Rick Carlisle is an evil genius

Great article describing how he used an impromptu 2-3 zone and Boban Marjanovic to make Ty Lue his bitch. Dude continues to show why Cuban kept him around through the dark years and why he’s so highly regarded among his coaching peers.

https://www.mavsmoneyball.com/platform/amp/2021/6/3/22487648/mavericks-clippers-playoffs-game-5-observations?__twitter_impression=true

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Carlisle went all-in on lineups with two big men that were terrible on defense all season. The move worked out for Dallas, and Carlisle showed again why he is the ‘adjustments genius’, born for playoff basketball. Carlisle started a lineup that featured a 7-4 Boban Marjanovic and 7-3 Kristaps Porzingis to counter the Clippers' small-ball lineups that presented big problems for Dallas in the first four games of the series. Carlisle also played a two big-men lineup featuring Dwight Powell and Porzingis for long stretches.

On defense, Carlisle mostly played zone when Porzingis and Marjanovic, or Porzingis and Powell were on the floor. When Powell played with Kleber, Dallas played aggressive defense, where Dorian Finney-Smith was the primary defender on Kawhi Leonard, but the Mavericks would double Leonard on most occasions. The Mavericks kept switching zone and man-to-man defense with doubling Leonard all night long, and the Clippers never got comfortable. Like all series long the Clippers still got to the rim (34 percent of their shots were rim shots), but they made only 54 percent at the rim. Per Synergy Dallas played zone defense on 25 out of 88 half-court possessions. The Clippers were way more efficient scoring against the zone than against the man-to-man defense, but Mavericks’ zone threw the Clippers out of their rhythm. Clippers had to shoot more threes, and less in the mid-range, where Leonard and George are the most comfortable.

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