From the Death Lineup to Death by KAT: Four Ways the NBA Evolved in 2015-16

Basketball is always evolving. The NBA isn't what it was 50 years ago; it isn't even what it was five years ago. External forces like rule changes, training methods, technologies, and medicine have pushed the league in new directions while internal forces such as player skill sets and team strategies have created copycat trends.

Forty years ago, there was no three-point line. More recently—think all the way back to 2011 —the Miami Heat played in the NBA Finals with a single elite outside shooter, Mike Bibby, in their starting lineup.

Today, of course, most teams start at least three reliable threats from behind the arc. The only constant is change.

The 2015-16 NBA season, particularly the final two rounds of the playoffs, figure to have a significant influence on the future direction of the league. Let's look forward by looking back, and examine the ways professional basketball evolved over the past year.

In the season's biggest trend, we saw an increasing number of teams switch defensive assignments across the board. Switching itself is hardly new; teams have switched guard-to-guard and forward-to-forward for decades. Switching everything also has precedent: in 2013, the Denver Nuggets did just that with certain lineups, mostly when Kenneth Faried played center in a sort of proto-smallball set.

Then came Golden State.

For two seasons now, the Warriors have been among the league's best defensive teams largely because of their ability to switch every screen on the floor. This tactic works especially well against the fast-paced, free-flowing ball movement and cutting that was perfected by teams like the 2014 San Antonio Spurs; instead of running through dozens of screens—and getting tired or making mistakes in the process—smart, versatile defenders can read their switches just as quickly as offensive players can screen and cut.

Golden State's much-touted "death lineup" features four players standing between six-foot-seven and six-foot-eight, all of whom are interchangeable on defense. Together, they terrorized the NBA, and while their historic shooting stole most of the headlines, it was their seamless defense that made it all work. Many league observers and teams assumed that the Warriors' switching scheme wasn't replicable.

That all changed late in the 2015-16 season, when the Spurs faced the Warriors in what was hyped as the biggest regular season game in recent memory. Despite having a much less interchangeable lineup of defenders, San Antonio switched every screen, stymying Golden State's rapid ball movement. In the playoffs, Oklahoma City and Cleveland followed suit. To nearly everyone's surprise, it worked.

Part of the reason both the Thunder and the Cavs found success was because switching screens helps mitigate the biggest advantage gained by rapid ball movement: wide-open catch-and-shoot jumpers created by defensive breakdowns. Traditional defensive schemes require players to fight through screens, help, and recover on nearly every cut, pick, and roll. Teams that whip the ball around the arc like the Warriors can make the defense fight through a dozen such screens in a single possession, forcing several quick, difficult reads. With playmakers at all five positions, the Warriors would create defensive breakdowns that led to wide-open shots. But when a team is able to switch all screens quickly enough, that offensive movement is wasted.

The trade-off is that switching forces slower, more lumbering defenders onto quicker opponents, often in unfavorable spots on the floor. This happened a lot in both the Western Conference Finals and the NBA Finals, as big men like Steven Adams, Enes Kanter, and Kevin Love found themselves guarding Steph Curry beyond the three-point line.

On paper, this seems like a loss for the defense, given how good Curry is at putting defenders on skates. But Curry wasn't himself in the postseason. I think much of that was probably due to lingering pain from a sprained MCL that he suffered in the first round; however, there's reason to believe switching one through five would've been moderately successful even with a fully healthy Curry.

How so? Teams often look to exploit mismatches through isolation, and the Warriors are no different. But the more time they spend in isolation, the less time they spend playing at the frantic pace that made them one of the most potent offenses in league history. Love guarding Curry on an island might still be better than the Cavs trying to guard the chaotic passing and cutting that the Warriors are used to. Like the Spurs, the Thunder, and the Cavs did this year, expect the rest of the NBA to experiment with widespread switching going forward.

Despite what happened in the playoffs, I'm still not convinced that Golden State's offense has been "solved." It's more likely that teams have discovered a way to slow it down. However, it's probably not a coincidence the two teams that had the most success against the Warriors were the two teams most perfectly designed to attack in isolation.

While ball movement has many pros (see above), it also creates cons. Unlike the 2014 Spurs and the current Warriors, most teams do not have capable scorers, passers, ball-handlers, and playmakers at all five positions. Even when you do, rapid ball movement increases your risk of turnovers. More passes means more chances to mistime a pass or a cut, more chances to lose floor balance and be out of position to get back on defense, and less control of the pace of the game.

