Harrison Barnes is clearly a smart guy, but the play he made in Sunday’s win against San Antonio makes him look even more intelligent — because he essentially called it last week.
First, here’s the play I’m talking about.
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By the fourth quarter, Barnes seemed to understand what the Spurs were doing against him defensively. He faced up with some success throughout the night, but he shot only 8 of 20 from the field. San Antonio tends to attack other teams’ best or most versatile offensive players in an attempt to take something away from them and force opponents to go elsewhere. Over the years, the Spurs have sent extra bodies at Dirk Nowitzki whenever he turns his back on his defender, and on Sunday they did the same thing against Barnes.
But Barnes knew the double-team — or, in this case, what became a triple-team — was coming. He said as much last week on this very site.
The 24-year-old has been keeping a running diary all season long in partnership with BBVA Compass. In the third installment, Barnes walks us through late-game situations and what it’s like to hit a game-winning shot, and he explains his relationship with Nowitzki. But most pertinent to this article, however, is the final part, when he writes about what it’s like to be a focal point of opponents’ game plans for the first time in his career.
It’s during that part that he mentioned the Spurs specifically.
“It’s just a process and you have to play through it,” Barnes writes. “I remember the first time I was going against San Antonio, the idea of a soft blitz was a new idea for me. I thought it was a double-team, but really the guy was just sitting there, and they want you to pass the ball out. So you have to go and bait the guy into coming before you pass it. It’s just little things like that, and you can only pick it up once you play those teams and then go back and watch what happened, so that the next time you play them, you know what they’re doing.”
During the sequence above, as soon as Barnes turns and dribbles, defenders swarm. In the process, he’s drawn in so many defenders — and he knew they were coming — which left a couple teammates open on the perimeter. Barnes jumped blindly, turned in mid-air, then delivered a strike to Seth Curry, who hit the 3 to put Dallas up nine points with about six minutes to play. Curry scored a career-high 24 points in the game.
That play tells you a lot about Barnes. You have to remember this is the first time the guy has ever been “the guy” on a professional team, and he’s just now beginning to play most teams for the second (or, in this case, third) time as the go-to guy. Every game he’s learned something new, and he’s had to apply those lessons to future games. The play above is an example of him doing just that, and it came at a key time.
Offensive focal points can produce, even on nights when their shots aren’t falling, and even if you send double- or triple-teams. This was just another step in that process for Barnes.
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