There's an old saying about how playoff basketball shifts the game's spotlight from strengths to weaknesses. In the hothouse of a postseason series, extensive preparation and repetition can expose the tiniest cracks in a team's facade and widen them until the whole foundation crumbles. Of course, every team has a soft spot somewhere, so the tournament is really a test of which team's weapons are best equipped to exploit the vulnerabilities of others and overcome their own.
One particular player archetype seems to sit at the center of this tactical tug-of-war each spring: the high-scoring, defensively vulnerable combo guard. At the high end of the spectrum, he can be a mighty valuable player, one who can jive with a team's starters and also capably shepherd the offense when those starters hit the bench. These aren't primary playmaker types capable of orchestrating ultra-efficient team offense on their own - some of them don't even score particularly efficiently - but as secondary creators, they can soak up possessions and give you buckets in high volume, which is pretty handy for spelling the primary guys and staving off offensive droughts.
In the playoffs, though, when opposing offenses are geared toward attacking these players relentlessly, the bar for their offense suddenly gets bumped up several notches, and their teams are forced to wrangle with a more tenuous trade-off. That makes them some of the postseason's biggest X-factors; their teams' runs can be made or broken by how well their offensive production translates and how damaging they prove to be defensively.
A handful of players who fit the bill as crucial contributors to teams with lofty (if varyingly realistic) aspirations this postseason: Tyrese Maxey in Philadelphia, Jordan Poole in Golden State, Malik Monk in Sacramento, and, before a broken hand knocked him out, Tyler Herro in Miami. Monk is playing in his first postseason and absolutely showing out so far, but all three others had multiple playoff appearances before this year, and their teams performed worse (sometimes significantly so) with them on the floor. What will this postseason hold?
Those are all hugely talented offensive players, but none hit the 60% true-shooting threshold this season, their playmaking ranges from good to below average, and they all come with question marks at the other end.
Herro's a sound positional defender who's hamstrung in individual assignments by his below-average strength and one of the league's shortest wingspans. Poole doesn't have those same physical limitations, but he's mistake-prone on and off the ball, susceptible to blow-bys due to uprightness and a lack of anticipation. Monk often takes poor angles around screens and doesn't swivel his hips fast enough to stay in front of drivers. Maxey has made huge defensive strides this year but still struggles to stay square to ball-handlers and maintain proper guarding position without using his hands.
The simplest and most common way for an offensive team to attack a small, shaky defender is just to call up that defender's man to screen for their most dangerous scorer. The defense, in turn, has to choose how to protect that defender, with the most common response being to have them hedge and recover in an effort to avoid the switch and to deter the ball-handler for long enough to let the whole defense reset with a dwindling shot clock. That option might be the least of all evils, but offensive teams have gotten very good at exploiting windows with two defenders on the ball and a man advantage on the backside.
No matter how a defense might try to scheme around it, one weak link can impact the whole chain. Shielding a weakness tends to put a defense in rotation, and a defense in rotation is liable to give up a layup or an open catch-and-shoot three if the offense can keep the ball moving.
A rotating defense is also vulnerable on its own glass. Take Miami's play-in loss to Atlanta last week, which saw the Hawks inhale 21 offensive rebounds. You might see that gobsmacking number and attribute it to the Heat getting outmuscled or failing to box out. But on plenty of occasions, it was the result of Bam Adebayo having to make an emergency rotation that pulled him away from the rim because Miami was in scramble mode after Herro hedged a ball screen:
Of course, Herro's on-ball creativity, off-ball shiftiness, and versatile shooting ability are essential elements of Miami's offense, which is shaky enough as is with Herro healthy. For the Heat, who are improbably up 1-0 on the top-seeded Bucks, adapting to life without him will be a huge challenge, even if his absence gives Milwaukee one less place to attack.
As mentioned above, dragging weak defenders into ball-screen action is just one way to attack them. You can also prey on their off-ball limitations, either by running them through mazes of pindowns and cross screens or isolating them on the weak side and forcing them into low-man help duty. The Warriors are experts at this brand of manipulation. They haven't directly attacked Monk much in their first-round series against the Kings, and that's something they should probably do more of, considering how badly he's shredding them on offense. But doing stuff like this works, too:
The Warriors actually had Monk on Poole to start that possession, which is a favorable matchup for the offense. But they screened him off anyway in order to make him the last line of help defense against Kevon Looney's slip to the rim. Steph Curry screened him for good measure, leaving Monk no real hope.
