Los Angeles Lakers: LeBron James’ pass to Danny Green was the right play

The Los Angeles Lakers had a chance to take a late lead against the Miami Heat in Game 5 of the NBA Finals when LeBron James passed to Danny Green.

The Los Angeles Lakers might be facing the Miami Heat in the 2020 NBA Finals, but it feels like 2007 all over again. Late in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals, the Cleveland Cavaliers trailed the Detroit Pistons by two points. LeBron James drove to the basket and passed out to a wide-open Donyell Marshall for what would have been a game-winning 3-pointer.

Marshall was an average 3-point shooter that season, shooting 35.1 percent from long range. He certainly wasn’t a dynamic sharp-shooter, but he could knock down a bucket when you needed him to. In this case, however, Marshall missed the shot, and LeBron James took the blame.

The talking heads and noisy voices criticized him roundly, but they hadn’t yet put two and two together to realize that LeBron is more Magic than MJ.

In this situation, a Marshall 3-pointer would have given the Cavs a one-point lead with six seconds remaining, while a two-point field goal would have tied it and given the Pistons an opportunity to win with a basket in the game’s final possession. We know now that especially for the road team, going for the win with a three is vastly superior option than going for a two-point field goal and either forcing overtime or leaving time for the home team to win on the final possession.

Based on everything we’ve learned about end-of-game strategy and analytics (which feeds that strategy), it was the right play then and it’s the right play now, whether the shot goes in or it doesn’t.

Over the last 17 years, LeBron James has trusted teammates with big shots like this many times. Sometimes the shot goes in and it’s heralded as a great basketball play from one of the league’s best playmakers, and other times it misses and the criticism from fans who really don’t know what they’re talking about and media (and former players who have never been in these high-leverage situations themselves) emerges.

History repeats itself for LeBron James with the Los Angeles Lakers

In the final seconds of Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Friday night, with the Lakers trailing by one point, we had a similar situation unfold to this Donyell Marshall attempt from 13 and a half years ago. James drove the ball into the teeth of the Miami Heat defense, and Bam Adebayo, Jimmy Butler, Duncan Robinson and Jae Crowder converged on him. The collapsing defense left Danny Green wide open for a 3-point attempt with 8.9 seconds left that would have given the Los Angeles Lakers a two-point lead.

As the saying goes, it’s a make or miss league, and Green missed. Markieff Morris corralled the rebound with just under 6.0 seconds to go and made the inexplicable decision to simply lob the ball over Anthony Davis’s head and out of bounds, and the game was over.

Criticism didn’t pile upon Morris for a decision that rivaled that of J.R. Smith in the 2018 NBA Finals when he forgot the score in the final seconds. It piled upon LeBron for creating a wide-open shooting opportunity for Danny Green rather than shoot a contested shot under heavy duress from multiple strong defenders.

Just like the Marshall attempt from many moons ago, this would have given the Lakers the lead with just a few seconds remaining. The parallels don’t end there. On unguarded catch and shoot attempts in 2006-07, Marshall converted on 36.9 percent of them, good for 1.094 points per possession. This season, Green was a virtual duplicate, converting on 36.7 percent of his unguarded catch and shoot attempts, good for 1.102 points per possession.

A made 3-pointer would have put the Los Angeles Lakers boot even more firmly on the necks of the Miami Heat than the Marshall shot. In this case, the Lakers would have been up two points with about six seconds left, meaning the Heat couldn’t win with a two-pointer like the Pistons could have if Marshall had made his.

It puts the onus on the Heat to shoot a two-point field goal, which if successful gives them roughly a coin-flip’s chance in overtime or to attempt a 3-pointer themselves to try and win, which would be about a 30 percent chance on such a short clock. And given the short clock the Heat would be dealing with, there’s no way they would be able to generate a shot of the same quality that James did for Danny Green.

LeBron James gets criticized for not having a “killer instinct” when he passes to teammates for last-second 3-point attempts, but the people levying these criticisms don’t understand what they’re seeing. It’s a 3-D chess game for LeBron at the end of games, and that’s exactly how he played it.