Nets trust Spencer Dinwiddie after lob-passing fiasco in Game 1: ‘The odds are in your favor’
PHILADELPHIA — When DeAndre Jordan arrived in Brooklyn in the summer of 2019, Spencer Dinwiddie had to re-learn alley-oops. Jordan was a one-footed jumper, and Jarrett Allen jumped off two feet. Dinwiddie had to learn the difference in cadence when throwing lob passes. The turnovers were high before he found his rhythm.
Game 1′s lob-pass nightmare, the starting Nets guard said, is not attributed to the same struggles — even though Dinwiddie returned to a new-look Brooklyn team this season after pit stops with the Washington Wizards and Dallas Mavericks.
It’s unclear where the team places blame for the miscommunications on alley-oop passes from Dinwiddie both to starting center Nic Claxton and reserve center Day’Ron Sharpe.
Dinwiddie turned the ball over four times in a below-average performance from Brooklyn’s floor general. Three of his turnovers came on lob passes. Two of his lob passes were uncharacteristically high, including one intended for Sharpe that bounced off the top of the backboard.
Dinwiddie said some of the onus fell on Claxton to convert alley-oops into points. On one lob, Dinwiddie went with a running hook shot-looking pass over Joel Embiid’s outstretched arms. Claxton bobbled the ball. When he corralled it, he threw a pass directly to Philadelphia’s Tyrese Maxey — but the NBA officially credited Dinwiddie with the turnover.
“I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater with one game. I think there are a couple lobs to Nic that I thought he should have converted, and there was one to Day’Ron that completely sold on me, that I just kind of threw too high,” Dinwiddie said before Sunday’s practice at Temple’s Pearson & McGonigle Hall. “So some of that, sometimes it’s gonna be the catch, sometimes the passer. Overall though, I think history tells us that (Claxton is) a phenomenal lab catcher, he obviously just led the league in field goal percentage. He’s extremely efficient on both sides of the ball, he’s a phenomenal player, and I’ve just gotta trust him and he’s gonna make the play. Odds are he’s gonna make the play nine times out of 10.”
Claxton tried to explain the failed connection ahead of Sunday’s practice. He said there wasn’t any miscommunication between him and Dinwiddie on those alley-oop attempts, but also said the two were not fully on the same page.
“But I’m not worried about that,” Claxton said. “We really had a good thing going at the end of the regular season, and we’ll get back to that.”
Nets head coach Jacque Vaughn said he’s going to take the odds of Dinwiddie completing those lob passes. Brooklyn’s starting point guard recorded 10 or more assists 12 times since the trade to the Nets. All 12 of those instances came after March 1.
Only two players are averaging more assists than Dinwiddie during the tail stretch of the regular season: James Harden, who had 13 assists against the Nets on Saturday; and Hawks star Trae Young, who turned the ball over five times and recorded eight assists in Atlanta’s series-opening loss to the Boston Celtics.
The Nets trust Dinwiddie and believe the awry passes were an outlier.
“I told him I take the odds of him completing those. I’ve seen it done before and I’ve seen him do it at a high level,” Vaughn said. “I said to him during one of the timeouts: ‘The odds are in your favor, and we’re going to connect on a few of these.’ The good thing is our bigs are getting to the rim, it is available. That’s the difference between sometimes scrimmaging during the week and giving your guys off a little time to recover during the week. You just don’t get that timing a bit during the course of a week.”
Dinwiddie wasn’t the Nets’ only turnover machine on Saturday. Brooklyn turned the ball over 19 times as a team. Mikal Bridges also turned the ball over three times, and four other Nets players gave the ball away twice.
“Most of them were live — it was a lot of live-ball turnovers, and those are the worst turnovers to have,” said Claxton, who finished with four points, 10 rebounds and three blocks in Game 1. “You’re better off just throwing the ball out of bounds so you can set up on defense, and they did a really good job of capitalizing off of those, and it gets the crowd involved when they’re hitting threes and getting transition dunks. So we really need to make sure we take care of the ball, especially in a hostile crowd like Philly.”
The Sixers attempted 19 more shot attempts than the Nets — coincidentally, the same number of giveaways the Nets had as a team. They will not be able to win this series — or win a game this series — if they cannot take care of the ball, starting with Dinwiddie, who orchestrates the offense.
“So you see the turnovers, you look at those: You’ve got the Spencer lobs; you’ve got them trying to take a charge. Those are all turnovers, so great. If they come try to take a charge, that means there’s somebody open on the perimeter and we should be getting an open three,” Vaughn said on Sunday. “Those are things that we can take care of for sure. Whether it is we penetrated and a guy shouldn’t be in the corner where he should be, like dead in the corner and having an outlet for that guy, that ends up being a turnover. A lot of things that we can clean up and a little rust that we can knock off from having a week off from basketball. We’ll be ready for game two.”
