2. The Los Angeles Lakers need to effectively slow down Bam Adebayo
Off the back of a second-place finish in this season’s Most Improved Player Award voting behind Brandon Ingram, this season has been a breakout of sorts for Bam Adebayo.
However, this postseason, he’s transformed from “good player” into the second-coming of Tim Duncan. With per-game averages of 21.8 PPG / 11.0 RPG / 5.2 APG / 1.7 SPG / 1.0 BPG against the Boston Celtics last round, Bam was the most impactful player in the series for the Heat on both sides of the court.
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The good news for the Lakers is that interior defense is the strong-point of the team, with Anthony Davis and Dwight Howard leading the way at that end of the court in the postseason.
In two regular-season matchups (both wins), Los Angeles did a great job of slowing down Bam, limiting him to only 12 and 11 points in both games (albeit on a combined 50% from the field).
According to advanced matchup data from NBA.com, Javale McGee and Howard spent the most time guarding Bam in the two regular-season matchups, followed by Anthony Davis. On the offensive end, Adebayo was very effective against McGee, less so against Howard, and unsurprisingly, was the least effective against Defensive Player of the Year runner-up Davis.
Based on coach Frank Vogel’s recent rotations, I don’t expect McGee to receive much court-time this series, which is a good thing because I think Bam is too crafty a player for him to effectively guard.
My preference would be for Anthony Davis to be his primary defender, because of how deadly Bam is as the screener in the pick-and-roll. He is one of the best players in the NBA when it comes to screen assists, a stat defined by NBA.com as “the number of times an offensive player or team sets a screen for a teammate that directly leads to a made field goal by that teammate.”
He ranks 4th in the postseason for screen assists at 4.5 per game and presents a similar threat to Nikola Jokic as a pick-and-roll option. Whoever guards Bam will thus be forced to switch a lot, and for that reason, I’d prefer if Anthony Davis was his primary cover for the series, as he is the best of the Laker bigs at switching onto smaller players if necessary.
However, if Bam’s recent offensive outburst isn’t a flash-in-the-pan, he’s going to be a much more dangerous scoring threat than he was when the teams met in November and December. Therefore, to keep AD as fresh as possible on the offensive end, it’ll need to be a team effort on defense to effectively blunt Adebayo’s impact on the series.