Whether it's doing more of that or simply involving him in more ball screens, Golden State has to push harder to make him uncomfortable at the defensive end. Because for now, Sacramento is handily winning the trade-off, with Monk dusting every defender he sees en route to averaging 25 points on 70% true shooting through two games.
On the other side of that series is Poole, who can be a maddening player to watch even at the end of the floor where he ostensibly butters his bread. His talent is undeniable, and he does things with the ball in his hands that no other Warrior can. Outside of Curry, he's by far the best off-the-bounce advantage creator on the team, which makes him vital to their hopes of staying afloat when Curry is on the bench. And for a team that's fairly light on dribble-drive threats and often struggles to put pressure on the rim, his explosive downhill burst can be an energizing elixir. He's capable of absolutely electric scoring outbursts that swing games or series in Golden State's direction.
But he hasn't shot the ball well this year (just 33% from 3-point range), and teams usually get away with playing drop against him. He also makes several head-scratching decisions and galling turnovers each game, which indicate a disregard for the value of possessions. You can't help but be in a permanent state of vexation watching Poole play. One moment, he'll do something singular like seamlessly blend an inside-out dribble into a stepback three, and the next, he'll plunge headlong into a wall of defenders with no plan and spark an opponent's fastbreak:
Coupled with his oft-destructive defense, that offensive inconsistency can make him a net liability. It didn't pose a problem for the Warriors last year until the Finals when his role ultimately had to be scaled down. But for this year's shallower iteration of the roster, those issues could prove more damaging in the early stages of the playoffs. The Warriors have been outscored by 13.6 points per 100 possessions with him on the floor against the Kings so far. They won't get out of the first round with him playing as poorly as he did in Games 1 and 2.
Poole and Herro have already been lumped together in that they got identical contract extensions (four years, $140 million) last offseason. Their respective teams' investment in them made sense, considering the Warriors won the title last year with Poole totaling the team's second-most regular-season minutes, while the Heat made the Finals in Herro's rookie season and came up a game short two years later with Herro playing a central role both times.
Maxey will be extension-eligible this summer, and the Poole and Herro contracts represent a compelling precedent. Of course, the way he and the Sixers perform this postseason could have a significant impact on that. (It'll also be interesting to see whether there's any kind of market correction, given the somewhat underwhelming early returns on those deals.)
Between Maxey's quick-trigger 3-ball off the catch, his blinding first step, and his crafty finishing ability, he was basically engineered in a lab to extend advantages and make defenses pay for loading up elsewhere. It's no surprise that he popped off in Game 2 against Brooklyn, dropping 33 points on 13-for-23 shooting as the Nets stuck with their strategy of hard-doubling Joel Embiid any time he touched the ball:
Maxey is deadly as a release valve on the wing, able to counter nail help and beat closeouts with catch-and-shoot bombs or stampede cuts into diagonal gaps. Whether he's in the half court or in transition, he's perpetually careening around like he's been blasted out of a pinball shooter. He completely changes Philly's tempo and the geometry of its offense. As an added bonus, he's also become a stone-cold pull-up shooter who can work as a primary pick-and-roll operator for stretches.
He's also a limited playmaker who's prone to tunnel vision, whether he's isolating up top or in motion slashing to the rim, but playing next to James Harden mitigates that issue and lets him lean into play finishing. He's kind of in the perfect place and the perfect role, given his current skill set.
With Harden struggling badly as a scorer out of the gate, it sure feels like the Sixers will need Maxey's offense consistently if they're to make a deep run. His defense isn't going to hurt Philly in this series against Brooklyn, but it's going to be tested in a huge way later in the playoffs, especially in the (extremely likely) event the Sixers see the Celtics next round. That's where the rubber will meet the road.
For Maxey, Monk, Poole, and so many others, each successive stage and each raising of stakes is an opportunity for weaknesses to be spotlighted - or, perhaps, surmounted.
