The Clippers spent a good part of Tuesday’s practice working on defensive rotations. During the team’s 5-on-5 scrimmage, the coaching staff would have one practice squad run a high pick-and-roll, with a direction by Mike Dunleavy to go left or right off the action. The defensive unit was then ordered to trap or “red” the point guard, which means the PG’s primary defender would crowd him directly on his shoulder, with the screener’s defender joining his teammate out on the perimeter.

Basic perimeter trap, but effective only if the back line defenders rotate with quickness and precision.

This coverage scheme is the backbone of most NBA defenses on half-court S/R possessions. The teams that perform this task well (Cleveland, San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans) tend to prosper.  Teams that struggle on defensive rotations get shredded, particularly by offenses who can spread the floor with shooters.

Remember these guys? Defense was their middle name. (Photo by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE)

Will the Clippers be a solid halfcourt defensive team this season?

Hope: Crisp as 2005-06
In some sense, defensive rotations are a lot like officiating in basketball. When your team’s defense is rotating effectively, you hardly notice it.  When they blow it, it’s painfully obvious and aggravating.

Let’s rewind to 2005-06, when the Clippers were the 7th most efficient defense in the league. One of the bedrock strengths of that team was the alacrity of their half-court defense. On a 1-5 pick-and-roll, Cassell and Kaman would blitz the ballhandler, and the backline trio of Elton Brand, Cuttino Mobley and Quinton Ross would pick up the screener and still get to their respective spots along the perimeter. That season, the Clips played 3-on-4 defense in those situations as well as any team in the league, which is why, despite being a below-average offensive squad, they were a Raja Bell hail mary away from a conference final berth.

“A lot of what you do defensively is keyed by the guys on the back line,” Dunleavy said. “They have a chance to see the play and read the play. They see everybody out there.”

That 2005-06 team knew how to read half-court defenses even though, with the possible exception of Ross, none of the other four players in that lineup were All-NBA defenders. But Brand and Mobley had acute court awareness and were tough as nails. That season, you could watch 40 defensive possessions before seeing a blown rotation. Though many Clippers fans might be loath to admit it, Mike Dunleavy had a lot to do with that.

For this year’s Clippers, getting from chaos to fluency is going to take a little time.

“It’s all about repetitions,” Dunleavy said. “For us, the first component is getting to the right spots, make the right reads, and then you continue to build on that.”

Will this team have the personnel and collective smarts to replicate that 2005-06 defense? It’s certainly possible. If you swap out Al Thornton for Rasual Butler, the Clippers’ “three man rotation” defending a 1-5 pick-and-roll would be composed of Eric Gordon, Rasual Butler, and Blake Griffin/Marcus Camby/Chris Kaman.

Aside from the beastliness, explosiveness, athleticism, balance, and general immortality Griffin displayed at Summer League, Dunleavy was most impressed with the rookie’s reads on defense. “He really got the rotations,” Dunleavy has said … three times in interviews over the past eight weeks. He’s telling the truth. Not only was Griffin routinely at the right spot, he reacted with ease to nearly every offensive counter. On top of that, he was a vocal traffic cop on D. In short, he got it.

Rasual Butler has the length and wherewithal to bounce from a cutter back to the perimeter effectively. The upgrade over Thornton in this department is almost inestimable.

The wild card here is Eric Gordon. Though EJ has the strength to body up as a man defender against many opposing shooting guards, he has yet to master team defense and has a long way to go before he’s Cat Mobley. But there’s tremendous upside here. Gordon played with dozens of lineups last season and it’s unreasonable to expect a young rookie to grasp the nuances of NBA rotations — particularly when there was a different defensive unit out there each time he took the floor … and that unit often included the likes of Thornton and Zach Randolph. When you consider that collection of players last season, it’s no wonder the Clips finished 27th in defensive efficiency.

This season, Butler will take tremendous pressure off  Gordon on the wing.  If Griffin is as quick a study defensively as he’s demonstrated early, the Clippers could be a dramatically different, and vastly improved, defensive unit.

The Fear: Opponents Exploit the Clips’ Inexperience
Compliment Griffin and Gordon all you want, but can you find any precedent for an elite defensive unit that depends on the instincts of a couple of 20 year olds?  I’ve been asked/forced to go on record with a prediction of the Clippers’ win total this season, and the optimistic number I’ve come up with is 36-38. And it’s this dynamic — along with the rebounding on the wings — that’s kept that number in check.

This fear isn’t without a disclaimer — it’s early. Although some believe that the ability of a player to understand half-court defense is a hard-wired intuition, there’s plenty of evidence that a player can cultivate that defensive readiness.

“These are skills that can be taught,” Dunleavy said. “When you get it right, it will be really good.”

