Why Play Smallball?
INTRODUCTION
While definitions of the term vary, playing smallball has increased within the NBA. (For some descriptive data see Nylon Calculus: The rise and effectiveness of small ball.) Smallball has become a slogan or war cry among much of the NBA community. However, what justifies playing smallball? What are the arguments and the evidence?
ARGUMENTS
Many factors go into winning, but here the basic issue involves kinds of personnel. The arguments heard for smallball tend to fall into two categories:
1. Playing without multiple bigs is good
2. Playing your five best players together regardless of height is good
Crosscutting these are the issues of successful offense and successful defense. Teams need to be good at both. Crudely speaking, to be a NBA Champion a team should minimally be top 5 in either offense or defense and top ten in the other. In addition, viewed from a personnel viewpoint the same players must play offense and defense, so both are relevant to each player.
Also from a personnel viewpoint, the players must play the opponent’s personnel. At its simplest, this is the matchup problem. However, NBA teams no longer play straightup man-to-man defense but rather play team-oriented schemes generally including the wide use of switching. Switches can bring mismatch problems. Therefore, switching schemes work best if every player is able to guard each of the opponent’s players when switched onto the player. Thus, a defensive-oriented combination of arguments 1 and 2 Is that all players should be able to guard all opponent players.
The dream is that the ideal team has every player within 3" of 6’9" with a 7’ wing span and high agility, and all play defense well. You can always teach such players offense. Five 7’ wingspans would total 420". MIL has taken somewhat this strategy, starters’ wingspans total 422.75". [SAS, if start Murray, Green, Gay, Aldridge, and Leonard, would have a total of wingspans of 426.25" (and starting Gasol rather than Gay does not substitute a short wingspan).
The most commonly heard offensive variant of arguments 1 and 2 is that four or preferably five players on the court for a team should be creditable 3-point shooters. This creates what is termed offensive player gravity that pulls their defenders towards them and therefore out to the 3-point line and clears out the interior for pick and rolls, drivers and cutters, or (the big man) going one on one.
With five creditable 3-point threats a team can start by emptying the interior, and play five-out. The five-out offensive set involves placing five separated players beyond the three-point line and having all of them be creditable threats to make a 3-point shot. This leaves the interior as an empty play yard for whatever the offense desires to try as well as the obvious possibility of a 3-point shot.
Several NBA teams can play five out including GSW, HOU, SAS, and possibly less comfortably CLE. The situation has come to the point that, for example, every player on the SAS’s 15-player roster is a creditable 3-point shooter except one, Murray, who Coach Popovich and opponents both appear not to consider a creditable 3-point threat despite his 39% 3P% (9-23) in 2016-17. (Two asides: Every SAS player who shot less than 32% 3P% in 2016-17 is no longer with the team to start 2017-18 (includes Simmons), and the 32% player was Bryn Forbes who had a 45.9% 3P% (56-122) during his DLeague appearances. As not a 3-point threat, Murray, a 6’5" tall, long-armed leaper, is often stationed in the "dunker’s position" to the side of the basket.)
Thus, possibly better, the two arguments for smallball are:
A. Every player being able to guard every player on the other team is good
B. A team with four or, even better, five skilled 3-point shooters on the court opens up good offensive opportunities including ones near the basket and making shots worth 3 rather than 2 points.
Weaker forms of argument A point to the merits of being able to guard almost every opponent player and/or being able to do so for at least a few seconds. While not as powerful as argument A. these abilities do open up some possibilities for better defensive schemes.
EVIDENCE
In his recent article on smallball, Matt Ignal of Nylon Calculus reported that in 2016-17 using possession weighting when smallball lineups played traditional lineups smallball lineups were +1.4 points better during the regular season, -2.2 points worse during the postseason yielding an combined average of +1.2 points better.
During January 2017, I wrote a piece comparing high or low 3P% teams crosscut by high or low 3P-shot volume and found that being a high-volume but low-percentage team was bad and being a high-percentage but low-volume team was average unless you were SAS. A finer breakdown from the piece is:
Games and 3-Point Shots
Jan 16 2017___ 3P%>=36 _____ 3P%<36
Range______________ Win% _____ Win%
3PA>=30_____ 0.701 _____ 0.313
3PA>=25 and <30 0.561 _____ 0.404
3PA<25 ___________ 0.706 _____ 0.350
Source: NBA.com
Note that the worse thing was to shoot a lot of threes but shoot threes poorly and that how well a team shot threes appeared to have more effect than how many were shot. Teams that simply pursue shooting more threes regardless of player skills are likely chasing fool’s gold.
CONCLUSION
The two main substantive arguments for smallball are only secondarily related to player height. They are
A. Every player being able to guard every player on the other team is good
B. A team with four or, even better, five skilled 3-point shooters on the court opens up good offensive opportunities including ones near the basket and making shots worth 3 rather than 2 points.
However, on average relationships with player size do exist. Being able to guard a big-tall player usually implies a set of physical characteristics, some combination of height (probably 6’7" and 6’8"), wingspan (approaching 7’), and weight/strength as well as, of course, skill at playing defense. In addition, historically few tall players have been good at shooting 3-point shots though this is changing. Finally, I should mention that some players on the court need to be able to exploit the gravity of the 3-point shooters that has drawn defenders out of the interior.
POSTSCRIPT: Historical Remark
Small ball is not new. D’Antoni had PHX playing it in the 2000s. The current explosion of smallball chiefly originated from the 2013-14 SAS Championship team’s postseason run. In the first round, Dallas’ Carlisle, played a totally switching defense that gave SAS trouble until they adjusted. In the Conference Finals, OKC was 2-2 against SAS when Popovich decided to go small and play either Bonner, a 3-point specialist, or Diaw at power forward, thus pulling Obaka away from the basket. This abandoned the two-interior-big-man approach and was continued in victorious games 3-5 of the Finals. During crisis time in the 2015 Playoffs, GSW coaches recalled this and adopted approaches with fewer bigs and more 3-point shooters. It was an amazing fit for GSW personnel. This was reinforced by D’Antoni’s return to coaching, Morey being GM in Houston, and analytics.
The cliché is that the NBA is a copycat league. These successes, particularly GSW’s, inspired pundits and other teams to jump on the smallball bandwagon usually spouting if-everything-else-stayed-the-same analytic results.