How Andre Roberson totally changed the Western Conference finals
When the Oklahoma City Thunder went to the 2012 NBA finals, they seemed to have everything. Youth, talent and athleticism; a dominant scoring forward; the game’s explosive point guard; an emerging interior defensive menace; and a reserve wing playmaker who, when deployed alongside the first two, made them nearly indefensible.
Then they lost in the finals, as young teams do. Then the realities of roster management and fear of a cap-strapped future in luxury-tax hell set in. Then James Harden got traded, and ever since, Oklahoma City has had a hole on the wing that it’s never quite been able to fill.
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Thabo Sefolosha, though very good at what he did, he couldn’t fill it. Neither could Kevin Martin. Nor could Jeremy Lamb or Perry Jones. Reggie Jackson came closest, but that fit never really fit, and it ended in a beef that’s still broiling.
Derek Fisher, DeAndre Liggins, Caron Butler, Anthony Morrow … Sam Presti has cycled through a lot of players over the last four years in search of an answer on the wing. That elusive answer, it turns out: a converted power forward, who became a shooting guard who couldn’t shoot, who became a glaring offensive liability, who became a de-facto center, who unlocks the most devastating lineup left in the NBA playoffs.
It’s almost too obvious, really.
Yes, Kevin Durant has evolved into a defensive waking nightmare haunting Draymond Green’s every step. Yes, Russell Westbrook’s relentless attacking has knocked the Golden State Warriors onto their heels and taken a massive toll on two-time NBA Most Valuable Player Stephen Curry. Yes, Steven Adams’ seemingly limitless pain threshold and expanding two-way game has shrunk the floor on Golden State and added new weapons to Oklahoma City’s arsenal. But it’s Andre Roberson — the lightly regarded, largely overlooked defense-first swingman out of Colorado — who has tilted the Western Conference finals, propelling the Thunder to within one win of a return trip to the championship round.
After averaging robust 4.8 points and 3.6 rebounds in 22.2 minutes per game during the regular season, Roberson’s kicking in 10.5 points and 6.5 boards in 26.7 minutes per contest in the Western finals, shooting a scorching 58.6 percent from the floor and — most staggering of all — 54.5 percent from 3-point land on nearly three triple tries per game. The Thunder are outscoring the Warriors by 12.7 points per 100 possessions with him on the floor through four games, and getting outscored by 4.2 points-per-100 when he sits.
Even coming off a stellar Game 6 to eliminate the San Antonio Spurs in which he scored 14 points on eight shots and went 3-for-5 from deep — the most 3s he’d ever made in a game in his three-year NBA career — this sort of sustained offensive success for the Thunder’s fifth option (at best) seemed unthinkable at the start of the series. How did this happen? How did we get here?
Well, for one thing, Roberson got here by getting mad, and insulted, and by Thunder head coach Billy Donovan — who earned earned his players’ respect over the course of his first season on the OKC bench, and who’s earning the respect of a nation of observers in this stellar postseason run — realizing that a change needed to come.
According to Anthony Slater of The Oklahoman, the shift came out of a film session between Games 2 and 3, which highlighted just how much the Warriors’ defenders — Green in Game 1, center Andrew Bogut in Game 2 — were ignoring Roberson to add another roving free-safety-style defender to their efforts to quiet Durant and Westbrook.
Roberson attacked where he could, totaling 12 points on 5-for-8 shooting in those first two games, but Golden State’s strategy paid off in a Game 2 win that saw Durant shine, Westbrook struggle, and nobody else really able to get off. That led some to wonder whether Donovan might decide to go away from Roberson moving forward.
“Well, it’s funny. Like, after Game 2, people are saying to me, is this guy going to even play anymore?” Donovan said after Game 4. “Andre’s a good basketball player, and I think sometimes the things that go missing with him is he makes winning plays and he’s a winning player. There’s a lot of things he can do.”
The Warriors’ eagerness to leave him alone was nothing new. As Sports Illustrated’s Rob Mahoney noted, Roberson’s “largely been left unattended” on the offensive end for the duration of his NBA career, and it did not escape Roberson’s notice. As he put it, he “definitely felt disrespected” by the lack of attention.
“If they are not going to guard me, I am going to stand in the corner shooting threes,” Roberson said, according to Diamond Leung of the Bay Area News Group. “I am just going out there and shooting with confidence.”
