How the keeper play became a weapon for modern big men

It was late February 2018 and the Raptors were trying to complete a comeback against the visiting Bucks in their first game after the All-Star break. East-leading Toronto entered the break on a seven-game winning streak, but that streak was in jeopardy as it trailed by two points with three seconds left in regulation.

Khris Middleton split a pair of free throws, and Raptors coach Dwane Casey called his final timeout to advance the ball and draw up a last-ditch side-out play.

Casey had two star guards in DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry who he could trust to take the last shot, but he decided to throw a curveball. Out of the timeout, center Jonas Valanciunas moved to set a cross screen for DeRozan to curl toward the near sideline, but never made contact. Instead, as Bucks center John Henson dropped down to help on the curl, Valanciunas wheeled around at the nail to receive the inbounds pass from sharpshooter C.J. Miles, who immediately sprinted toward him looking for a handoff and a potential game-winning three. At least, that's what Henson thought was happening.

His reaction was subtle; all he did was flip his stance, transferring his weight from back foot to front, so he'd be ready to jump out at Miles. It provided Valanciunas with just enough of an opening. The hulking Lithuanian put the ball on the deck with 2.2 seconds on the clock. With Henson on his hip, he took two hard dribbles, gathered, and stuffed the ball through the hoop just before the buzzer sounded.

"We knew they were gonna be up there to protect the 3-point shot, they knew we needed a three to win the game," Valanciunas recalls of his game-tying buzzer-beater, which he still insists he was fouled on. "All game they were up, corralling, taking the 3-point shot away. So that was a smart move by the coaches, just reading the game."

Valanciunas was far from the first big man to uncork a fake-handoff keeper, but rarely had the play been used to such great effect in such a big spot.

"To win a game or tie a game, that was the first one (for me)," he laughs. "First and last one, I guess."

About eight months later, Casey, then coaching in Detroit, drew up a nearly identical game-winning keeper for Blake Griffin. Five years after that, the Raptors returned to the well and won a game by drawing one up for Scottie Barnes. In between, the play became a popular counter for some of the game's biggest (literally) offensive hubs.

"I hope they call it the JV play," Valanciunas says.

Though the play had been around for a while, Valanciunas' mad dash felt like something of a flashpoint. It occurred at a time when the NBA's big-man renaissance was starting to take shape; a time when it was becoming paramount for the league's giants - even those in the "traditional" mold like Valanciunas - to be able to handle the ball at the top of the floor, make quick reads and decisions, use deception, and leverage the dual threats of playmaking and self-creation. The importance of those skills has only been magnified in the years since.

"You gotta be versatile," Valanciunas says of the demands of his position today. "Not just traditional, scoring down low. You gotta be able to pass, you gotta be able to dribble the ball, run DHOs, fake DHOs, keeps, swing, set a screen, cut. It's been a change for the big man to have to do more than just post, finish, or rebound the ball. But it's good. We're evolving. It's fun."

The spread pick-and-roll changed the game in the mid-aughts, and became ubiquitous by the early 2010s. But when defenses became accustomed to guarding it, coaches started looking for new (and in some cases old) tactics. Around the turn of the decade, more teams began following the Steve Kerr-era Warriors' blueprint, incorporating a higher volume of high-post actions revolving around their big men. Split cuts, delay action, and myriad dribble-handoff variations began to replace some rote pick-and-rolls. Back in 2013-14, the year before Kerr took over in Golden State, the league averaged about 14 DHOs per 100 possessions, according to a source with Second Spectrum access. This season, that's up to 22 per 100.

That stylistic shift was made possible by both the deluge of skilled bigs who started pouring into the league and the influx of quick-trigger shooters capable of launching on the move. With the 3-point boom reaching a crescendo and defenses stretching themselves to protect the arc, new possibilities opened up inside of it. One way to mine those possibilities involved turning dribble-handoffs into multi-pronged threats.

Most DHOs function similarly to pick-and-rolls, but putting the ball in the screen-setters' hands gives them more agency in how the action unfolds. The primary way they can exercise that agency is by keeping the ball for themselves, like a quarterback executing a play-action bootleg. In basketball terms, think of it like a pick-and-roll ball-handler rejecting the screen, only in this case the screener and ball-handler are one and the same, so it's the screen itself doing the rejecting.

"I feel like the reason you're seeing less value, or just not as much pick-and-roll, is the defense is switching," Suns center Jusuf Nurkic says. "You see more people try to put you in position to iso the ball. And that's not allowing you to really play pick-and-roll. So, that's a kind of counter with the DHO, it's harder to guard. It's hard to switch when you (as the screener) have a live ball. Because if they switch, I'm just going to keep it and get the defense on their heels."

Sacramento coach Mike Brown, whose Kings run more DHOs than any team in history, offers a similar explanation.

"If you have a guy like (Domantas Sabonis) and he's coming at you on the dribble, and you think you want to blitz the guy that's coming (for a handoff), if you jump two out, now he keeps it. And that doubt just changes the whole momentum of the game."

Sabonis, who leads the league by a mile in both handoffs and fakes, says the threat of him keeping the ball can make things easier for the guys coming off his live-dribble screens.

