How will Pistons defend Kevin Love? ‘Maybe rough him up a little’
Kevin Love came up huge for the Cleveland Cavaliers on Sunday, pouring in 28 points on 10-for-22 shooting and pulling down 13 rebounds to help the top-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers fend off a tough challenge from the No. 8 Detroit Pistons and take a 1-0 lead in their best-of-seven opening-round Eastern Conference playoff series. Love put in work both inside and out, and helped Cleveland put the Pistons away by sliding up to center in small-ball lineups that stretched their defense past its breaking point, outscoring Detroit by eight points in 12 total minutes and keying a pair of fourth-quarter runs that helped keep Stan Van Gundy’s club at bay.
[Follow Dunks Don’t Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball]
The Pistons knew they were going to have their hands full with LeBron James (22 points, 11 assists, six rebounds, two steals, two blocks in the opener) and Kyrie Irving (a game-high 31 points with six assists and two steals) as they attempted to spring a stunning upset. If the Cavs can get Love going consistently, though, Detroit might just be drawing dead, no matter how well rising stars Andre Drummond and Reggie Jackson play; there are no easy answers to stopping that full-throttle attack, as Van Gundy told Vincent Ellis of the Detroit News:
“What makes it effective is that it spreads out the floor, obviously,” Van Gundy said after Game 1. “It makes it really tough in pick-and-rolls for your (centers) to get out there.” […]
“Even when do you do cover, then we’ve got our center away from the basket,” Van Gundy said. “We’ve got the best rebounder in the league [in Drummond] and we’re playing him at 25 feet. […]
“I don’t know,” Van Gundy said. “Everything is an option. The idea is you have a lot of options. You have to find the best one. You gotta lot of things you gotta do besides guarding the first shot. You gotta be able to rebound the ball. You gotta put pressure on the other end of the floor. There’s a lot of considerations.”
Including, if Marcus Morris has anything to say about it, getting it on like Olivia Newton-John. From David Mayo of MLive.com:
Asked how the Pistons would deal with Love as the best-of-seven series continues, Morris replied, “Maybe rough him up a little bit.”
“He had a good game the first game,” Morris said. “We definitely took it a little disrespectful. So I think we’re definitely going to push up a little harder on him, maybe foul him a little harder, things like that.” […]
Morris said the Pistons need to disrupt and jostle Love much earlier in the game.
“I think he was just too comfortable,” Morris said. “His confidence was too high. We’ve definitely got to get him out of that rhythm early.”
While the promise to get rough-and-tumble surely sounds like sweet music to the ears of some Pistons fans who’ve never been happier than they were watching the Bad Boys lay wood on the league in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it’s likely Van Gundy would be just as happy with his defenders simply getting in Love’s neighborhood. Thirteen of Love’s 22 field-goal attempts — which, by the way, was more shots than he’d taken in any game since putting on a Cavaliers uniform before last season — came without a Detroit defender being within 3 1/2 feet of him at the time of release, according to NBA.com’s SportVU player tracking data. He made seven, paving the way for his stellar outing.
Just getting close enough to get a hand up could help Detroit find a better balance and more success come Wednesday night. Doing so could require Van Gundy to make some personnel adjustments that take the Pistons out of their most frequently used and comfortable alignments, though.
If the massive and gifted but lumbering Drummond proves unable to either punish the smaller Love on the offensive end or capably defend the floor-stretching big man in space, Van Gundy could elect to go smaller, with some combination of Tobias Harris, rookie Stanley Johnson (who looked good in his postseason debut) and eserve Anthony Tolliver manning the four and five spots when Love slides to center, to try to boost Detroit’s defensive quickness and 3-point shooting against the small-ball Cavs. Going that way, though, diverts Detroit’s offense away from the bread-and-butter attack of Drummond springing point guard Reggie Jackson off high screens, takes away the valuable weapon of Drummond’s offensive rebounding, and could leave Detroit vulnerable on the offensive glass.
That’s the rub of facing excellent offenses, though — a leak springs in one area of your defense, so you adjust to plug it, and you pray that it doesn’t leave you susceptible to three more opening up in the area you just left. Morris seems to be of the opinion that reducing the pressure of the water battering against the dam by using brute force could be an even more effective approach. But if the officials are keeping an extra close eye on that stuff — and, after Van Gundy’s recent fine-prompting comments, they might be — it could wind up doing little more than getting the Cavaliers into the bonus early and putting the Pistons into an even deeper hole out of which to climb.
More NBA coverage:
– – – – – – –
Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
Stay connected with Ball Don’t Lie on Twitter @YahooBDL, “Like” BDL on Facebook and follow Dunks Don’t Lie on Tumblr for year-round NBA talk, jokes and more.
