Here’s how David wants to beat Goliath: by wearing him down and keeping him guessing.
It’s the challenge ahead for an undersized Nets team tasked with stopping the 7-foot, 280-pound Joel Embiid in Brooklyn’s first-round playoff matchup against the Philadelphia 76ers.
The Nets don’t have a player of Embiid’s size or strength on their roster. Instead, they will lean on the strengths that helped them solidify the Eastern Conference’s No. 6 seed, even after a blockbuster midseason trade sent the Nets plummeting down the standings.
“I think we’ll take advantage of the things we do well. We’ve always said we’re gonna play with pace and we’re gonna get the ball up the floor,” head coach Jacque Vaughn said after Friday’s practice at the HSS Training Facility, less than 24 hours ahead of Saturday’s matinee tipoff for Game 1 in Philadelphia. “That’s an advantage for us. And then the different looks that we can give him whether we’re small, whether we’re big, I think the looks have to be different throughout the course of a game, definitely, this series.”
Chief among those strengths is the ability to take and make a high volume of threes, which the Nets want to get up in transition to avoid half-court basketball.
Increasing transition opportunities has been a point of emphasis for Vaughn and his coaching staff ever since the Nets dealt their pair of megastars, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, in mid-February.
The Nets are 10-6 since the trade deadline in games they’ve made at least 13 three-pointers. They are 9-1 when they make at least 15 treys.
“We’ve made it no secret we want to shoot threes; the more the better,” Vaughn said on Tuesday. “We’re learning the quality of them, what that looks like for our group, how quick we can shoot them. So I do think that is something we’ll look at in the series and see if we can make shots? When we make shots we’re an entirely different team. So we’re looking to make some shots.”
The Nets create some of their best three-point looks, however, in transition. They hope their run-and-gun style of offense wears the MVP frontrunner down. He is averaging 33 points and 10 rebounds per game, but a third of those points come at the foul line. Brooklyn plans to keep Embiid working all night in an effort to fatigue him out of his game.
“It’s a 48-minute, seven-game task,” said Seth Curry, Embiid’s former Sixers teammate. “He’s probably one of the most unstoppable forces in the league, so you just got to try and stick to your game plan for 48 minutes through the entire series, and hopefully it plays out in your favor overall. But it’s a full-team task to try and hold them down, and we’re going to have our hands full for sure.”
No player will be strained more in this series than starting Nets center Nic Claxton. On paper, Embiid outweighs Claxton by 65 pounds. In practice, he’s used that brute strength to dominate a Nets team that hasn’t had an answer for the bruising archetype of the center for years.
Claxton said the two have trash-talked over the years.
“I mean I like to chat on the court. I think talking trash I think that’s part of basketball,” he said. “We’ve had some discussions.”
Vaughn, however, said Claxton has grown in knowing his game and how to use his advantages — even if he’s giving up size in the matchup.
“You want to lean into your gifts, not your deficiencies, and he has some gifts,” the head coach said. “So he’s gonna lean into those, because that’s beneficial for us. And we’ll try to stay away from those deficiencies, and I think we’ll be OK.”
“Just using my footwork, my quickness, obviously he has however many pounds on me so I’m not going to be able to outmuscle him,” Claxton added. “And then offensively also just making him work, picking my spots, knowing when to attack and when to get my teammates involved.”
Here’s one more way the Nets are going to attempt to slow down Embiid: playing Dorian Finney-Smith as the small-ball five.
Finney-Smith said he “wouldn’t be surprised if coach throws a wrinkle out there, and I’d be guarding him” in an effort to show the presumptive league MVP different defensive looks. The starting forward is also a career 40% three-point shooter, and the Nets are 7-2 since the trade deadline in games he has made at least two threes. Playing him at the five means a lineup of all shooters on the court, which would pull Embiid — a noted rim protector — away from the rim and open up driving lanes into the paint.
“You don’t really — I can’t say stop. You just make it hard on him. Wear on his legs,” Finney-Smith said. “It’s gonna take a lot of bodies. It’s gonna be a team effort, man. When you got a guy like that who can also get rebounds on top of the post-ups he’s getting. It’s tough.”
Starting forward Cam Johnson was tight-lipped about Brooklyn’s defensive strategy for Embiid, but conceded their plan is to try to speed Embiid up.
“Just scheme and try to execute what we execute,” he said after Friday’s practice, “and everybody being locked into the game plan.”
Brooklyn’s longshot odds at upsetting No. 3 Philadelphia to ruin the Sixers’ quest for an NBA title starts and ends with how they fare at slowing down the superstar center. Few teams, however, have found an answer to one of the most dominant big men in league history.
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