Attacking the Miami Heat trap

I finally caught the condensed replay of the Bulls Heat game from Jan 4 on my DVR.

With a lot of fast, active defenders, especially Lebron, the Heat love to attack the primary ballhandler with double teams. Recall the first time they played Jeremy Lin last season and how they unleashed a barrage of double teams high and forced him into a ton of turnovers.

The Bulls, surprisingly, won this game, and I noticed a few things that might point the way for future success against the Heat, whether it's the Bulls or another team. You can follow along with the two examples below in this highlight reel.

At 0:16, you see the Heat trapping on the strongside against the sideline with Lebron and Udonis Haslem. This is an example of a case where the Heat's attack succeeded in forcing the turnover and triggering the Heat's fast break, where they are nearly unstoppable.

One way to succeed against that trap which the Heat often employ is a tactic the Bulls used a few times in this game. First, you have to be able to recognize it as a team. The man whose defender has left can move to an open spot near the top of the circle or the high post to serve as a safety release for the ballhandler. If you get the ball to that player quickly, the defender can't recover in time to mitigate your man advantage, and another defender will have to rotate to try to protect the basket. Then the player that rotating defender was covering can cut to the basket, and if you hit him with a pass it's often an easy dunk or layup. Easier said than done, but the Bulls pulled it off several times in this game with Joakim Noah when he was setting the pick on the pick and roll.

You can see one example in this clip at 2:04. Bosh and Wade show a soft double team on Hinrich, and Noah sneaks away towards the basket to take the release pass, then turns towards the basket, at which point the zone defender on Boozer cuts towards Noah. In that instant, Noah quickly hits Boozer for a layup. It's easier said than done, but Noah, who's having a great year, is an ideal big man to be the hub of such an attack because of his passing ability and increased willingness to attack the basket this season. I saw this happen a few times in this game, but this is the only example I could find in this highlight clip. The Bulls ballhandler would be trapped up high, above the 3-point circle, they'd quickly advance the ball to the next level towards the basket, somewhere along the top of the key or free throw line, then that ballhandler would feign an attack to the basket and then drop the ball down behind the defense near the basket for the easy bucket.

The other option, of course, is to conclude that attack not with a pass to a big man cutting to the hoop but to swing it to a 3-point shooter in the corner when their defender rotates to defend the basket. The Bulls have a shortage of 3-point shooters this season so it's not surprising they usually opted to go to Gibson and Boozer on backdoor cuts instead.

Where the Heat are deadly is when they can attack the ballhandler without a double team, and they almost always do that when times get tough with Lebron, whom they unleashed on Derrick Rose the last time the two teams met in the playoffs. Also, it's worth noting that the Heat don't seem to be exerting themselves as hard as they can on defense right now. They're certain to ratchet it up in the playoffs, and all of the above is standard playbook fare against the overplay. Still, it's odd to see it working so well in the regular season.

Legal monopolies

Matthew Yglesias on the absurdity of professional sports team owners treating profits as a fundamental right:

Owning a pro sports franchise is pretty awesome and it's something that high net worth sports fans ought to be doing as a costly hobby. The relevant financial fact is that it's a costly hobby you can exit from by selling your team to the next guy. But the web of municipal subsidies, labor market cartels, and barriers to market access that have been spun around the conceit that it should be a lucrative hobby flies in the face of all kinds of common sense. After all, you look at the people with great season ticket packages to any of these teams. Who are those guys? Not savvy investors. They're rich fans dropping a lot of money on indulging their hobby. And the owner is the richest and most indulgent fan of all. Except somehow he expects to get paid for it? It's nuts.

If you're a fan of a sports team and the owners turn out their pants pockets and shed a few tears to justify trading away some of your favorite players, don't fall for it. The fact that teams make moves to avoid a tax that is named the "luxury tax" is hilarious.

If I were immensely wealthy I'd buy the Chicago Cubs. Not because I'm a Cubs fan and would love to get them a World Series but because owning a professional sports team is one of the few legal monopolies the U.S. holds sacred. What a great racket.

Marriage and commitment being disrupted

Typically we speak about disruption when discussing technology companies, but two incumbents that we wouldn't typically associate with disruption may be under assault: commitment and marriage.

The fascinating essay A Million First Dates in the Atlantic explores the thesis that online dating is making meeting people so simple and efficient that people are less likely to commit to marriage or even long-term relationships that hit a bit of rocky waters.

After two years, when Rachel informed Jacob that she was moving out, he logged on to Match.com the same day. His old profile was still up. Messages had even come in from people who couldn’t tell he was no longer active. The site had improved in the two years he’d been away. It was sleeker, faster, more efficient. And the population of online daters in Portland seemed to have tripled. He’d never imagined that so many single people were out there.

“I’m about 95 percent certain,” he says, “that if I’d met Rachel offline, and if I’d never done online dating, I would’ve married her. At that point in my life, I would’ve overlooked everything else and done whatever it took to make things work. Did online dating change my perception of permanence? No doubt. When I sensed the breakup coming, I was okay with it. It didn’t seem like there was going to be much of a mourning period, where you stare at your wall thinking you’re destined to be alone and all that. I was eager to see what else was out there.”

The positive aspects of online dating are clear: the Internet makes it easier for single people to meet other single people with whom they might be compatible, raising the bar for what they consider a good relationship. But what if online dating makes it too easy to meet someone new? What if it raises the bar for a good relationship too high? What if the prospect of finding an ever-more-compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, in which we keep chasing the elusive rabbit around the dating track?

The article is intriguing throughout. Another choice excerpt:

In 2011, Mark Brooks, a consultant to online-dating companies, published the results of an industry survey titled “How Has Internet Dating Changed Society?” The survey responses, from 39 executives, produced the following conclusions:

“Internet dating has made people more disposable.”

“Internet dating may be partly responsible for a rise in the divorce rates.”

“Low quality, unhappy and unsatisfying marriages are being destroyed as people drift to Internet dating sites.”

“The market is hugely more efficient … People expect to—and this will be increasingly the case over time—access people anywhere, anytime, based on complex search requests … Such a feeling of access affects our pursuit of love … the whole world (versus, say, the city we live in) will, increasingly, feel like the market for our partner(s). Our pickiness will probably increase.”

“Above all, Internet dating has helped people of all ages realize that there’s no need to settle for a mediocre relationship.”

The ideal economic model of online dating sites wants to work well enough to attract customers but not so well that you find a lifelong mate and stop subscribing to their services, so a model of lifelong casual dating might end up being the perfect world for them, if not society. The article includes an interesting analysis of why couples who meet online are more likely to hook up earlier than in the past.

Disruption, as those who study the topic tend to know, usually comes from the low-end. It's not surprising, then, that marriage and commitment is being disrupted at the low end, where bad marriages and relationships reside. Divorce might be seen as a healthy thing if it were not so costly: I have not seen statistics on this, but based on this article I'd predict we've seen a healthy rise in pre-nuptial agreements this past decade.