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We’ve officially made it through the opening game of each NBA playoff series. It’s important not to overreact to these things, but there’s always information to glean. We’re going to take a look at a key number that emerged from each game, one that could serve as a solve-or-sink point as we get deeper into the series.
Let’s dig in, shall we?
Cavaliers-Raptors
Key number to watch: 28
I was excited about the unknown of this series: all three of the regular-season matchups, all won by the Raptors, happened before Thanksgiving. There were key figures missing in each matchup, and because of the early nature of the meetings, we had no film of James Harden as a Cavalier to gather clues from.
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Harden promptly ripped the Raptors, and virtually every defensive coverage they deployed, to shreds in the Cavs’ 126-113 victory on Saturday. A 22-point, 10-assist performance is relatively straightforward; the pick-and-roll dominance — 36 on-ball picks received, an absurd 1.28 points per possession on those trips — was the real story.
What stood out to me, aside from Harden having answers to the schematic test, was how high up the floor a lot of those ball screens happened. It’s one thing to have to deal with talented ball-screen partnerships — it’s another when you have to do so while being stretched thin from a spacing perspective.
More broadly, it felt like the Cavs were consistently intentional about maximizing their space — Spacemaxxing? Can we say that? — with their ball screens in real time. In addition to running them high on the floor, they often paired those actions with their weakside spacer lifting from the corner to the wing to put a help defender in peril.
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Help on the roll, and a shooter’s open; stay attached to the shooter, and you have Jarrett Allen or Evan Mobley rolling free to the basket.
To that end: per Second Spectrum, the Cavs ran 28 ball screens 30+ feet from the basket, their fifth-highest total in a game this season.
(If you extend it to 35 feet or more, the number is still 10 — their highest clip in a game, only trailing the Phoenix Suns, who had 12 on Feb….
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/nba-playoffs-2026-lebron-james-and-the-lakers-turning-back-the-clock-1-defining-stat-for-each-series-so-far-173422296.html
Author : Nekias Duncan
Publish date : 2026-04-20 17:34:00
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