DENVER — A superstar’s powers are growing. A point guard’s hero ball is rather unselfish. A magician is guarding two shooters at once. And a former All-Star is coaching before he retires.
Let’s open up the notebook to run through four NBA trends that have caught my eye over the past week:
Edwards’ floor game
Anthony Edwards didn’t see his teammate, nor was seeing him necessary.
The Minnesota Timberwolves star entered the second half of a too-close-for-comfort match in Denver with a special objective. He believed the way the Nuggets were defending him was leaving the corner too open. He hadn’t taken advantage of that enough over the first two quarters.
Come the third, that would change. That’s when Edwards sliced the Nuggets apart.
It’s been a season of adaptation for the 23-year-old. He’s chucking up more 3s than ever, maneuvering differently in a post-Karl-Anthony Towns world. Towns was Minnesota’s scariest 3-point shooter. Losing him means defenders can sink into the paint with more comfort, taking away Edwards’ driving lanes, just as the Nuggets did Wednesday.
The beginning of the second half, Edwards made them pay — three times in a row.
Only a few minutes into the quarter, he swerved around a screen from Rudy Gobert and whipped an over-the-head floater to Jaden McDaniels, with whom he didn’t even make eye contact.
Watch where Edwards is peering — not at McDaniels but instead at the man responsible for guarding him, Nuggets wing Michael Porter Jr., who takes a step into the lane as Gobert makes contact on the screen. Once Edwards notices Porter stray too far, he knows the guy in the corner is open and lofts the ball over the defense to McDaniels for a 3-pointer.
The Nuggets love to muck up the middle of games with a pesky zone defense. Edwards looked ready for it. And on the next possession, he pulled off the same feat from the other side of the court. He drove to the opposite direction of a screen from Julius Randle, leaving his defender behind him. From there, the math was easy.
Once again, Edwards doesn’t peek at McDaniels in the corner. Instead, he counts four defenders in front of him. With one behind him, the same shooter must be alone in the same place. He fakes a stepback, drawing the Nuggets closer to him. McDaniels doesn’t let down.
It’s no coincidence Edwards is making these types of plays now. He says he studied perennial MVP candidate Luka Dončić, a master of these reads. It’s beginning to show.
“In the past, he would’ve kinda fought that coverage a bit,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said. “But he’s now accepting it, and he’s making all the right plays. He’s been tremendous at it.”
Tremendous enough to pull off the same pass a third time consecutively. On the next possession, Mike Conley Jr. is the one parked in the opposite corner. Edwards heads to his right around another pick-and-roll. Porter steps into the lane, and without hesitation, Edwards fires to Conley.
Three possessions, three buckets, eight points — and a young star getting better by the minute.
Unselfish isolations
All is going right for the Cleveland Cavaliers, owners of the NBA’s best record, winners of 15 consecutive games and challengers for the top scoring attack in NBA history. The Cavs are just two-fifths of a point per 100 possessions short of the 2023-24 Boston Celtics’ record offensive efficiency. At 55-10, the Cavaliers are a modicum of beautiful basketball, where even the sport’s most presumptuously selfish plays still involve everyone else.
Cleveland may plop two conventional big men in the middle of its offense, but coach Kenny Atkinson’s group is anything but old school. The Cavaliers take the fourth-most 3-pointers in the NBA and sink the highest rate of them, 39 percent. Their off-ball actions cause melees. Jarrett Allen, one of their 7-footers, is an expert at darting to the paint from the corners. Evan Mobley, the other big man, is hitting more jumpers than ever and also is screening and moving away from the ball more than he has in any other season.
Anyone who puts on a Cleveland jersey turns to gold. De’Andre Hunter has hit half of his 3s since arriving from the Atlanta Hawks before the trade deadline. Ty Jerome has become one of the NBA’s most gluttonous bench scorers and will be on the Sixth Man of the Year long list — though he isn’t even the top sixth man on his own team, thanks to Hunter.
The Cavs flow. If a player moves, a reward comes … which brings us to one of their few All-NBA contenders: Darius Garland, who is in the midst of a career year.