Note the future progressive tense here.  It will be really good.  But that could take some time and there are several rotation players on the squad for whom that time could be an eternity: Thornton, Steve Novak, DeAndre Jordan, Ricky Davis (at times). Gordon still has a ways to go.  Chris Kaman is a sold interior defender, but becomes less capable the farther away from the basket. At this juncture, only Marcus Camby and Butler can be depended on for crisp possession in-possession out rotations.

Another uncertain piece here: Baron Davis’ ability to contain the ballhandler. For all his defensive failings — and they were many — Cassell knew he’d be beaten off most S/Rs, but he was very good about funneling the opposing PG to the right spot. Baron has been a very, very good defender in the past. Last year? Well, you watched the games. You tell me. Will Baron recommit himself this season?

There are a lot of uncertainties and the prospect of this collection of players replicating the air-tight 2005-06 squad defensively are very, very remote.  If this season’s Clippers can finish in the high-teens in defensive efficiency, that would be a vast improvement — but still leave them as a 30-ish win team.

The Hope: Gordon and Griffin become quick studies under the tutelage of a coach whose specialty is this kind of instruction.

The Fear: That learning process takes far longer than anticipated. Thornton continues to get the bulk of the minutes at the 3, and the base pick-and-roll defense up top will leak like a sieve.

This is an exciting time for those trying to find new and compelling ways to understand basketball through analytical means.  The sphere of advanced statistical analytics is experiencing a golden era, and I was fortunate enough to be at ground zero this past weekend — the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.  Some of the smartest people in the NBA world gathered in Cambridge to exchange ideas and pose larger questions about what we can — and in some cases, can’t — learn about the pro game from advanced data.

One of the things that continues to challenge people who work with this information is how to integrate individual data into a team game.  If you’re a fan who grew up on Bill James Baseball Abstracts, then you have a fair understanding that baseball, at its essence, is an individual sport masquerading as a team sport, which makes it much easier to illuminate many of these questions.  You can rationally measure how many runs a lineup with nine Dustin Pedroias would generate in 162 games vs. a lineup of nine Hanley Ramirezes, but basketball is a much tougher proposition.  You could, theoretically, compare the offensive and defensive efficiency ratings of a team composed of five Chris Pauls vs. a team of five Yao Mings — and we have smart guys like Kevin Pelton on the case — but it wouldn’t produce results that are terribly useful in comparing the two players’ relative values.  That’s because a direct statistical contrast between two individuals is a much trickier exercise in basketball.

Aside from determining how certain players are undervalued, what are some of the practical utilities for all this cool new data?  One answer I heard repeatedly from the panelists and in conversations is applying this information to measure the performance of 5-man units.  A couple of different stat guys told me that, for one, information about 5-man units can be imparted to coaches in a palatable way.  An ornery coach might not want to hear from some data-cruncher that he needs to run fewer isolations sets for Player A out on the wing, but that same coach will likely be much more receptive to a few simple numbers that show he’s got a 5-man unit that’s killing the competition.

The Clippers are a tough nut to crack on a lot of this stuff because they haven’t been able to run consistent lineups out on the floor.  The Clips have exactly one 5-man unit that’s shared the floor for more than 116 minutes this season: Baron-Gordon-Thornton-Randolph-Camby.  That unit is a shade below average, with an adjusted +/- of -0.15, and an overall rating per 100 possessions of -2.17, which is a bit crummier.

Among the Clippers’ 5-man units that have played together for a measurable number of minutes, the best is Baron-Gordon-Collins-Randolph-Camby.  In 84 possessions [about 46 minutes of basketball], this unit has outscored its opponents 98-72. Keep in mind that the standard error in such a small sample is pretty massive (Aaron Barzilai will tell you as much), and the majority of these data come from two games — the recent win over Boston and the December 12 Portland game.   That being the case, these results support the notion that if you swap out Al Thornton for Mardy Collins on the wing, you get a substantially more efficient performance.

Naturally, the Clippers can’t capitalize on this information right now even if they wanted to, because Marcus Camby is suffering from head fluid, which sounds really unpleasant.  But in thinking about how the Clippers might want to deal with LeBron James tonight, it’s hard to imagine throwing Al Thornton out there to guard him.  I’m no fan of Mardy Collins’ inefficient offensive game. He displays a horrible habit of  amplifying those inefficiencies by attempting far too many shots, a condition his coach needs to manage more vigilantly.  That aside, the data show that on both an individual and team basis, Collins is considerably more useful than Al Thornton, who is the team’s least efficient regular, when placed alongside the Clippers’ other three primary scorers — Randolph, Gordon, and Baron Davis.

