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Welcome to Hips tonight here at The Volume. Happy Wednesday, everybody. Hope all of you guys are having a great middle of your week. Got a jam-pack show for you guys tonight. We had an absolutely insane game five of the Eastern Conference semis between the Cavs and Pistons. We're going to break that nut job of a game down from the perspective of both teams. And then for those of you guys who have some questions, drop them in the chat. Jackson's going to come on the stream at the tail end of the show. We'll take you guys as questions. You can go anywhere around any of the series. We'd love to dig into some stuff around the NBA playoffs with you guys at the tail end of the show. You guys know the joke before we started. Subscribe to Hoops Tonight YouTube channel so you don't miss any more of our videos. We're on the pathway to 150,000 subs. So it would mean a lot to me if you guys would take a second to scroll down and hit that subscribe button. If you're already subscribed, like this video, sign up for post notifications. That would mean a lot to me. All right, let's talk some basketball. So one of the things we talked about after game four was that the shot quality dynamic, it kind of tilted towards the calves for a couple of reasons. And it started to dawn on me at the tail end of game

two. If you guys remember, one of the things I talked about was, you know, obviously Cade was

and Tobias, we're both showing impressive shot making over the smaller, uh, calves perimeter

players, namely Mitchell and Hardin and also

Max Trues as well. But the calves went 0 for seven on catch and shoot threes in that fourth quarter.

And I thought they were able to get a lot of good threes by playing through the pocket. And essentially,

uh, uh, uh, it's has a, it's a product of the way that the pistons are guarding in those coverages.

So regardless of whether it's Duren, Isaiah Stewart, or Paul Reed, if there's a ball screen

involving those guys, they're coming up to the level, which is creating an opening to hit

the roll man as he slips out, either into the short roll or you saw a little bit of pick of popping

tonight with Evan Mobley, where he popped above the brake line. But when that guy gets out of the ball screen, then they're able to get clean looks as they move the ball to the weak side because it creates a four on three, right? And that four on three, if, you know, it's a too big look with Jared Allen. If they don't, if they don't tag Evan, Evan can look to score. If they do kind of tag Evan with that third defender, the lob pass to Jared Allen is open. If they tag Jared, then the skip over to the weak side is open for a three. And so one of the things that I talked about after game two, if you guys remember, is like, well, the calves aren't making these catch-and-shoot threes. But, I mean, if you dig through their NBA playoff history, it's recent playoff history, they've been a very good catch and shoot team in the regular season that struggles to make catch and shoot threes in the postseason, right? Then we go on the road to Cleveland. And in Cleveland, that dynamic finally really starts to take shape. Obviously, there's one-on-ones for both sides, right? You know, James Hardin and

Donovan Mitchell both had a lot of success attacking Duncan Robinson. There's a lot of James

Harden on Tobias Harris that we're starting to see as of late, although I thought Tobias did a little

bit better in that matchup over the course of the last couple of games. There is some one-on-ones,

but for the most part, if they can get

into a ball screen and they can get the ball into the pocket, they can get a clean look. And

they shot over 40% on catch-and-shoot threes in both game three and game four. And that dynamic

continued tonight into game five, as Cleveland continued to get great shots in those ball screens.

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