Maybe we’re being too hard on Jamal Crawford. Or maybe not. Over at the Washington Post’s Fancy Stats blog, I wrote about the brilliance of the Clippers’ high pick-and-roll and why they seem to get away from it throughout games. Click here to read the full article. Here is an excerpt:
The Clippers’ offense has actually been 2.8 points per 100 possessions worse with Crawford in the game during the postseason, and plenty of that has to do with their inability to move the ball.
Jamal can score. He can cross guys over, but once he enters the game with Paul, we start to see so much isolation. According to Synergy Sports, Crawford is one of the ten most isolation-heavy players in the league, and more than two-thirds of his catch-and-shoot attempts are actually guarded. That’s pretty easily the most of any player on the Clippers.
That style it may work for a bench unit, which needs someone who can score on his own considering there aren’t many facilitators out there when the reserves are in, but when J. Crossover plays crunch time, it’s a different story.
That’s when Chris Paul takes his own turn, Crawford takes his, and the offense just starts to go away. Paul runs the pick-and-roll on about two-thirds of his plays. Crawford, meanwhile, is doing it less than 40 percent of the time.
