The Pacers are in the playoffs for the first time in five years, but — more importantly — this will be the first time for 8p9s covering Indiana in the postseason. We’re going to jump in with both feet. Read all about it in our multi-part Pacers vs Bulls Playoff Preview series in the hours and days to come.
In the next part of our detailed analysis of the upcoming Pacers/Bulls 1st round playoff series, we’re going to take a look at some Synergy breakdowns. mySynergySports.com is a fantastic site that tracks a team’s results by play types — isos, pick-and-rolls, post ups, etc. — and provides film on each of these plays. It’s a great way to look at how a team approaches its offense, and where a team is strong or weak at both ends of the floor.
Once again, we’re going to start at the top of the house, with a comparisons at each end. The tables you’ll see below will show each team’s ranking in a specific play category based on points per play (PPP). They are color coded with the same green/yellow/red methodology as used in Part Two of this series – Stoplight Analysis. They also include the percentage of time each play was used/defended by that team.
Pacers Offense vs. Bulls Defense
One limitation Synergy has is that all information is year-to-date (YTD). This makes it difficult to break out the Pacers under Vogel vs. under O’Brien. I do have some analysis that approximates this relatively well, and we’ll discuss it later, but for the big picture, we’ll just use the YTD numbers.
You may want to avert your eyes.
Looking at this chart, I can’t help but hear the old Irving Berlin classic, “Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.” (What can I say? I have seven sisters.) In this case, however, it’s more like, “Anything you can stop, I can stop better.”
Chicago’s D is 99 different kinds of nasty.
The only thing they’re “bad” at stopping is “hand offs”, and that’s pretty survivable, considering they only allow the opponent to run those about twice a game. The Pacers are decent at them, but most of theirs came out of O’Brien’s motion offense, not Vogel’s. Regardless, nobody’s getting anywhere against anyone trying to curl Danny off Roy in the high post for a handoff 50 times a game.
No, the Pacers are going to have to go into Chicago’s strong points and defeat them. I’ll get more into this later, but my sense is that Indy’s best chance is with PnR Screener, post up, and transition plays. And, as I mention in the Stoplight Analysis, control the offensive boards.
Bulls’ Offense vs. Pacers’ Defense
The green at the top of the Bulls column underscores Derrick Rose’s impact on the Bulls’ offense. Danny was largely correct when he said:
“Chicago, they go as Derrick Rose goes. If you make a concerted effort to stop Derrick Rose, you have a better chance to beat them.”
Though, I’d qualify it to say that Chicago’s offense goes as Derrick Rose goes. His 32.3% usage rate is second only to Kobe’s 35.0% in the Association. According to BasketballValue, the Bulls score 110.6 points for every 100 possessions with Derrick Rose on the floor, but only 101.9 without him.
Though only about 23% of Chicago’s plays finish as Isos or PnRs, that doesn’t mean they don’t go to it often. Another limitation of Synergy is that it charts plays based on how they finish. Therefore, other plays, like spot ups and cuts can actually come out of a set that was begun with either iso or PnR action.
And that’s where Derrick Rose lives and breathes. Just short of 60% of his plays and shots come out of isos and PnRs. The Pacers are OK at defending the ball-handler in the PnR, but they’re one of the worst in the league in PPP given up in iso situations. More disconcertingly for the upcoming match-up is that Rose’s counterpart, Darren Collison, gives up 1.13 PPP when iso’d.
But it’s really much simpler than that. Rose is the guy that can get inside the Pacer defense, and once he’s there, he does a lot of damage. He scores, he creates, he draws fouls. In 93 minutes against Chicago this year, Roy Hibbert has committed 11 fouls. Five of them have been shooting fouls on Derrick Rose.
Collison will have to step up as much as he can, but Rose will get by him. Rose will get by pretty much anybody Indiana will throw at him. Pacer rotations will have to be quick and strong, because if he gets in the lane, it’s all over but the shouting.
Different Approach
Frank Vogel has moved away from the motion and passing offensive system in favor of the very simple approach of isolations, PnRs and post ups.
The yellow overlay shows the current distribution. As noted in Part II of this series, the offense has improved by 3.5 points per 100 since the end of January. Some of this was personnel changes, but some of this has to do with scrapping an offensive system that the players either couldn’t or wouldn’t understand.
Since this was done in the middle of the season, compromises had to be made. In this case, the Pacers sacrificed coherence, for lack of a better word. In the half-court, they run very simple one-option sets. These primarily consist of iso’s & mid posts for Danny, Post action for Hibbert, and pick-and-roll/pick-and-pop action for Collison, generally paired with Hansbrough.
Given a training camp, Vogel or his replacement may be able to tie these things together into a coherent offense. For this series, however, they’re just going to have to execute the plays they call will brutal precision. It will be no mean feat against the Bulls Defense.
One thing to be encouraged by is the Pacer win over the Bulls on March 18th. In it, the Pacers posted an offensive efficiency of over 116. The Bulls have only allowed more than that five times this season.
The offensive play distribution for that game looked like this:
So, it worked once.
Once.
I mentioned earlier that I thought the keys to success lied in PnRs to the screener, post action, and transition. Taking the last first, transition is crucial because they’ll need easy baskets. Indiana won’t be able to fight a war of attrition in the half-court over a seven-game series. They’ll need to push tempo, because Chicago is just too good otherwise. This may be the toughest thing they’ll have to do, because the pace of play in the playoffs historically has dropped 3 to 4 possessions per game from regular season levels.
