158 minutes that David West has logged in this series. (Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images)

The power forward matchup: We knew going in that Orlando lacked the size to match up with the behemoth Roy Hibbert, but David West’s old-man game has been just as big a problem — and perhaps a bigger one — for Ryan Anderson, Earl Clark and (in fewer chances) Glen Davis. Indiana has outscored the Magic by 55 points in the 158 minutes that West has logged in this series, while the Magic have won the remaining 39 minutes — with West sitting — by a mammoth 19-point margin.

This all peaked in the third quarter of Game 4, when the Pacers built a huge behind West doing a little bit of everything — slipping screens to create penetration, drawing double-teams in the post, ducking in for post-up chances behind Hibbert pick-and-rolls and firing solid passes to open shooters. He overpowered Anderson and Clark, and his play, coupled with Anderson’s disappearance, has been perhaps the largest swing factor in this series. It got so bad that Stan Van Gundy went small in the second half of the fourth quarter, with Hedo Turkoglu at power forward, a move that seemed to unnerve the Pacers for a short stretch.

But in the long run, or what’s left of it, the Magic need Anderson to make this matchup something close to a wash. He’s just 10-of-31 from the floor so far, and the secondary skills he brings — offensive rebounds, two-point shots, the occasional free throws — have vanished in this series. Orlando has a huge speed advantage at the big-man positions, and it can (and has) hurt Indiana by running West in multiple pick-and-rolls and targeting Hibbert as the last man in quick-hitting, staggered screen plays, knowing Hibbert will sag back and concede a jump shot. Anderson needs to make some of those jump shots, and the Magic need to find a way to limit West on the other end without compromising themselves fatally elsewhere. That’s a huge challenge given the roster limitations here, but Van Gundy, working what might be his last game in Orlando on Tuesday, has coached his tail off in this series. Does he have some tricks left? Read More…