LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Long before the Lakers broke the Houston Rockets, James Harden broke Frank Vogel.
Back in Jan. 20, 2018, Harden scored 60 points in the highest-scoring triple-double in NBA history. It came against a wild crowd in Houston, without the help of his then-teammate Chris Paul. The numbers were overwhelming: The Beard shot 19 for 30 from the field and 17 for 18 from the line.
The unfortunate defense who surrendered history in a 114-107 loss was the Orlando Magic. Vogel was their head coach, and he had absolutely no answers, trying to defend one of the best offensive players in history with Magic starter Mario Hezonja.
That game was arguably the signature regular season performance in an eventual 2018 MVP season. For Vogel, it was a rough night on a long road to getting dismissed at the end of the year. But something clicked in his brain afterward — an understanding that he, as a defensive-minded coach, needed to eventually learn to adapt or be cast aside.
“That game,” Vogel told Southern California News Group on Saturday night, “it really changed my mindset about how a modern NBA defense has to look.”
Fast-forward two-and-a-half years: On Saturday night, Vogel coached a team that beat Harden and won a game (and a series) that actually mattered. After a Game 1 letdown, the Lakers proceeded to stifle the Rockets like few teams have this season in four straight wins. The mere point totals — from 112 points, to 109, to 106, to 100 and finally 96 — paint a compelling portrait of either the Lakers’ tightening grip, the Rockets’ withering confidence, or some combination of both.
Despite averaging more minutes in this series than in the regular season, Harden’s scoring (34.3 to 29.4), field goal attempts (22.3 to 17.2) and 3-point attempts (12.4 to 7.4) all decreased as the Lakers used timely double-teams to force the ball out of Harden’s hands, then asked their wings to scramble back to the corners to not give up corner threes. LeBron James and Anthony Davis used their natural size, length and athleticism to help the team switch more at the forward positions, then swat Houston’s drives out of the sky.
The Lakers’ accomplished many of their defensive goals on the way to winning, including holding Harden (a 35.5 percent 3-point shooter) to fewer shots than Russell Westbrook (a 25.8 percent 3-point shooter). The No. 6 offense in the NBA’s regular season with 112.5 offensive rating was reduced to a 106.8 rating in the series.
In the third quarter of Game 4, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope said, it felt like Houston had lost a lot of will to even compete.
“We felt like when we went up, we felt like they was getting tired,” he said. “We was running them a lot, pressuring them the whole game. We feel like they got tight.”
It represents growth for Vogel, who once crafted elite defenses around old-school principles of having an elite rim protector, in his case two-time All-Star Roy Hibbert. Vogel’s Indiana teams that went to two Eastern Conference Finals had grind-out games well under triple digits, favoring rock fights over shootouts.
But times have changed. Hibbert was drummed out of the league by 2017, too flat-footed to keep up. Vogel’s best Pacers team which won 56 games in 2014 only saw 19 threes attempted per game; this season, no NBA team averaged fewer than 29 3-pointers attempted against them. With Steph Curry, Damian Lillard and Harden initiating actions further and further away from the rim and being able to shoot consistently from ludicrously deep range, Vogel’s old-school approach was getting torn apart.
Harden’s 60-point triple-double was the game that Vogel said truly “sparked” him to look for something different. Like he had early in his career, he went to the tape, looking through European footage and other international footage for inspiration. During a sabbatical year away from coaching, he made a point to visit with the Celtics’ Brad Stevens and the Jazz’s Quin Snyder among others, whose bedrock typically rests on defense.
It’s not that the Lakers have innovated new strategy on Lillard or Harden, but they’ve committed to it and executed in a way few teams have. In the last few years, it’s become more common to blitz high pick-and-rolls even near halfcourt against some of the league’s best perimeter threats. The Lakers were able to trap Lillard and keep him below average because their bigs could match up with Portland’s size and still be mobile enough to double team at the perimeter then get back on their man in the paint.
But the Rockets don’t typically run pick and rolls; Harden works out of isolation. When Harden gets doubled, there’s always an open shot in a spread-out floor. Doubling worked for the Lakers in a January meeting when the Rockets had Clint Capela, but in a follow-up in February after Capela was traded, they were badly beaten by open shots on the backside.
The Lakers initially tried guarding the Rockets straight up in Game 1 to avoid facing this problem: They got rocked by Harden and Westbrook to the tune of 63 combined points.
There was disagreement the next day as the Lakers schemed their counter: Should they go small and try a riskier, but different, doubling scheme that would change their rotations and potentially expose open shots? Or should they stick to their plan, trusting that their Game 1 loss was more a product of their turnovers that led to Rockets’ fastbreak possessions?
“We felt like we could guard these guys straight up without having to get burned with threes, give that a shot first, but obviously they’re too good to guard one-on-one,” Vogel said. “We saw that in Game 1, it was clear to me that we had to shift our focus into taking the ball out of those guys’ hands, much like we did with Damian Lillard, just in a different way.”
That required sacrifice by the Lakers’ centers, who sat for most of the series after being core role players throughout the year. It also required a lot of hustle from the Lakers’ wings, who had to scramble after Harden passed out of the double to cover the open shooter. It required the Lakers to have the awareness to chase corner threats like P.J. Tucker and Robert Covington off the 3-point line. And it required James to play low man with an energy that he hasn’t needed to summon since he became a Laker.
In short, it worked: Vogel and his staff worked plenty hard on the schemes, but it wouldn’t have come to fruition without attention to detail by the players themselves. Even after the Game 2 adjustment, Harden and Mike D’Antoni spoke confidently about how many times they had seen similar approaches before. But they never figured out how to beat the Lakers’ hustle.
“It’s not something he hasn’t seen before: He’s one of the best scorers in the history of the game and one of the most unique,” Vogel said. “I just think that we executed. We have an extremely athletic, long, smart defensive team that was really defensive oriented in terms of how to do it and not get too exposed on the backside. And it wasn’t perfect, by any stretch, but it was enough to get the job done.”
That confidence has been building, the Lakers said, and there’s a sync between players and coaches on defense that feels like it just might be the edge to win it all. The Lakers have a 105.4 defensive rating in the postseason so far, and they’ve won by playing both big and small on defense.It’s a team that Vogel could only have dimly imagined two-and-a-half years ago, but it’s the defense of his dreams.
“I love how this team is defending right now, I’ll tell you that much,” Vogel said in his postgame press conference. “And this is a different era of NBA basketball. So the scheme that we used back then is very, very different than what we’re using right now, but this group is very locked into the details of it and it’s a heck of a weapon in these playoff series to really take away these other team’s strengths.”
How the Lakers defense stopped James Harden and the Rockets posted first on https://anaheimsignsorangecounty.blogspot.com
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