In some respects, this conversation evokes the debates of 2005-2006, when Corey Maggette and Quinton Ross were competing for playing time at the small forward position.  Maggette was by every metric the more prolific offensive player, but there was enough data to suggest that the team played a more efficient game defensively when Ross was the SF alongside Cassell-Mobley-Brand-Kaman.  The truth was that both Ross and Maggette had glaring deficiencies, but the ensuing discussion was one of the more interesting of its day for Clippers fans, with reasonable arguments on both sides.

Obviously, Thornton’s starting role hasn’t really been challenged by Collins, but in thinking about LeBron tonight…shouldn’t it be?  If you had told me on Christmas Day that the matter of Collins v. Thornton would ever be a topic of earnest consideration, I would’ve eaten my hat, but among the dastardly number of issues that the Clippers are dealing with, the Al Thornton question stands out prominently.  While I don’t support Al’s public humiliation by a tactless owner going off half-cocked, his role on the team needs to be examined more closely, particularly on a night when his team requires someone at the 3 who has some degree of defensive intuition. Again, Mardy Collins is not the long-term solution for the Clippers at the 3 — far from it — but most nights, he’s the better of two undesirable options.

On the road with a sluggish broadband connection, I had a chance to see only the second half of this one.

With Zach Randolph out and Marcus Camby sidelined with a migraine after only 12 minutes, the Clippers go small with Baron-Jones-Collins-Thornton-Jordan to start the second half, and it serves them well offensively for a good part of the third quarter.    The Clippers come out of the locker room with a couple of ugly turnovers, but then begin to push the ball more in the open floor, and get a lot more movement in the halfcourt.  There’s a nice six or seven possession sequence when the Clippers capitalize on a couple of bad Memphis misses.  Both Baron and Thornton are in full attack mode, DeAndre Jordan crashes the boards to create additional opportunities [and even delivers a slick interior pass to a cutting Thornton for an easy bucket], and the Clippers find all kinds of space for open jumpers [Jones at 3rd, 7:54] and basket cuts [Collins at 3rd, 6:13].  But after Steve Novak hits a 3PA to break a very short-lived Memphis zone, the Clippers don’t convert another field goal for more than seven minutes.

As badly as the offense fades, the trouble starts on the defensive end when Rudy Gay begins to heat up.   He torches the Clippers for 20 points in the third quarter [6-7 FG, 2-3 3PA, 6-6 FT].  Once again, the Clippers are done in by their inability to guard the wing.  Gay has a fantastic ability to get separation from his defender to create his own shot, and when his long-range game is humming, his lanky frame is a near impossible cover for a hobbled Mardy Collins and a helpless Al Thornton, who nominally picks up Gay once Collins checks out.  Gay punctuates the quarter with a silky, unconscionable 30-footer to cap an 18-2 Memphis run.

The problems run deeper than Gay.  Steve Novak can’t do much to stop Hakim Warrick inside, and asking Mike Taylor to accomplish anything defensively against O.J. Mayo is simply unfair.  DeAndre Jordan struggles defending Marc Gasol, who finishes with 10 assists.  Like his brother, Pau, Marc has a preternatural ability to find cutters over his shoulder with easy passes.  If the Clippers have any chance to get back into the game at the start of the fourth quarter, Gasol ensures that it doesn’t happen.  In a three-minute span, Gasol finds Greg Buckner along the arc for a 3PM, delivers a perfect interior pass to Darrell Arthur for an easy jumper in the paint, makes a beautiful 60-foot outlet pass to Hakim Warrick off a jump ball on the Clippers’ end, and dekes Jordan on a simple S/R play to get himself a 5-footer.  The Grizz extend an 11-point lead to 18, and the game is effectively over.

One nice sight for Clippers fans: Quinton Ross picks up 21 minutes of action.  Aaron Barzilai, who’s been doing some of the most interesting advanced statistical analysis in the game, released his adjusted plus/minus ratings recently.  The data showed Ross as the second most effective defensive player in the league over the past two years, but tonight Ross works his offensive game, hitting a three-pointer toward the end of the first quarter to extend the Memphis lead to six — a play I sadly missed.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Donald Sterling got loose in the Clippers’ locker room following Monday night’s loss to San Antonio.  Ben Bolch quotes team sources saying that Sterling “offered a blanket denunciation of the players and strongly backed Coach and General Manager Mike Dunleavy.”

The timing is curious, and by casual observation, the effort Monday night was relatively vigorous compared to what we saw immediately after the break.  A team owner certainly has the right to lash out at his team whenever he feels like it.  But to berate a squad when its two most efficient scorers and best wing defender aren’t suited up just seems tone-deaf, particularly when the owner excludes the staff from his wholesale criticism.