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Breathtaking: Diandra Eyton has become the most influential defensive player in the playoffs

The Phoenix center turns out to be a marvelous guard and illustrates what the new ultimate stopwatch looks like, Steve Nash becomes the true star of Brooklyn, Utah demonstrates in front of the Clippers the power of the foot and only Philadelphia still finds no solution to the mystery.

Ravitz on the silent heroes of the second round

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• Diandra Eyton

• Steve Nash

• Ben Simmons

• Utah Jazz

Assaf Ravitz

Saturday, June 12, 2021, 2 p.m.

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Brooklyn - Milwaukee: The true star of the Hunts

The most surprising statistic in the second round so far is that the best defensive team of the round, by a huge margin, is Brooklyn. Steve Nash's team absorbs 94.6 points per 100 passes in its three games, 12.2 points less than the best defense in the league in the regular season. And she does it against Milwaukee, who scored 116.5 points per 100 passers in the regular season and 115 in the first round. Three games are a tiny sample, but they are a significant part of a playoff series, in this case a series defined by many as the true final. When a team takes over a series through defense it is easier to give credit to the coach, and for me Nash is the real star of the series in the meantime.

It is difficult to explain what makes a team connected, what makes a coach one that the players listen to, believe in. But it's easy to spot when it's happening, and it's definitely happening in Brooklyn. Losing a superstar in the first minute of a series is something that can break a team, probably a heavyweight series that few would bet on the Nets without James Harden. But as he does throughout the obstacle-saturated season, Nash has conveyed to his players that they can handle it. Something in his calmness seeps into the players. They responded to Harden's injury in three perfect defensive games, probably their best all season. Everyone who goes up to the floor works hard, knows his job, concentrates, avoids mistakes, fights for position and rebounds all the time. This is true for Kyrie Irving, perhaps the toughest player to train in the league, and it is also true for a shaky assistant team made up of players who did not want them in Detroit, the Clippers and CSKA Moscow and suddenly looks like a cohesive and impenetrable unit.

Nash also earns the trust of the players thanks to his great professional adjustments. In his debut season as head coach, his standout feature is flexibility. He has prepared his team for different types of defenses, of rivalries, of situations, and pulls out what is needed when needed. Against Milwaukee, he somehow made Blake Griffin a defense expert. The combination of height, width and athleticism makes Blake a very successful guard on Yannis Antocompo, one who makes it difficult for the outgoing MVP to throw over him, pass through him or overtake him with agility. Kevin Durant, in a wonderful defensive series, is close to the paint and helps build the famous wall against Yannis. Durant keeps a player who releases a ball slowly (Brock Lopez or PJ Tucker), allowing the defensive rotation to reach him and prevent light shots almost completely. Precise automatic substitutions force the Bucks' superstars to take hard shots, and most of the time they have a hard time doing so.

Compared to most NBA coaches, Nash knows how to react quickly even while playing.

When the third game got complicated, he had some excellent adjustments that got Brooklyn back on track.

He made Bruce Brown his regular blocker to take advantage of the excessive distance Lopez gives him, and when KD struggled to create shot situations in front of Tucker, who functioned as a human tank politely refusing to get stuck in the blocks, he created double-blocking exercises that managed to free his star in the second half.

This was not enough among the excavations of the third game.

On the face of it the loss does not seem dramatic for the Hunts, a weak offensive day is rare, but the momentum of a series can change quickly.

Milwaukee can tell you about it, two years ago it almost went up to 0: 3 against Toronto in the Eastern Conference Finals and the Raptors' ability to steal Game 3 changed the series.

Nothing is finished yet.

More on Walla!

Milwaukee survived an excavation battle and shrank to 2: 1 against Brooklyn, Utah went up to 0: 2 over the Clippers

To the full article

When it happens, it just happens.

Steve Nash with Durant (Photo: AP, Adam Hunger)

Utah - Clippers: The regular season has meaning

Eventually, a week into the second round the teams that finished the regular season in first and second place at each conference lead in their series.

Things can turn upside down, but it could very well be that the regional finals will be between the top two on each side and the four teams with the best balance in the league in the regular season.

