The Magic Should Use Fewer Pick And Rolls
By Cory Hutson
The Orlando Magic’s offense is among the worst in the league right now. The reason for it is kind of hard to tell. One reason might be its pet play.
The Magic’s victory against the Chicago Bulls was like a breath of fresh air. Fast pace! Ball movement! Victor Oladipo is awesome! NIKOLA VUCEVIC SMASH!
The defense was not anything to write home about. But, for a game, the offense finally looked something like we all imagined it ought to. All night long, the Magic were able to get possessions to end in a lot of favorable ways
Starting early in the game, the Magic ran and ran and ran some more, racking up the fastbreak buckets. When they were not scoring immediately, they were often using that pace to force the defense into uncomfortable positions: forcing their bigs into isos against guards, or finding Vucevic deep in the post before he could get forced out.
If they keep up that style of play with injured players like Tobias Harris and Aaron Gordon in the lineup, maybe Orlando will have something nice going, for a change.
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So what gives? Why was this Magic team suddenly able to scorch the Bulls like few teams have been able to do this season?
The short answer is the Magic were able to avoid playing a slow, half-court game for much of the night, and when they had to they could lean on Vucevic in the post or Oladipo drives. In other words, standard half-court sets were the secondary option, compared to simply exploiting matchups.
This naturally begs the question, why is the Magic’s half-court offense so bad? They do not have a “give him the ball and let him go to work” kind of superstar, but plenty of teams are perfectly functional without that guy in the modern NBA.
Instead, it seems more like the offense is just . . . stagnant. Stiff. No movement.
Maybe the solution is to get some more pick-and-rolls going, just to get some energy into the system.
The thing is, the Magic do not actually run that many pure isolation sets. Most of the Magic’s plays actually do involve some kind of pick-and-roll or pick-and-pop.
In fact, that is exactly the problem right there. The Magic’s offense, in simple terms, boils down to two plays: a post-up (usually by Vucevic), or an on-ball screen. There is nothing else happening on the floor.
If the Magic look stagnant, it is because there is only ever two guys moving at one time.
Let us see that again, in a handy top-down view of just the player movement on the court, courtesy of NBA.com/stats. Orlando’s players are the red dots.
(EDIT: The .gif doesn’t appear to be cooperating, but you can view this play’s player movement–and others like it– at http://on.nba.com/1wcHtNx )
The guys who are not screening or handling the ball shift themselves only to move to better spot-up positions. Otherwise, they are mere bystanders to the main action.
This disparity has actually been quantified. Ian Levy, in his week 11 installment of The Pivot Point at Vantage Sports, took a look at how the ratio of on-ball versus off-ball screens affects offensive efficiency. Check out this chart plotting the amount of screening against that ratio:
See Orlando, wayyyyyyyy at the top? They have the highest ratio of on-ball screens to off-ball screens in the entire league.
They have more than two on-ball screens for every off-ball screen they run.
This chart also shows that their usage of screens is above average compared to the rest of the league. We also know the Magic are 28th in the league in offensive efficiency (as measured by points per possession).
The sum of all this data confirms what we already sort of knew: the Magic run a ton of pick-and-rolls (or pick-and-pops), most of which go roughly nowhere.
It is worth noting that Levy points out how more on-ball screening actually correlates slightly with better offense overall. Indeed, the Cavs, Clippers and Mavericks are all high on this chart, and each ranks among the very-good-to-elite offenses in the league.
This is easy to explain: these teams have excellent “screening” players, including the likes of Kyrie Irving, Chris Paul, and Dirk Nowitzki. They have very good reasons to run these kinds of plays.
The Magic, frankly, do not have these players. Vucevic and O’Quinn are OK as screeners and rollers/poppers, and Elfrid Payton projects as an excellent ball-handler, but for the moment this just is not an amazing play for the Magic. This is why it is borderline insane that the Magic are among the most frequent on-ball screening teams in the league.
The benefits of correcting this imbalance are easy to pick out.
The Magic’s spot-up options are not inspiring a lot of fear in the opposition, especially when the likes of Elfrid Payton are hiding in the corner.
Using off-ball action is going to make these players useful, not just by freeing themselves for better opportunities, but by forcing the opposition to rethink how they handle that pick-and-X in the first place. Maybe, on that play I just showed, Taj Gibson cannot crash down on Oladipo so hard. Maybe a Luke Ridnour/Channing Frye off-ball screen captures his attention somehow.
Off-ball action should benefit Oladipo in particular. He gets his best looks when he is able to work off-ball, catching the ball on the run or when the defense is distracted. He is a force to be reckoned with when he gets a head of steam moving toward the rim (which is why the high pick and rolls he ran at the end of the Chicago game were so effective). Using him as just a spot-up guy when he is not handling the ball is wasting his talents.
Why is the Magic’s offense so imbalanced in the first place? Maybe Coach Jacque Vaughn is hesitant to install more complicated sets. Maybe the Magic are force-feeding these kinds of plays to improve Payton’s and Oladipo’s ball-handling skills. I cannot really say.
What I am sure about is that this cannot be the most efficient way to run the offense. The Magic’s anemic scorelines are evidence to that fact. It is time to unlock the Magic’s potential.