Rolo's tip cup

I'll have to write a post on Robin Lopez and his amazing season with the Blazers this year.  He just took over the town.  No one captured the imaginations of Blazermaniacs as much as Rolo this year, really.  Lopez seems to have been destined to make his way to this city.  The dude screams PDX.  Why didn't we see this earlier, when he was on the Suns?  How on earth could he have played a whole season in New Orleans?  It should have been clear from the beginning.  The dude IS so much of the spirit of Portland.

Another reason for his popularity: he played amazing basketball and was a key component of the Blazer's winningest season in recent memory and their deep run into the playoffs. ...Not bad!

With a field goal percentage of 55%, 700 rebounds (374 defensive, and an impressive 326 offensive), a whopping 139 blocks, and an 81% free throw percentage (a crucial stat, and a significant improvement over last year's 78%), he played a part in the changes in the offense that gave LaMarcus Aldridge his best season ever and made them the best overall rebounding team in the NBA (3rd offensive, 4th defensive).  He was also part of one of the most impressive pick and roll duos in the NBA--the Batman and Robin pick and roll, which I'll take apart sometime to reveal all its beautiful little intricacies.

But until I do all that, I'll just post here a clip of one of his best and most signature skills, which displays his amazing athleticism and which always blew my mind when I saw it this year. 

This is his little one-handed tip-in, which he brings about by cupping his hand, cradling the ball in it, and shoving it back at the board. It's Rolo's tip cup.

It's an immensely effective move: it avoids all the innacuracies that would come with merely tipping the ball in, and all the slowness and dangers (such as getting the ball stripped) that come from bringing the ball down to gather and go back up.  

It looks simple, right?  Just grabbing the ball, a little swish with the fingers to move the ball from the fingers to the middle of the palm and steady it, and a shot upward a foot or so up to the basket.  For someone 7'1 with hands the size of frying pans, no problem.

But to appreciate it fully, you have to watch what Rolo is does first with his other hand and arm.  Here, in a game against the Clippers from the season, he uses that left arm to push away--yes, that's right--Glen Big Baby Davis.  BIG BABY DAVIS.  That gentle movement again with his right hand looks slightly more impressive when you know it takes place while the rest of the body is holding back two hundred and eighty pounds (as he is listed on the roster, but I think we'd all be willing to say it is probably A LOT more) of Big Baby muscle and bone.

Look at the legs too: the ability to come and jump again after catching the ball (to rejump or second-jump) is also vital.  It needs to be kept simple and effective, so as not to mess with that hand's movement.  In this case Lopez has plenty of room to move (he's boxed out Davis thoroughly), but to plant those feet going after a board and go up again while making that catch one-handed is no doubt difficult, and I haven't seen Rolo drop the ball once, even when he gets bad position.

And then there's that hand movement itself.  Lopez brings the ball back towards the center of his body and turns his hand around it with amazing quickness and control, getting enough of the palm underneath the ball to push it back up, but not too much so as to shoot the ball out of his fingers merely, rather than his whole hand.   It's a graceful, effective move of the hand, but one which looks quite dangerous, since the ball is kept so exposed and away from the body.  But it is also thereby kept away from defenders and closer to the hoop.  This requires an immense sense of balance and not a little coordination--I don't see either Dwight Howard or DeAndre Jordan making this move.  It falls more in the category of players that seem to have a more nuanced sense of their body's distribution in space than Lopez at first might appear, and who generally also share more duties with power forwards than Lopez does: people like Tim Duncan, Pau or Marc Gasol, (younger) Kevin Garnett.  I'll dwell more on this in a later post, but Rolo's control of his body is acute and his use of it--his sense of what it does to the space of the floor and what can be done within that space--is brilliant: he is one of the most creative centers in the NBA simply in how he puts his body to work on the floor.  This pays huge dividends in his pick and roll with Batum, of course, but it is also evidenced in actions like these.

So, there's a little bit of Rolo to savor there and enjoy.  It's a move that only appears every so often, but which is always an option, and it comes up more frequently than you'd expect for requiring so much effort in so many stranger areas of bodily movement.  It's one of the things that makes this player so remarkable, and such a rewarding element in the Blazers' amazing performance this last year.