It's hard to get too caught up in a single moment when a team scores 138 points. They scored 138 points. Every moment must have been pretty incredible to get them there. But as the Chicago Bulls desperately tried to catch up to the Brooklyn Nets in their heavyweight showdown on Wednesday, one set of two plays was a stark reminder of just how terrifying Brooklyn's offense can be at its best.
It came in the third quarter. The Nets had built a sizable 11-point lead thanks to James Harden carving up Chicago's pick-and-roll defense like a Thanksgiving turkey. On this possession, though, Harden had earned a brief reprieve. So he dumped the ball into Kevin Durant in the post… and the Bulls lost their minds. Nikola Vucevic and Troy Brown Jr. quickly converged on Durant, joining Ayo Dosunmu, who was already there. This left two Bulls to defend four Nets and a whole lot of court. They did the best they could under the circumstances. Zach LaVine tried to split the difference between DeAndre' Bembry and Blake Griffin. Coby White wisely scampered over to Harden. That left Patty Mills, simultaneously one of the best shooters in the NBA and only the fifth-best shooter on this particular team, wide open from behind the arc.
Guess what happened?
Now, there are plenty of reasonable rebuttals on Chicago's part. Brown probably shouldn't have left Harden. Dosunmu is a mismatch in the post, and the fact that he was fronting him and trying to prevent the catch is evidence enough that Chicago was going to send some help. Their best defensive player, Alex Caruso, didn't play on Wednesday. The Bulls have ample trade ammo to add another defensive forward as well, and there's a good chance that if these teams meet in the playoffs, Chicago's roster will look different. But let's look ahead to the very next possession.
Harden brings the ball up. Durant starts in a very similar position, but rather than posting up, he comes off of a pin-down screen. This time, he's not working on a smaller player in the post. He's running a play designed for a mid-range jumper. And both Chicago defenders in the play still chase him down, leaving the screener wide-open in the corner. That screener was Patty Mills. Durant didn't hit for another open 3, though. He casually made the jumper while getting fouled in the process.
There's a chilling scene in the seventh season of Game of Thrones in which a major character, Jaime Lannister, is spared death at the hands of a dragon only by the timely intervention of one of his subordinates, who tackles him into a lake to get him out of the line of fire. When he pulls him out of it afterward and the two stare at the scorched battlefield the dragon left in its wake, Lannister murmurs in terror, "that was only one of them."
That, essentially, is what happened here. In case you didn't notice in the clips, Kyrie Irving was not on the floor for either of these plays. Harden initiated them, but didn't factor heavily into the defense's response. In one play, Durant alone managed to warp Chicago's defense beyond recognition in order to create the sort of shot that a shooter as accomplished as Mills should never be able to take. On the second, he proved why he was capable of doing so by scoring over that warped defense and picking up a free throw for his troubles. There are somewhere between 10 and 15 players in the NBA who can do that to a defense, and like Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons, the Nets have three of them.
They unleashed them all against one of the best teams in the NBA on Wednesday and scored 138 points in the process. Irving delivered only nine. That is what makes the Nets such a scary postseason opponent. If one such scorer can do to a defense what Durant did to the Bulls in that third-quarter sequence, Wednesday's game as a whole is proof of what happens when you put three game-breakers of that caliber on the court at the same time. Their mere presence drags opponents so far away from the defensive principles and game plans they've relied on all season and creates easy points for everyone on the floor.
Even now, almost a year after the Harden trade was made, the Nets have still barely been able to capitalize on that singular advantage. Irving just played his third game of the season. Joe Harris remains out with an ankle injury. Harden is only now rounding into form. But if this is what the Nets are capable of even under those circumstances, the fully realized version of this team is only going to be more terrifying. Most defenses lack the personnel to adequately contain one superstar. No one has enough for all three.
