BADALONA (Spain) - The first Semi-Final of Season X of the Basketball Champions League, powered by Ameresco SUNEL, Final Four saw Rytas Vilnius come out on top against La Laguna Tenerife, 87-69.
The Lithuanians won all the battles that you need to if you want to get past a behemoth of this competition like Tenerife.
They won the hustle battles with 42 rebounds to Tenerife's 38, converting those rebounds into 18 second-chance points against 8 from their opponents.
They dominated with 10 fast break points to 0, and also won the paint battle 38-24.
But above all that, Rytas and coach Giedrius Zibenas were able to come out on top in a fascinating tactical battle. Let's dive into the film to discover how they did it.
Do you take the over or the under?
When teams create game plans for one of the best point guards in the game, there are a thousand options, but when players are as skilled and smart as Marcelinho Huertas, the chances of stopping them impacting the game in one way or another are perishingly small.
It's much more likely that you need to pick your poison; do you want to get the ball out of their hands and force them to create more for others, or do you gamble on taking away as many of their passing options as possible and allow them windows to score themselves?
As you will see in the video below, Rytas elected to use a Drop and Over coverage on pick-and-rolls, with the player defending the screener dropping to protect the basket, and the player on the ball fighting over the screen to recover.
The outcome was that Huertas was repeatedly open to take the midrange pullup that he loves.
On his way to 21 points, Huertas made these shots at a 53 percent clip and took full advantage. The challenge for Tenerife was that Rytas defending the pick-and-roll 2v2 meant they could stay home on everyone else.
There were very limited advantages for Huertas to create for his bigs rolling to the rim or his shooters on the perimeter.
Rytas head coach Giedrius Zibenas spoke about this specific element to their game plan.
"The key was defensively like always. We know for Tenerife, the way they play, the whole orchestra is run by one musician, Huertas. Usually, he will involve everybody, but today we allowed him to score more from the pullups. He was punishing us with that, but other guys were not actually involved," he explained.
After the game, Tim Abromaitis explained the impact this same impact of Rytas' game plan in an even more succinct way.
"We’re not gonna win many games making two three-pointers," he said.
Tenerife went with a much more aggressive scheme against Jerrick Harding. Instead of trying to defend the ball screen 2v2 and giving scoring opportunities to Harding to score, they chose to regularly send two players to the ball in an attempt to force the ball out of his hands.
As you will see in the video below, Harding wasn't going to allow that to stop him tonight.
As you just saw in the clips above, instead of giving the ball up, Harding changed the angle that he took using the screen, went wider, and forced switches.
He then proceeded to punish those switches on his way to 29 points on 53 percent shooting. Only Kyle Guy in Belgrade has ever scored more in a BCL Semi-Final (34). He also had 5 assists, mostly from picking out the short roll against the same aggressive coverages.
Good teams find solutions
As effective as Rytas' game plan was, a team like Tenerife will never be solved by one coverage without at least asking some questions of that scheme. The clip you see in the play below has an action that will be very familiar to regular enjoyers of Tenerife basketball.
What you have just seen is Patty Mills setting up as if he's there to play the shooter role in a Spain pick-and-roll, but instead of setting the back screen for the roller, instead it was Mills sprinted over a flare screen from Shermadini.
Tenerife used to run this exact play for Sasu Salin, and it works uniquely against drop coverage because Shermadini's defender is away from him in the drop position.
The outcome of that was that the big Georgian was free to screen Mills and get him wide open for the three.
The other adjustment that Tenerife made was setting what are known as Gortat screens, named after the Polish legend, Marcin Gortat.
What you will see in the clip below is Huertas using a snake dribble to get his defender on his back and out of the equation. Then, from there, you will see Fran Guerra set a second screen on his man in the drop position. Tenerife regularly used this tweak to convert those Huertas pullups into shots at the rim or free throws.
Zibenas also had some adjustments of his own, sending Martynas Paliukenas and others to post up Tenerife's Brazilian point god.
The idea wasn't to score a large volume of points from the post but more to use their physicality to add to Huertas' physical load in the game.
Zibenas mentioned that Huertas' shooting percentages dropped in the second half, and defending those post-ups would have only helped Rytas make it harder for him to carry the scoring load.
Augustas Marciulionis was the X-Factor
In a game when Speedy Smith was outstanding on his way to 12 points and 3 assists, and Gytis Masiulis had 12 points himself, it might seem strange to pick out Augustus Marciulionis with just 4 points as the X-Factor in this game, but it was his impact on the Rytas bench units that made such a huge difference.
Marciulionis had 5 assists that produced 13 Rytas points, and maybe more importantly, it was where those points came from.
Jordan Caroline made his first three-pointer of the season since January, and then hit another one. Tenerife would not have been game-planning for Caroline to hit those shots, and both were created by Marciulionis's assists.
The young Lithuanian was also responsible for getting Masiulis going with wide-open looks.
The reads and precision passes you just saw from Marciulionis in that video were very impressive for a player so young on a stage like this.
Rytas won the bench-scoring battle 54-34. A lot of that will have been thanks to Harding coming off the bench, but Marciulionis was right there to make sure everyone else on that Rytas bench was involved.
"Actually, he joined us only in March, and it was the turning point of our season. He helped us to change the season dramatically. Having in mind he's so young, it's big. He's a very humble kid, great listener, very coachable, and for him the sky is the limit," Zibenas said about his young point guard.