"With the good shooters around me, (the keeper) becomes open. Especially since we run DHO so much, I feel like it's easier to mix it in, and it keeps the defense honest. That way, the shooters can come up cleaner."

The ability to put defenses in that kind of bind was part of the impetus for the 76ers redesigning their offense around Joel Embiid this season under new coach Nick Nurse. After years of operating out of the low post or in pick-and-roll, Embiid was moved to the top of the floor as a DHO hub, and it was a big part of the playmaking growth that had him at the forefront of the MVP conversation before he got injured. He ranked second to Sabonis in fake-handoff frequency at the time.

Some keeper plays, like the one that produced Valanciunas' heroics, are scripted. Most of them rely on spur-of-the-moment coverage reads and split-second decisions.

"It's spontaneous, it's a read-and-react thing," Heat center and keeper maestro Bam Adebayo says. "You can work on it just to get your timing and everything else down. But at the end of the day, it's a reaction.

"If you know a team is gonna start switching, or they're blitzing certain players, that's when you put it in your mind, like, 'OK, I might be able to get a keep.' And then you watch as the point of the screen is about to happen, and you'll see if your man cheats up. If he does, you get a layup."

As one of the skilled bigs who entered the league in the late 2010s, Adebayo quickly became one of the game's preeminent handoff hubs, developing balletic two-man chemistry with Tyler Herro, Max Strus, and especially Duncan Robinson. But for all the ball skill Adebayo possessed, and the gravity imposed by the shooters orbiting him, he didn't consider the possibility of using fake DHOs to create for himself until he noticed a veteran teammate doing it.

"I actually got that from Kelly Olynyk. We used to call it the 'Kelly Keeper' when he was here," Adebayo says. "I used to always be like, 'Yo, why Kelly get open so much?' And I realized it was because of the keeper. He would get cheap layups, or he would get somebody else a bucket, or it would just mess up the defense. So, I give a lot of that credit to Kelly O."

Olynyk doesn't remember gleaning the move from anywhere or anyone in particular. He feels like it's always been part of his repertoire.

"I don't know when or how I picked it up," the now-Raptors center says. "It was just something that I did and that I got really, really good at. It was kind of a patented thing, and soon everyone was like, 'Watch the keep, watch the keep!'

"You're basically just reading the two defenders. But it's also a rhythm thing. Kind of like in football, it's like: handoff, handoff, handoff, play-action. You're kind of lulling the defense to sleep and then, you know."

While the keeper remains a valuable proposition for Olynyk (producing about 1.4 points per possession this season), he gets fewer of those opportunities than he used to. Probably because, as he noted, defenders are now primed to 'watch the keep.'

Defensive adjustments like that also help explain why the play isn't particularly effective for the most skilled, most creative offensive fulcrum in the league. Early in his career, Nikola Jokic often would fake handoffs, doing so 6.2 times per 100 possessions in the 2016-17 campaign. Fast-forward to this season, and he's doing it just 1.9 times per 100, which puts him in the lowest percentile among bigs, per my Second Spectrum source.

In essence, now that he's established himself as a two-time MVP and arguably the best offensive big man of all time, defenders are reluctant to abandon Jokic for even a split-second, even with lethal movement shooters like Jamal Murray, Michael Porter Jr., and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope flying off his screens. When you couple that with Jokic's lack of foot speed, keeper plays like the one he tried to execute on the last play of regulation against Phoenix a couple of weeks ago often don't create any separation.

Of course, Jokic is such a skilled one-on-one scorer that he can turn those plays into buckets anyway, as he did against Al Horford on the other play clipped above.

"It just depends on your abilities," Jokic says of the role of the keeper in today's game. "It's a good move for (big men who) put the ball on the floor, but I think there's a lot of versatile players in the NBA, so if you don't do it, it's not a big problem."

Not if you're Jokic, anyway.

Finally, there's Draymond Green, who executes keepers with more verve and variety than anybody. Of course, he has the benefit of playing with the greatest shooter of all time, who sows more panic than any player in the sport and thus gives Green a whole lot of gravity to leverage. But while credit obviously belongs to Steph Curry (and to a lesser extent Klay Thompson) for warping defenses, the Warriors' keeper plays wouldn't sing the way they do without Green's creativity and pace.

He highlights the different ways the fake DHO can be deployed. You can execute it from a standstill, letting the movement of the would-be recipient bend the defense in one direction before taking the ball the other way. Or you can bust it out when you're already in motion, giving the defense even less time to anticipate and react.

Green gets many of his keepers out of chase actions up top. Sabonis gets a lot of his out of Pistol action along the sideline, where you'll also see some guards (like Jalen Brunson) pull off convincing fakes. Blind Pig, a three-man pass-and-handoff action beloved in Atlanta among other places, is also ripe for chicanery:

So, a lot of factors have conspired to make the keeper a small but dynamic piece of the modern offensive puzzle. It's more of a back-pocket play than something you're going to see five or 10 times a game, but it's always there looming as a deterrent in the back of the defense's mind.

As Adebayo says, "It just makes your offense more dynamic."