Explain One Play: Stephen Curry's special defense to attack Ja Morant

Good old High Tag

A list of all Explain One Play articles and videos is at The new Explain One Play index.

For long-time followers, you’ll know that I never do Explain One Play for losses, because frankly I’m grouchy. But I’m trying an experiment for this 2021.10.28.MEM-GSW game.

The game was kind of a bummer, I guess that's what happens when you give up 20 plus turnovers and get it to the end of the game where it's one possession, which means it's going to be a random ending.

When it's that close, it's always some freak play like an eight second violation or someone gets a rebound or. a shot just doesn't go in. So the Warriors just let it get random. And then in overtime, more randomness and the Memphis Grizzlies played great defense and they just pulled it out.

But I want to talk about things that happened right before the overtime. MEM had the lead and tried to isolate Ja Morant on Stephen Curry twice and both times the Warriors used a special defense, High Tag, to neutralize the advantage.

We look at the origin of High Tag as technology against LeBron James, and examples of Steph using it against James Harden and Demar DeRozan, and then finally the key plays in crunch time of regulation.

Co-starring Draymond Green, Andre Iguodala, and a clutch shooting Damion Lee.

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