This is supposed to be the most anticipated option, but in the West this is really not the case.

Despite the wonderful regular season of both, few expected a regional final between Utah and Phoenix.

So here's a scoop: the regular season still has meaning.

This is especially noticeable in the series between Utah and the Clippers.

On paper the Clippers have a lot more benefits and options, certainly when Mike Conley is injured.

On paper Utah is built for the regular season and the Clippers are built for the playoffs, which is a whole other world.

In practice, in the first two games we saw a battle between a team that worked an entire season to formulate a method, style, character and hierarchy and a team that each series re-tries to figure out what and who it is.

After taking Tyrone almost half a series to figure out how to deal with Luka Doncic, he starts from scratch in an attempt to figure out how to deal with Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gober's dominant presence. While Brooklyn shows the advantage of flexibility, the Clippers show the disadvantage of inconsistent rotation and players getting in and out of it. Luke Kenard went into rotation thanks to the shot but Mitchell signed him on defense, Patrick Beverly got back on track thanks to defending Mitchell but looked cold and unable to score a shot, Ivica Zubac was returned to the top five and was helpless in front of Mitchell and Gover's pick n roll The other and mentioned that he is capable of ruining a game in two bad minutes. There was no doubt that inconsistency does no good to any of them.

Utah exemplifies the opposite, she just does what she did all year on both sides. The regular template helps each of the actors to perform his role well. The importance of the pattern is especially noticeable in defense. Every player knows exactly what is required of him, how he responds to each exercise on offense, where to move in rotation, when to help and when not. Thus, the bunch of outside players, none of whom are senior defensive players, look excellent in dealing with Kwai Leonard and Paul George. The offense, in Conley’s absence, relies heavily on the ability of Mitchell and Jordan Clarkson to create shot situations, once the defense is forced to respond Utah moves to her familiar ball propulsion.

The Clippers once again put themselves in the pit at the beginning of the series, and once again the possibility that they will be able to get out of it cannot be ruled out.

On good shooting days it is very difficult to stop Ty Lou's gang, and having managed to connect in Game 7 in the first round with a wonderful shooting day they may well find it on their own again as the series progresses.

But Utah's defense is much better than Dallas', making far fewer small mistakes, knowing how to make it difficult for threes with four players while Gober waits in color.

Kwai and George meet a collection of guards with a large body who allow themselves to cling to them because Guber is in cover, they make any basket of the Clippers' two stars look tough.

More on Walla!

"One of the best one-on-one players ever": Donovan Mitchell begins to gain recognition

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In the end, basketball is a matter of habits - and those of Utah are much better and more established at the moment (Photo: AP, Rick Bowmer)

Phoenix - Denver: The new stopwatch

The inability of the Clippers to deal with Luka Doncic and Donovan Mitchell is also interesting from another direction. This is the team that is best built in the league to deal defensively with senior scorers. Kwai is, apparently, still the best personal guard in the league. But nowadays a lone player cannot stop a star who has the holy trinity of ability to go up to a three from a dribbling, ability to reach the ring and good passing ability. When such a player gets a good block he will always have an initial advantage that is very difficult to close, the only way to deal with such a pick n roll is to bring help or make automatic substitutions, which many teams have been doing in recent years. The classic stopwatch status is in decline because the rival star can force a spare and choose against whom he is attacking. Less important is the quality of the best defensive player in the top five, more important is the quality of the least defensive player, and the really senior players will always find someone who is easy with them.

All of this is irrelevant to the senior domestic players who have taken over the league in recent years. Teams that do not have a player who can make it difficult for Anthony Davis, Joel Ambide or Nikola Jukic will not be able to survive a series against their teams (maybe Yannis, in fact, belongs to this list and not to the outside players). To make it difficult for these players requires a combination of size, strength, agility and wisdom that very few domestic players in the league have. Maybe it’s time to treat the quality guards in the face positions as the new, real-time stoppers of today, the ones without whom there really isn’t much chance of making the four playoff series a success.