But that’s not how Donovan saw it. Instead of just parking Roberson in the corner, or on the pine to remove Golden State’s preferred hiding spot, Donovan decided to change his offense’s configuration, more frequently bringing Roberson to the ball as a screener and dive man, and empowering him to work the baseline in search of backdoor cuts and duck-ins, as illustrated by SB Nation’s Yaron Weitzman:
“That means we just tried to make an adjustment,” Durant said after the Thunder’s Game 4 win, according to Fred Katz of the Norman Transcript. “They weren’t guarding [Roberson] at first, and we can’t have him just standing around. He did a great job of setting screens. He did a great job of rolling and making plays and finishing and just being under the rim.”
“He’s a pretty active player,” Kerr said after Game 4. “So he got some offensive boards, he snuck behind our defense a couple of times, and we did not guard him correctly.”
In and of itself, that adjustment isn’t revolutionary. As ESPN.com’s Zach Lowe noted, it’s the same kind of stuff the Memphis Grizzlies tried to do when the Warriors made the midstream schematic switch of having Bogut guard similarly non-shooting shooting guard Tony Allen in last year’s playoffs.
But Dave Joerger’s Grizzlies didn’t have anything approximating the offensive firepower that Durant and Westbrook offer, and they also didn’t have a legitimate shooting-threat big man like Ibaka, who could be slotted into Roberson’s position as a floor-stretching shooter to keep the offense’s spacing in shape, as captured here by Mahoney:
So Roberson ducked in, dove, dipped, dodged and dunked like a center, as in this play highlighted by Scott Rafferty of the Sporting News:
The 6-foot-7 swingman with the 6-foot-11 wingspan also rebounded and defended like a pivot, pulling down a career-high-tying 12 boards and blocking two shots to go with his five steals in 41 minutes of work.
That last number, the 41 minutes, matters a lot. Because if Roberson’s not an offensive liability — if he can make Golden State pay for ignoring him, and can make the kind of plays with the ball they (and most of the rest of us) didn’t think could — then he can stay on the floor to make a defensive difference. That allows Donovan to continue shortening his rotation to reduce the number of other liabilities on which he has to rely against an opponent as dangerous as Golden State. (Hey there, Enes Kanter.)
Plus, if Roberson’s versatile enough to handle everything required in this matchup — guarding Curry and Klay Thompson; battling for boards with Green, Bogut and Festus Ezeli; attacking as a pick-and-roll playmaker and a spot-up shooter — he allows Donovan to try out a unit that he didn’t favor much during the season, but that has proven absolutely devastating in this series.
After getting outscored by 31 points in only 46 total regular-season minutes, the Thunder’s “small” lineup of Durant, Westbrook, Ibaka, Roberson and Dion Waiters — which, as many have noted, isn’t really all that small when you remember that Durant’s a 7-footer, despite what he tells the ladies — has murdered Golden State, outscoring the Warriors by 49 points in 30 minutes of floor time. That unit’s shooting a blistering 58.3 percent from the floor, scoring an obscene 139.8 points per 100 possessions, notching 4.2 assists for every turnover, and holding the Warriors to just 32.3 percent shooting.
It’s been an absolute meat-grinder, capable of generating turnovers, playing uptempo in transition, and creating good looks in the half-court … and if not for the somewhat unexpected challenge that Roberson has posed, it might not be able to hold up in coverage.
As a result, Kerr said before Game 5 that the Warriors will have to re-evaluate their approach to handling Roberson.
“We were very, very careless in terms of roaming off of him, and he did a good job moving without the ball,” Kerr said. “[…] The tape showed a glaring deficiency defensively in terms of accounting for him. So it’s one thing to play off of a guy, it’s another thing to forget about him. We were forgetting about him, and that can’t happen.”
It remains to be seen how the Warriors pan to switch up their defensive strategy. Whatever comes, though, Roberson figures to have a major offensive role to play in Game 5, too.
One of the primary adjustments many have suggested Kerr might make is moving Curry off Westbrook on defense, in hopes of keeping his MVP fresh enough to hang a crooked number on offense. In all likelihood, that’ll mean slotting Steph onto Roberson, the most natural hiding spot in the Thunder’s big-minute lineups. Roberson will have to remain active, looking for chances to use his size advantage to take a toll on Curry and, when the opportunity presents itself, bully Curry in the paint for the kind of high-percentage looks that have helped keep OKC’s offense humming.
Whatever adjustment Golden State might make to try to flip Roberson back from asset to liability, Donovan seems to have enough confidence in the 24-year-old’s ability to adapt to leave him in there and let him figure out how to make a difference. Throughout this stellar postseason run, Roberson has earned that trust.
“I’m just happy for him because he’s really put the time in,” Donovan said after Game 4. “Andre’s a great teammate. He’s an unselfish guy, and he’s a guy that’s trying to make winning plays as best he can.”
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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!
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