Suns, Bucks and ‘space ball’: The biggest story of the NBA playoffs and what it

OK, so … now what?

The Milwaukee Bucks and Phoenix Suns met in the NBA Finals last season, and each squad had high hopes of being back there this June. Instead, they both lost seventh games on Sunday and head into the offseason with some lingering structural questions.

In some respects, this is normal. The reality of the NBA is that nearly every team sees its season end in at least somewhat disappointing fashion and with its weaknesses glaringly exposed. While there are levels to this, the reality is that four teams saw their seasons end in the past few days after very strong seasons; 20 other teams crave having their problems.

Unfortunately, “Let’s run it back and lose in the second round again” isn’t much of a rallying cry. As teams get better, the stakes only get higher; win a championship (like Milwaukee did) and the goal immediately becomes repeating. Merely winning 50 and losing a tough series to another top contender feels like failure.

So let’s not overreact to what happened. The Bucks still have Giannis Antetokounmpo, and the Suns still have Devin Booker, Chris Paul and (we think) Deandre Ayton. They’ll be back.

Underlying their 2022 postseason shortcomings, however, is one potential failure that was consistent across both teams: They couldn’t deal with spread-out lineups. This isn’t “small ball” so much as it is “space ball.”

Space ball is what happens when the size of the players on the court isn’t the issue, but rather where they are standing. It’s what happens when the Mavericks put five capable 3-point shooters on the perimeter and leave Rudy Gobert and Ayton in no man’s land, or when the Bucks’ protect-the-rim-first defensive ethos leaves them essentially daring Grant Williams to eliminate them.

It’s the latest evolution in a postseason tactical game that continues evolving at a dizzying pace: String five players on the perimeter, switch everything on defense, go one-on-one against a defense that can’t easily send help, and either feast on open 3s or get to the rim. Forget pick-and-roll, this is more like pick-and-run. Space-ball teams might set a screen to get a switch, but the endgame is an isolation for the dribbler after the screener gets the hell out of dodge and relocates along the 3-point line.

While other coaches likely have tried this from to time at some point, the real turning point for space ball came in the Clippers-Jazz series a year ago. LA coach Tyronn Lue turned to it as a way to neutralize Gobert in a series where the Clippers were without superstar forward Kawhi Leonard and had a surfeit of guard talent. It worked so well that they came back from 25 down in Game 6 to stun the Jazz and win the series.

It’s an evolution one step beyond the Golden State Warriors’ infamous small-ball “Death Lineup” because it depends on five mostly switchable players shutting down the opponents’ 3-pointers while creating myriad drive-and-kick chances of their own. The Warriors’ grouping worked because they had the greatest 3-point shooter in history; in contrast, space ball works because the 3-point threat is distributed across the entire lineup.

Just look at the massive 3-point disparities in the first two rounds. Dallas and Boston are first and second, respectively, in playoff 3-point frequency and second and third in limiting opponent 3s. For the postseason as a whole, Dallas takes 12.9 3s per 100 possessions more than the opposition, and Boston 11.0.

Over the course of a series, it generated an impossible math problem. Utah was out-3’d by 72 attempts and 44 makes over six games against Dallas after leading the league in 3-point frequency during the regular season. The Mavs’ margin in the same category was 83 attempts and 33 makes in seven games against Phoenix. Meanwhile, Boston nearly doubled up Milwaukee on triples, 110 to 57, over seven games in the East second round.

Phoenix, Milwaukee and Utah all tripped over themselves trying to deal with space ball with traditional fives. In contrast, it might have looked weird when the Nets were playing three small guards against Boston in the first round, and they got swept for their efforts. However, the kernel of truth in Brooklyn’s odd lineup was that it had to match up against Boston’s space-ball pairings and ran out of big forwards.

Milwaukee tried to go big against Boston, and for five games, it was working out OK — the Bucks had a ton of rim protection, and they had Giannis to carry the offense. Ditto for Phoenix, which had a 3-2 series lead and a hope that it was fatiguing Dallas star Luka Dončić. Instead, the Suns lost the final two games by 60 points. The longer the series went, the more Boston and Dallas pressed their advantage with space ball.

The individual data underlines these trends further. The Bucks were outscored by 19.2 points per 100 possessions with Brook Lopez on the court in the Boston series, surrendering a jaw-dropping 47.1 3-point attempts per…