This whole introduction is meant to announce Diandra Eyton as the ultimate new stopwatch. He may be the most important defensive player of the second round. His ability to make it difficult for Nikola Jukic is the basis for Phoenix's defensive game in the series against Denver. Thanks to this ability Monty Williams can be picky about whether, when and how to bring a double-team on the MVP and bring the Nuggets' assisting team back to his natural size. Even when the Joker achieves wonderful numbers, like in the 32nd, 20th and 10th game of the night, he does not control the game as usual. Tonight he worked very hard on every basket and it exhausted him to a level where he failed to function defensively in the second half.

Eyton refuses to make a mistake on defense.

He looks like a robot that took him a year and a half to learn the role of defensive chin in the NBA and since then he has been doing everything perfectly.

He is always in the right place, knows how to make it difficult to shoot and position himself for a rebound, does not commit unnecessary offenses (which was Joseph Norkich's weak point in the first round), he cannot be moved, he cannot be surprised.

In the last week he has been making it difficult for the player that even Rudy Gover has not been able to make it difficult for him.

Eyton embodies the spirit of Phoenix, a stable and self-assured team that does not take a free evening, a pretty amazing team that most of its rotation players are in their first playoff.

She enjoys senior rivals with injured stars in the meantime, but what she does in this playoffs is far from self-evident.

More on Walla!

Phoenix is ​​already 0: 3 over Denver, Philadelphia won in Atlanta and went up to 1: 2

To the full article

robot.

Eyton (Photo: AP, Matt York)

Philadelphia - Atlanta: A Mystery Named Ben Simmons

The stability and efficiency of Phoenix stands out against the background of the immaturity of Atlanta, a team that is in a similar developmental stage in terms of the experience of the rotation players. In every game of the Hawks there are moments when it is hard to miss how talented and promising this staff is, when everything connects to them it is a brilliant attacking team and a brilliant superstar wins over it, but in every game there are also moments when we remember that these are inexperienced kids in the playoffs. Trey Young has quite a few minutes of lack of concentration, John Collins and Kevin Heather can disappear for entire games, all three making a lot of small mistakes on defense. That was enough against the Knicks (much thanks to Diandra Hunter who has been injured since), it probably won’t be enough against a quality opponent like Philadelphia.

After Atlanta’s win in the first game, Doc Rivers turned the series around when he moved Ben Simmons to keep Trey Young.

Simmons and Ambide, rarely in this playoff, face Young and Clint Capella's pick n roll alone and without a spare, Simmons fights the block and Ambide waits in color.

It does not always work because Young is well versed in all the secrets of produced n 'roll, including unusual ways of squeezing offenses, but in quite a few cases the size of the two does manage to bother the miniature quarterback (by NBA standards).

This is how Simmons makes himself the most important classic stopwatch in this round.

It is not certain that it will work against bigger players physically, or in two years after Xiang will gain playoff experience, but in the meantime Simmons' unusual combination of size and agility makes him a rare defensive player.

Doubts about the combination with ambide arise again.

Ben Simmons (Photo: Reuters)

On offense, Simmons continues to be a mystery that there is no logical way to know what to expect from her on any given day. Throughout his short career there have been periods in which he seems to understand how to express his unique set of abilities, alongside longer periods in which he has disappeared. In the second game against the Hawks he scored four points and took three shots, the first half tonight seemed a direct sequel, then he took control of the start of the second half through his post game and actually led the run that dominated the game. The problem is that it's still unclear what to expect from him in front of a quality playoff defense, because Philadelphia has yet to meet one. He scores a 35.4 percent penalty in the playoffs, which means it's almost impossible to let him lead a ball in money time.

In a game against Washington in which Ambide was injured, Simmons played the role of point center for everything.

He led the ball at the start of the attack, but after the first delivery moved to the position of chin blocking and rolling inside.

This is a role he performs great, a kind of Drymond Green with a better and more powerful finish in color.

It was his best game in the playoffs.

But when Ambide plays Simmons can not perform this role, which reinforces the question of whether Simmons and Ambide are suitable to play together.

Eventually the series will arrive that will examine the Sixers' offense and flood the Simmons question, the answer he will provide is one of the most important of the coming weeks.

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