LeBron James

“Jonas sometimes said, ‘What can I do to get him to stop screaming at me?'” Says Aaron Gray, who has acted in three seasons with the Raptors.

The Toronto guards found it frustrating that Valanciunas, although an eager and aggressive dive man on pick-and-roll, wasn’t explosive enough to jump for lobs, coaches say.

“We are a family, and sometimes the family is hard on each other,” once Valanciunas told me about those early years. Lowry made sure to balance nitpicking with support.

The young Valanciunas ate badly – soda, sauces at will. David Gale, a former Raptors assistant, remembers having dined in a steakhouse in Toronto with a voracious young Valanciunas, and having looked surprised while Valanciunas phoned the pizzeria a few doors down to order two pizzas he could take on the way home – a second dinner.

“It was like Andre the Giant,” says Gale.

Even then, Valanciunas loved work. He devoured the film. He asked questions about opponents’ tendencies. When Tim Duncan baffled him with the counters on top of the pole counters, Valanciunas slipped on the bench and said to Gray, “I don’t know how this guy can be stopped,” recalls Gray.

At each training in the next two weeks, Valanciunas asked Gray and Ed Davis, another great veteran, to play one on one against him – with Valanciunas playing only after the defense, says Gray.

“Everything we’ve worked on has embraced it 100%,” says Bill Bayno, a former Raptors assistant – now with the Pacers – who worked closely with Valanciunas in Toronto.

Except for the occasional ultra-slow-motion 3-pointer, Valanciunas has never evolved into a modern center. Instead, it became the best version of his true self.

That player has thrived in Memphis this season: 15 points per game (in just 26 minutes!) With 59% of the best career shots and the most fat rebounds of his NBA life. Valanciunas ranks 11th in the offensive rebound rate and 6th in defense. In part this is due to positioning; Taylor Jenkins planted Valanciunas deep into the paint. Valanciunas is on average closer to the basket when an opponent’s shot increases than any other player in the league, according to Second Spectrum tracking data.

Valanciunas combines this territorial advantage with some of the league’s baddest boxouts.

Valanciunas does not offer much schematic defense flexibility. He won’t take Damian Lillard’s guys over the arch on the pick-and-roll; Grizzlies depend on whether their guards stand side by side with such players around choices.

But Valanciunas has learned to play his style quite well. He is more intelligent at reading angles and moving his feet. Use its length well around the edge.

He is in much better condition than when he was twenty. This process began in the summer of 2014, when Masai Ujiri, president of Toronto’s basketball operations, challenged Valanciunas to get back in shape. He spent the summer training twice a day with Gale in Los Angeles. He gave up junk food.

Gale and Valanciunas remember having celebrated a summer spent in Nobu. Sitting outside at sunset, Valanciunas declared that he wanted edamame. Valanciunas decided to treat himself: he would order a beer with every order of edamame. “I think we had five orders of edamame,” says Gale, laughing. Remember that the bill was around $ 600.

Valanciunas had earned it. He maintained a healthy diet and work ethic. On the right night, he can keep the offense of Memphis afloat. It is not super efficient against behemoths that can almost match its size. It is still below average as a passerby when help arrives, although it has improved.

But if you start an undersized center against him, Valanciunas can beast. Pass and blush the kids. He can use his left hand after working almost with one hand in the early part of his career.

It was easy to forget Valanciunas after Toronto swapped him after last season’s deadline. The Raptors, with Marc Gasol in place of Valanciunas, won the title. Valanciunas made a mistake in a reconstruction team in a small market.

It did fit anyway. The pairings between great men with Valanciunas with one of Jaren Jackson Jr., Brandon Clarke or Solomon Hill have all proved feasible. The Valanciunas / Clarke duo was a big winner.

Memphis was one of the happiest stories in the league before this horrible virus stopped the league. Most of the attention was rightly paid to their young stars, especially the brave and charismatic Ja Morant. But Valanciunas was part of it. His old coaches and teammates watched and smiled.

“He’s like a son to me,” Bayno once told me.

3. Cavs get big and funky

It seemed like a stroke of luck when a triple lineup of Larry Nance Jr., Kevin Love and Tristan Thompson led the Cavaliers to a massive fourth quarter return against Miami on February 24th. JB Bickerstaff tried something crazy before the waste time, and stumbled on a win. We would never see him again.

The NBA announced that due to the current coronavirus pandemic, the 2019-20 season would be suspended on March 12th.

Mistaken! Bickerstaff went on busting with injured Darius Garland and Kevin Porter Jr. It worked! The Nance / Love / Thompson and Nance / Love / Andre Drummond trios are a combined plus-44 of over 70 minutes total!

