The headline probably should have included Robin Lopez, the Blazers center who put in a layup to give Portland a 105-103 advantage with 1.3 seconds remaining last night. The Blazers held on to win, but all anyone wanted to talk about was the brilliance of Portland coach Terry Stotts and his ATO (after timeout) play-calling.
The play in question was unfettered high-low action with Nicolas Batum — who had 13 assists on the night — inbounding the ball to LaMarcus Aldridge, who had 39 points on 16-of-30 from the field at that point. Aldridge draws the attention by catching the inbounds and immediately finds Lopez for the go-ahead layup:
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And here it is from two more angles:
The genius of the play – if you can call anything genius without sounding like a hyperbolic eighth grader — lies in it’s simplicity and the misdirection of inbounding the ball to Aldridge. LMA poured in a season-high 39 points during the game, so the natural assumption for Denver is he’d take the shot with the score knotted at 103 and less than five seconds to play.
Nope. Robin Lopez seals off J.J. Hickson splendidly under the basket and the rest of the Blazers act as decoys along the perimeter: pass, pass, bucket. Stotts knows what he’s doing when you need a play out of the timeout, but if Aldridge hadn’t been dominating and Lopez fails to seal Hickson under the cup, it wouldn’t have happened. Kudos to this Blazers team for running Stott’s play to perfection.
What do you think?
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