Garland has been one of the league’s best one-on-one players this season, mostly because he never actually commits to scoring until he finds his shot. He’ll go one-on-one to get to his stepback but also will attack the paint, where he’s become one of the world’s preeminent jump passers. One of his go-to moves is to draw in the defense, rise as if he’s about to try a layup, then whip a pass to the corner around the back of the defense. When Allen cuts, Garland dumps it off to him.
The Cavaliers are scoring 1.13 points per possession directly off Garland’s isolations this season, sixth-best in the NBA among the league’s 50 highest-volume one-on-one players. No one passes like Garland in these situations. He assists on one in every seven isos, twice as often as he did last season and tops in the NBA, a stat that becomes even more impressive when coupled with the fact that Garland doesn’t often see double-teams on these plays, which would make a pass more intuitive.
More than ever, Garland is creating something out of nothing.
Closeout(s) of the Year
The Nuggets were at the center of the NBA universe this week, facing the first-place Oklahoma City Thunder twice before taking on the Timberwolves in a rematch of last spring’s seven-game, second-round playoff series. Before Edwards sliced them up, they witnessed a man defy the laws of physics: Lu Dort was in two places at once.
Watch Dort take away two jumpers in as many seconds on the below play. Nuggets guard Jamal Murray tries a stepback against Thunder pest Cason Wallace but can’t get it off because Dort, who should make his first All-Defense team come season’s end, flies from out of Murray’s periphery to deter the shot. Murray has to audible in midair and dumps it off to Dort’s man, Porter, who rises for a 3-pointer as soon as he receives the basketball.
Somehow, Dort raced back to the Nuggets’ sharpshooter in time to swipe the basketball away:
Coach Jordan
The bench is meant for sitting, especially on a basketball team.
Watch the sidelines of any NBA game, and you’ll notice one or two coaches leave their seats throughout. The head coach roams to half court, shouting instructions to players (and maybe a profanity or seven at the officials). A lead assistant will get up to communicate with players who return to the bench. He could venture to the head coach to alert him of how many fouls someone has or a coverage the opponent is about to run.
But that’s it — except for in Denver, where DeAndre Jordan is already comporting himself like he’s past his playing career.
“I owe it to my teammates and the young guys to kinda give them knowledge that I didn’t have or s— that I know now,” Jordan told The Athletic. “If I see something that may help, then I do it.”
Jordan will notice an in-game trend and, as if he’s the Nuggets’ lead assistant, will step to the court to alert his teammates. On one first-half possession earlier this week, with the Thunder between two free throws and starting wing Christian Braun hanging by the Nuggets bench, Jordan prodded to the 23-year-old for a tip. He had noticed a quirk in Oklahoma City’s defense that Braun could exploit.
In-game lessons from Jordan are a theme that Denver head coach Michael Malone encourages. And Jordan doesn’t limit those chats just to players.
He will converse with referees for 48 minutes — not in an argumentative way but in a strategic one — even though the 36-year-old, once a first-team All-NBA center, isn’t a rotation regular anymore.
During the fourth quarter of that same game, with Malone huddling his squad during a stoppage, Jordan called over official David Guthrie. The Thunder were defending three-time league MVP Nikola Jokić illegally, Jordan estimated. He asked Guthrie if he could show him, then placed a hand on the official’s back, trying to demonstrate what he deemed legal guarding position.
This is not new for Jordan (not even for this particular game; he called over another official, Curtis Blair, for a similar talk in the first quarter), though it’s not regular in other places.
Beloved vets at the ends of benches can boast loud locker room voices. They may speak up during timeouts or when someone sits next to them. But they’re not usually heading near the court to chat with teammates between plays. Jordan doesn’t know if he wants to coach when he’s done playing, whenever that comes. But whether he has the title or not, he’s already doing it.
“Those guys actually respect it,” Jordan said. “I could go out there and say something, and they’re like, ‘I’m not listening to that s—.’ But it’s cool that you have the respect of your peers and the other guys of like, ‘Hey, I know he’s not telling me some bulls— or something that’s gonna impact me negatively.’ We all wanna help each other.”
(Photo of Anthony Edwards: Justin Edmonds / Getty Images)
