Milwaukee Bucks: The formula for defending James Harden
By Ben Rauman
Disrupting passing lanes
Another important component to the Bucks’ defensive strategy is disrupting Harden’s passing lanes. After all, Harden is one of the league’s best distributors in addition to being a generational scorer.
One way the Bucks achieve this is by staying home on the Rockets’ three-point shooters on the perimeter.
By not collapsing when Harden drove to the lane and trusting in the rim protection of their bigs, the Bucks made it difficult for Harden to kick it out to open shooters consistently.
Additionally, an under-the-radar benefit of forcing Harden right is making him attempt more difficult passes:
In my best @CrumpledJumper impression, I attempted to chart all of Harden's passes last night.
— Mike Zavagno (@MZavagno11) March 27, 2019
One big takeaway - by forcing him right so dramatically, the Bucks are able to take away most competitive passes to the right corner. This makes him attempt tougher R to L passes pic.twitter.com/8nJPNPGwAD
By consistently forcing Harden right, that side of the court gets clogged up, making it more difficult to execute competitive passes in that area.
Consequently, he is forced to make more difficult passes to the left with his non-dominant right hand across his body and through traffic.
This forced two of his three passing turnovers in the teams’ second matchup, as indicated by the red lines in the graphic above.
More significantly, though, it led to a lot of non-competitive passes to the right corner and back out to the perimeter when there was too much congestion for Harden to make a play for his teammates or finish himself.
Clogging up the right corner also does collateral damage by making things a bit more difficult for Rockets forward P.J. Tucker, who is significantly more lethal shooting from the right corner (46 percent) than the left (37 percent).