Quick Look at the Kings offense

I was interested in trying to determine what we are doing on offense, so I rewatched the 2nd, 3rd and 4th quarters of last night's Utah game and made some notes.  I was real interested in determining how often we are getting the ball to a post player, and whether it was working or not.

A quick comment about my methods, I only counted non-transition possessions, and I counted any time we were shooting free throws as two points regardless of whether or not the free throws actually went in.

As you can see, over the course of the game we steadily went away from the post up game.  In the second quarter it was extremely effective, in the 3rd quarter though, we played most of the quarter without JT, Spencer or Tyreke on the floor and the offense was much different.  It worked reasonably well, but I don't know that we can count on duplicating the shooting we got in the 3rd quarter very often without a post player to run the offense through. 

The 4th quarter strategy of draining the shot clock to 8 before even attempting to start the offense was a mess.  Yes, we won the game, but I can't believe we had a better chance to win playing the prevent offense than running our usual sets.  The only bright spot in the 4th quarter was, when we did get the ball down low, we were pretty effective against a pretty decent defensive team, at home, in lockdown mode out of desperation.

One other question I had, was who is getting the post up opportunities.  The results didn't surprise me a ton having watched the games, but if you'd have told me they would look like this before the season started I would have been Shocked (pun intended):

Last night, every time we got the ball to JT in the post, he made a good decision that either resulted in points or foul shots.  I think its interesting to note who is getting the chance to post up (JT & Tyreke) in addition to the amazing effieciency JT displayed last night.

Now for all the usual caveats, these numbers are amateurish for a host of reasons, and the sample size is way too small to draw any conclusions from, but given the assist numbers JT has put up to start this season, I think we've sold JT short a little bit (or at least I have) as a playmaker.  We are starting to see the emergence of a post player you can throw the ball in to, and count on them to make a good decision that leads to a good chance for points.  We have not given Jason his due to date for amazing development from last year to what we've seen this year.