Isolation possessions are among the NBA's least efficient ways to score. However, they create some indirect benefits. The biggest positive? They make it easy for the offense to maintain floor balance and prevent transition opportunities. After all, isolations are deliberate. They are controlled. There are much fewer errors or unexpected outcomes. When a team goes to an isolation, there is rarely more than one or two reads for the offense to make, and many fewer opportunities for live ball turnovers. Because of this, an offense running isolation plays can slow tempo, crash the boards more easily without sacrificing transition opportunities, and force the game to be played in the half-court.

The Cavs won the championship with this approach. Although they scored just 0.88 points per possession in isolation, they were able to slow down the Warriors to an uncomfortable pace of play and nearly eliminated fast-break opportunities. In the playoff games that they won against Golden State, both Oklahoma City and Cleveland followed the same script: take away fast-break opportunities, grab a lead, and stymie pace by letting the Warriors switch into less favorable matchups before attacking in isolation.

Few teams can mimic Golden State's versatility, but many feature at least one or two gifted iso scorers. While the era of 1990s-style backdowns and clearouts is dead, teams that find themselves struggling to keep up should consider using isolation offense as a valuable change of pace.

No position has been more revolutionized during the NBA's modern era than center. There are very polarizing opinions about the state of the position, but regardless of what people think a center ought to be, the prototype for a successful modern player is beginning to take shape in the form of OKC's Steven Adams and Cleveland's Tristan Thompson.

Adams dominated the first four games of the Western Conference Finals by destroying Golden State's small lineups on the offensive glass, protecting the rim, and managing to hold his own defensively when switched onto perimeter players like Curry. Thompson plays a similar role for the Cavs. No three skills are more important for big men in today's game than rim protection, offensive rebounding, and the ability to contain pick-and-rolls and/or isolations; the league is gravitating toward players who fit that bill.

Of course, it's even better when a center can also score in the low post, or pass, or handle the ball, or—more recently—shoot from the perimeter. Combine those skills with the Adams/Thompson trifecta, and you have the state-of-the-art, new new prototype. Consider Kristaps Porzingis. What makes the seven-foot-three New York Knicks youngster such an exciting prospect is that he has the mobility to guard the perimeter, the length to protect the rim, some traditional low-post scoring skills, and three-point shooting touch. Plus, he can crash the boards!

And yet, Porzingis isn't even the NBA's top young center prospect. That honor falls upon Karl-Anthony Towns, who has the potential to be the game's best rim protector and perimeter defender while also possessing nearly every offensive skill in basketball. Towns has the tools to be a go-to scorer in the post or on the wing, the athletic ability to finish on rolls, and the shooting touch to compete in the All-Star Weekend three-point contest. He has a high basketball IQ, too, and a feel for the game unusual for someone who is only 20 years old. Combine Anthony Davis's jump-shooting, DeAndre Jordan's gravity on rolls to the rim, Nikola Jokic's passing, and Adams's defensive versatility, and you have Towns, a player perfectly designed for the direction the NBA is headed. Oh, and did I mention he's only 20?

For the second consecutive year, the 2015-16 season began with over 100 foreign-born players on NBA rosters. This number of overseas players has been steadily climbing for over two decades, and that figures to continue as basketball becomes more popular and organized abroad. This season, there were a record ten African-born players and a record nine Brazilian-born players in the league at the start of training camp. Not surprisingly, a majority of these international players are power forwards and centers.

Fact: there just aren't that many particularly tall people in the world. This is especially true when the NBA world pretty much only consists of the United States. As the market for basketball recruiting expands to all corners of the Earth, so does the pool of extraordinarily tall candidates for league jobs. Of the top 25 picks in this year's NBA draft, there were five power forwards or centers who stood at least 6'11'', and all of them were born outside of the States.

That's no anomaly: more than half of the 80 NBA players categorized by ESPN as centers in the 2015-16 season were born outside of the U.S. America might still produce the majority of the world's elite NBA talent, but it does not have a monopoly on tall people who also can ball. Nikola Jokic, Rudy Gobert, Andrew Bogut—look at the top centers in RPM, and notice how many of them were born overseas.

So what do the above trends mean for the short-term future of the league?

Well, as more teams employ switch-heavy defensive schemes, isolation scoring will become more important. As increasingly versatile big men enter the NBA and develop into star-level players—thanks largely to an ongoing influx of foreign-born talent—smallball may give way to bigger lineups that can play like smaller ones. As all of that happens, the league will keep evolving; things that worked last season won't necessarily work in the future. Not when new strategies and new players continually push the sport forward.

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