Split-second timing for baskets off cuts fueled the season the season's first victory by visitors on the home court of the defending champs.
Stats review: Making the Cut
Stats
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Round 27 of the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague has come and gone with several teams notching important wins as the march towards the final month of the season continues. No team came away with a better win than Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens, which handed Real Madrid its first home loss of the season in WiZink Center to hang onto third place in the standings.
A lot of things went right for Panathinaikos on the offensive end in their 11-point victory, but perhaps the most glaring was the production they found cutting off the ball as they scored a season-high 18 points over 10 cuts.
Cuts fill an important role in EuroLeague offenses but tend to take very different forms, possession to possession. That was particularly clear in Panathinaikos's win as they scored several cuts in the flow the game as their finishers played off dribble penetration and offensive rebounds, filling vacant space sneaking behind the defense. The Panathinaikos passers also found cutters coming off screens in a designed flex action, several flashing to the mid-post area for short jump shots, and a few with drop passes after timely duck-ins as well.
Frequently, those opportunities are the byproduct of the play that precedes them. Whether it was Kostas Sloukas keeping his dribble alive to gain the attention of additional defenders, Mathias Lessort getting double-teamed in the post, or one of Real's big men stepping up to help off their man, Panathinaikos's cut scoring was often the reward for moving the defense. In many ways, cuts are a proxy for all the other things going right for an offense.
That is not to say that the pass and finish do not require skill. Several of the cuts Panathinaikos scored would not have been possible without perfect timing, an accurate pass, and either the athleticism to finish a dunk or the combination of touch and footwork to score the resulting shot attempt. Mathias Lessort's poster dunk in the fourth quarter was perhaps that game's best example of the personnel involved cutting to the rim making all the difference.
Regardless of what goes into them, both the volume of cuts a team produces and the consistency with which they finish them matter. In the EuroLeague, only 6.3% of all possessions are cuts resulting in around 8.1 points per game, and teams finish them at a 66% clip. These tend to be high-value shots that are very difficult to come by. How many a team gets on any given night tends to vary wildly as every possession at this level is like a chess match and cuts are just the winning move, sometimes the route to that point is quick and simple and sometimes there's no route at all.