NBA Playoffs – Brook Lopez May Annoy Trae Young: An Effective Emperor Penguin

Trae Young made his worst game of the playoffs in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Milwaukee Bucks. One factor in this was adjustments to the Bucks, which primarily affected Brook Lopez. The center actually managed to get the Hawks star out of his comfort zone.

Sometimes there are things before playoff series that are so obvious that you then wonder why coaches didn’t notice it in advance. Trae Young’s defense in the Bucks streak against Atlanta was one of them.

Under coach Mike Budenholzer, the Bucks developed a system around Center Brook Lopez, which worked like a well-oiled machine for years in the regular season. Lopez patrols the zone, always at the limit of the legal with regard to the “Defensive-3-Seconds” rule.

2.9 seconds became a household name and Lopez could be seen again and again as he briefly left the zone with his long strides to go straight back into it. At the same time Lopez stays as close to the basket as possible in Pick’n’Rolls, it is the often quoted “drop coverage” that hardly any team plays more extreme than the Bucks, but which also has obvious weaknesses.

Milwaukee Bucks adapt

The basket is protected, but the team is prone to pullups from the middle distance and floaters from movement. And this is exactly where the strengths of Hawks-Star Young lie, the 22-year-old put on 48 points and 11 assists in Game 1. Numbers that you had never seen at this level in the Conference Finals.

Atlanta stole the first game as a blatant outsider, so the criticism of Budenholzer was again big. Voices were raised that Lopez was useless in this series, not for the first time. That was already heard in the Nets series, but ultimately the center was one of the guarantees for the win in Game 7, especially in extra time.

This also applied to Game 2 against Atlanta, which Milwaukee decided in the first half and ultimately won with 125: 91. Budenholzer actually reacted and changed small details that had a big impact. Milwaukee switched again, only in the pick’n’roll it was not done, but here too the Bucks had thought about something.

Bucks: Brook Lopez influences Young’s decisions

Lopez actually stepped a little more out of the zone and took Young the middle distance. But that’s not all: the center kept changing its approach a little. Sometimes the arms were up, sometimes the center of gravity was lower and the arms stretched out to the side. Young could never be sure what Lopez was going to do, so the center forced some of the playmaker’s nine ball losses.

“We wanted him not to feel too comfortable,” Lopez explained the strategy. “I wanted to stand in the pass paths, where he wanted to move to the basket and use my hands at the same time.”

It looked strange at times, but it was an effective tool. Lopez tipped mostly backwards, fooled movements and looked more like an emperor penguin than a serious opponent. But it worked. Young scored only 15 points, played a meager 3 assists and only took five attempts near the basket or from the floater distance, also because the 2.13-meter man managed to prevent Young’s drives. The easy reads were taken from Young, so he made lots of wrong decisions for the first time in these playoffs.

Young himself had a different view of things, but this was exclusive. “They didn’t do much differently, they were just more aggressive and [Referee, Anm. d. Red.] Scott Foster allowed that, “complained Young. At least in the case of Jrue Holiday, the Hawks star was right, the Bucks defender was much more physical, fought better for blocks and also benefited from Lopez’s incarnate stop sign.