Nance is the nominal little striker and is fast enough to defend some wings; oversaw DeMar DeRozan for much of Cleveland’s extraordinary March 8 victory against San Antonio. Both Drummond and Thompson can attack forcefully forward if Bickerstaff wants love on slower opponent centers.

Nance is turning 35% from the bottom, and has grossed more than 3 seconds this season – 56 – than he has done in his entire previous career. Between Love and this redone Nance, Cleveland’s gigantour formations have (had? How are we doing?) Enough shots to get away with it.

What really makes them go is a cunning inner passage. If you like old-school transitions from large to large – fast windings and short distances – the large triple Cavs were (are they?) A pleasure.

Nance and Love are good, smart passersby. Thompson and Drummond are underestimated in this regard; Drummond averaged about four dimes per game in 2017-18 before the Pistons acquired Blake Griffin, a much better passerby who usurped Drummond’s role as an elbow-to-elbow.

This is not a genius, a coaching against wheat. Given recent injuries, it is really only Bickerstaff who plays as many of his best players as possible together. But it’s a buzz, and it’s a nice wrinkle: one of the reasons the Cavs went well 4-6 after the All-Star break.

4. Sigh. Jazz has found a bench

One of the joys of the long season is watching each team go through its own jagged and unpredictable self-discovery process. Sometimes there is no trial: a team starts badly and remains the same type of evil. Sometimes the process is fluid and intentional: a team makes an exchange to meet a certain need, it works and the team is better exactly in the way it sought.

Sometimes the process is more casual, and it’s the most fun when that semi-randomness leads to a happy ending.

Namely: in the weeks leading up to the shutdown of the season and after many unsuccessful attempts, Jazz seemed to have found a functioning bench. Remember: despite all the (justified) handshakes about Mike Conley’s adaptability to Utah’s top five – and Joe Ingles’ relegation – first season Jazz really lost games every time two or more benches played together. Jeff Green did not adapt. Maybe even for the first time in his career, Ed Davis didn’t. Dante Exum stopped. Emmanuel Mudiay also did it after a rather promising first stretch.

Utah’s first step in tackling this was swapping Exum (and two second round choices) with Jordan Clarkson, a bench machine gun prototype who silently improved his choice of shots and passed the second half of last season at Cleveland.

This alone did not lock the team into position. He left Utah with a lot of kids – maybe too many – who needed the ball. Around Christmas, Utah gave up Green to free up minutes of backup for Georges Niang and handed over the role of Davis’s backup center to Tony Bradley.

Utah soared with wounded Conley, and then went through several wild up and down cycles alternating Conley from starter to reserve before reinstalling it as a permanent appetizer – and relegating Ingles.

In March, they seemed to land on the right bench group. Utah beat opponents nine points per 100 possessions in 362 minutes with Niang and Bradley on the floor, for NBA.com. The hybrid range of Conley, Clarkson, Ingles, Niang and Bradley – a mainstay in the weeks leading up to the end of the season – is over-45 in 78 minutes.

Playing with three ball managers makes life easier for the big names in Utah. Niang can recover 3 seconds; nearly 70% of his shots come from deep in this season, compared to 56% a year ago, and he is a shooter on the ground who can speed up his release under duress.

Bradley is a dangerous lob-catcher with a soft touch on floats and half hooks. It bounced off an absurd 19.3% of Utah’s near misses while on the ground, the highest offensive rebound rate among all spin players – and yet another benefit of playing with so many ball managers who draw help around the circle. (Only five players have ever reached 19% in an entire season: Moses Malone, Dennis Rodman, Jeff Foster, Jayson Williams and Danny Fortson.)

Bradley assumed the role of defender in the role of defense. It’s not Rudy Gobert, but he improved his timing by taking on challenges.

Jazz never peaked during a sparshot 64 game. They may not have had it in the past 18 years, and even at that theoretical limit they would have been unfavorable – and probably the big ones – against both teams in Los Angeles.

But they would have been dangerous and interesting, and it stinks at the level of pure basketball that we won’t see Utah completing its evolution on the natural timeline of the NBA.

5. An old-fashioned ass pass

This is one of the funniest and funniest basketball games:

Each inbounder should practice passing football. Anecdotally, it appears to have a huge success rate. We need advanced tracking data on this. Who are the best butt passers? Is it better to be taller or shorter? What, umm, types of butts make targets more effective? Want a fastball rebound or some cushioning? Second Spectrum wizards must make it.