Any time you get Cleveland and Oklahoma City into the first sentence of your blog, you can be reasonably sure that no one from either coast of North America will read it all the way to the end. The pressure's off! I can fill this blog with anything I like! Therefore I am choosing to spend the next several paragraphs sermonizing about the divine skills of Cleveland big man Evan Mobley. Mobley and the Cavaliers prevailed Wednesday night over the visiting Thunder, in a matchup of teams carrying combined 25-game active win streaks. This was a great game, from beginning to end, and if you ignored it because you consider these to be flyover teams, you deserve to feel bad this morning.
Mobley was incredible. Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson is putting him everywhere on the floor and using him in as many ways as possible. The Cavaliers run normal-ish stuff to get the ball moving toward the basket, but Mobley's particular gifts make all the actions a tick or two more dangerous than they'd be if you replaced him with a normal-ish NBA big man. Consider the dribble handoff, or DHO. It's a staple of the modern game, but NBA defenses are getting better at defending it, so that it often feels less like a powerful go-to and more like some shit your team does by lazy habit, or from lack of any better ideas. In a DHO, the ball is passed to a big man up the floor, near the free-throw line. Guards and shooters whir around the arc; the big man takes a hard dribble or two parallel to the free-throw line and hands the ball off to one of his buds, who pulls a sprinting defender into a collision with the big man, and is thus freed to slice down the middle of the floor. All the quick-moving action around the perimeter creates secondary opportunities, but this is the basic action: a big guy lumbering sideways and punching the ball into the tummy of a teammate while absorbing into his own tummy his teammate's defender.
Mobley doesn't lumber. This is not Domantas Sabonis we're talking about. When the Cavs use him as the handoff man, they start him up beyond the arc, and then Mobley sprints, like a huge gazelle, into the action. His own defender often cannot keep up. The proven method for defending the DHO involves hounding the ball-handling big while also blitzing and cutting off the angles of approach for his teammates, forcing the offense to burn seconds off the clock with the ball in the hands of a goofus. But Mobley DHOs can't be defended this way, because they start so far from the basket and develop with such ferocious tempo, often in semi-transition while the defense is still getting oriented. The speed is discombobulating. The Cavs ran a Mobley-to-Max Strus DHO in the first quarter Wednesday that unfolded so quickly that a good shot was off before either of the two defenders drawn into the action even had time to get a hand up. Atkinson's offense doesn't usually call up a lot of DHOs, but when it does, those DHOs fuckin' work: The Cavs score at the second-highest rate in the NBA on handoffs; they produce the fourth-best effective field goal percentage, and they score the fourth-most points per possession.
Another preference of modern defense is to blitz and trap the opponent's best ball-handler on high pick-and-rolls. The Thunder love to do this. Watch what happens when they blitz and trap Luka Doncic on high screens. He's going to pitch it over the top to Derek Lively II or Daniel Gafford, positioned somewhere near the top of the key. These are two very sweet and well-meaning galoots, and they're both pretty quick for big guys, but they have the open-court guard skills of only slightly impressive toddlers. It's a victory for the defense to get Doncic to pass the ball to either of these guys, really anywhere but inside the restricted area, let alone way out above the break, where they are least useful. In their last meeting, in the quarterfinals of the NBA Cup, the Thunder held Doncic to 15 shots and five assists in 40 minutes, and won easily.
The Thunder wanted to hassle Cavs ball-handlers in this way Wednesday night, and did, and in fact hounded Donovan Mitchell into a pretty poor performance. But Mobley has become a killer on the short roll, in that little pocket of dump-off space left wide open by a trap above the three-point line. A useful package of guard skills is what made Draymond Green into a deadly short-roll operator, even while moving with the athletic grace of an armadillo. Brick-handed galoots bomb out of NBA rotations if they can't handle the ball on the short-roll at least without exploding the building; if all Andre Drummond does as a short roller is freeze with the ball like a cartoon burglar in a spotlight, that is a good outcome for his own team.
Mobley is just so fast and nimble. He can gain a lot of distance from the trap in the split second after it's sprung, creating more and better passing angles for his retreating ball-handler. And that quickness makes Mobley quite a bit more dangerous than the average screener once he's caught the pass, because neither of the trapping defenders can hope to chase him down from behind.
The defense must rotate, and Mobley has made himself into a very smooth operator against a contorted defense. The Cavs exploited a 5-on-4 situation in the second quarter when Darius Garland pitched it ahead to Mobley around the free-throw line. Mobley caught the ball and turned over his left shoulder. His eyes were up, so he saw a defender closing out on his teammate in the strong-side corner. His eyes were still up when he saw a rotated guy—the last Thunder defender—in the restricted arc; without needing to scan further Mobley lofted the ball toward the corner of the backboard, where it was caught by a soaring Jarrett Allen and thundered home. Later, to bust a zone defense, Mobley flashed to the free-throw line and took a pass. With one hard dribble into the paint he dragged in a help defender, and instantly flicked the ball high to his left, where Allen again completed the alley-oop. In the third quarter, with the game tied, Mobley darted away from a trap and pulled in a lofted short-roll pass on the move. In a much shorter amount of time than it took for me, a person who types for a living, to type the words "in a much shorter amount of time," Mobley sized up the rotated last line of Thunder defenders and whipped the ball to the far corner, where it became an open three-pointer for a deadly shooter.
Also Mobley is no longer shy about contact, and is now built like a Humvee. Twice he scored by driving directly into Isaiah Hartenstein, who is on the Thunder precisely because they need at least one defender whose abdomen cannot be collapsed and pulverized by a shoulder charge. Mobley finished the game with 21 points on 13 shots, 10 rebounds, and seven assists, plus the usual excellent defense. He and Allen tormented the undermanned Thunder on the offensive glass, had spooky two-man offensive chemistry (Allen at one point dunked home an airballed Mobley three-pointer), and kept the Cavs respectable defensively while sharing lineups with a bunch of vulnerable, undersized and/or slow-footed shooter types. Before you write off the Cavs as a hyped upstart or roll your eyes at their 72-win pace, ask yourself how your team is going to prevent these delightful giants from reshaping a game or series into their own image. Which of your puny stretch 4s or lumbering screeners is going to stop Mobley from taking advantages from every little opening?
It's very fun to me that the team with the best record in the NBA today is killing everyone with traditional two-big lineups. The basketball played by the Cavs is gorgeous, combining the best parts of modern three-heavy optimization with the more intricate interior work of a couple of eras ago, when competent big-to-big passing was a requisite of high-level offense. We find ourselves in a situation where the NBA's best team is doing something meaningfully different from the rest of the basketball world, which is the kind of thing that tends to inspire imitation. The NBA could do a lot worse, for its next aesthetic revolution. Unfortunately for would-be imitators, they don't make very many players like Evan Mobley.