The post action will be vital, because it should serve as an anchor to the offense. The Pacers have used the post more under Vogel (12.6% vs. 9.5%). Unfortunately, they have been less effective. The points per possession has dropped from 0.88 to 0.83, and they’re only scoring 42.6% of the time, down from 46.4%. However, the post can best be compared to the running game in football. Even if it’s weak, you have to call the play to keep the defense honest.
The most important weapon — the one most likely to be potent — is going to be the PnR action. We’ll get into this more in the rest of this series, but what really hurt the Bulls on that Friday night was Tyler Hansbrough in the PnP.
Deconstructing the Bulls
We’ve looked in detail at the strengths and weaknesses of both teams, and we’ve talked about how the teams approach the game. In the next part of this series, we’ll break down in further detail the Pacers win over the Bulls on March 18. We’ll also take a look at the other Chicago losses in hopes of finding a common theme.
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The Pacers’ Tendency to Suffer Vomit-Inducing Losses Under Frank Vogel
by Jeremy Comstock on February 1, 2012 at 3:00 pm · 0 comments
The feeling is a familiar one: the bottom drops out of my stomach, a bleak emptiness consumes my soul and mind, and a vein of burning acid starts working its way up my esophagus. The end result is always the same: the Pacers lose – badly – and I vow to never watch them again. This has happened 14 times in the last 58 games. Luckily all these symptoms can be cured by — and my solemn vow forgotten after — a good night’s sleep.
If you were wondering, 58 is the number of games the Pacers have played with Frank Vogel at the helm. Fortunately for the Pacers (and my esophageal lining) 33 of those games have been wins. What disturbs me, however, is that in the 24 games this team has lost, they have been unwatchably wretched for large portions of 14 of them.
Lately I’ve begun calling these types of games – games where all the joy is sucked out of watching my favorite team in all of sports due to their general malaise, pathetic effort level, or atrocious play – vomit-inducing losses (VILs). My gut feeling was that these losses were more common for the Pacers under Frank Vogel than for any other team I’d ever seriously followed, so I decided to dig into the numbers and see what I could find.
At first blush, the numbers certainly seemed to justify my suspicions.
The Pacers have lost 24 games during Vogel’s tenure as coach, and 14 of these losses have been of the vomit-inducing variety. This number includes five of the Pacers’ six losses this season and nine of their eighteen losses last season. This means that 58% of the Pacers losses have been VILs.
What exactly qualifies as a VIL? As I delved into the historical box scores, where my intestinal rumblings were of no help, I developed the following definition of a VIL: (1) the team in question is never really in the game resulting in a double digit loss (for example, the game at Miami this year), (2) the team in question plays an inordinately awful stretch of basketball that results in loss (e.g., at Sacramento or home vs. Orlando), (3) the team in question is beaten by an inferior team that does not play particularly well (e.g., at Detroit or at Sacramento), or (4) the team in question is beaten by an injury-riddled that does not play particularly well (e.g., at Boston).
Even with this (admittedly vague) definition, it is hard to know exactly how much of an outlier that 58% number under Vogel is. I wanted to find some historical comparisons for this number. So I first perused the box scores from 2009-2010: the last full year that Voldemort, a guy you may know as Jim O’Brien, coached the Pacers. (Note: This is not something I would recommend doing for any Pacer fan. It was a painful experience. I used to think the Pacers would have been a playoff team a year earlier if they’d only re-signed Jarrett Jack. I no longer think that.)
The Pacers lost 50 games that year and 20 of them seemed to fit into the VIL category. That’s 40% — a number which seems high, but is far short of Vogel’s 58%.
However, Voldemort’s teams played a style that lead to more wild swings in results and quality of play than Vogel’s teams. To see what a “normal” team would do, I looked at the box scores of the 2010-2011 Philadelphia 76ers. They were a 41-41 team that was near the middle of the pack in every major statistical category, had a bunch of young players, and played at a similar pace to Vogel’s Pacers. The 76ers had only 9 VILs among their 41 losses. That’s a remarkably low 22%. For a comparison with the 2009-10 Pacers, I looked at the 2010-11 Golden State Warriors: 19 of their 46 losses (41%) were VILs.
At this point, the only conclusion I was able to draw was that Vogel’s VIL% was incredibly high. I didn’t want to lie this at his feet, however, without doing due diligence. Maybe the players were the problem.
I decided to look at the first 44 games of the 2010-11 season. During this span, the Pacers lost 27 games with twelve of them being VILs. That’s 44% — approaching Vogel’s rate, but still far short.
All these numbers, though they point to a phenomenon that is certainly occurring, do nothing to explain why. They also don’t tell us if this occurrence is even a problem for anything other than my esophagus. Sadly, I have no definite answers to those questions. I can only offer a couple of theories that I am not entirely satisfied with.
The first is that Vogel’s uber-positivism and use of “rah-rah” motivational tactics has a natural ebb and flow that is not sustainable on a nightly basis. When the confidence/enthusiasm starts to wane, the bottom drops out.
My second theory is that it has nothing to do with Vogel’s coaching whatsoever. Former NCAA football coach Homer Rice once said “You can motivate by fear, and you can motivate by reward. But both those methods are only temporary. The only lasting thing is self-motivation.” It’s possible that this collection of players is just not a very self-motivated group.
The truth could be a combination of these two ideas or it could be something else entirely. It might even be nothing more than coincidence and a small sample. It is, however, something to watch as this young team and coach move forward into what I hope will be a bright future.
Related Topics: Frank Vogel, Jim O'Brien
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