Real Madrid defeated Regal FC Barcelona (Boxscore|Video) for the first time in the ACB regular season in Xavi Pascual’s tenure as Barça headcoach. Going into the game, Pascual was 15-4 versus Real in all competitions. Pablo Laso and his staff have turned a halfcourt-based squad into a transition machine. It is the style of play that suits these players anyway.

The clash of Lorbek and Mirotic, arguably the continent’s finest power forwards, became a footnote as Real’s wings Pocius, Carroll & Suárez combined for 37 points to complement Ante Tomic (16) inside.

Barça played without Navarro and Perovic, while Lorbek, listed as day-to-day, featured in a tall starting five alonside Huertas, Eidson, Mickeal and N’Dong. Laso went with Rodriguez, Pocius, Suárez, Mirotic and Tomic.

Isolation: plenty of Mickeal vs. Suárez

Laso’s initiative to get an aggressive performance from Suárez against Mickeal was evident early on. Suárez, one of Messina’s best players but now struggling a bit in an offense that isn’t playing to his strengths, has had difficulties against the physical, one-on-one skilled Barça forwards once in a while, be it Mickeal or Alan Anderson last season. The latter put up a dominating offensive performance against Suárez in the Copa del Rey final. Real ran a bunch of isolations plays for Suárez early on, five in total for the game, which he converted into four points and two turnovers. The strategy wasn’t entirely successful and Suárez conceded a fair share of points on the other end, but he certainly fought like a bull and managed to set a tone, be it just for himself, for the rest of the game.

Barça ran eight isolations for Mickeal, which he converted into ten points. Not in the grand finale though: Mickeal conceded two clutch baskets from Pocius and settled for a long two, which rimmed out, on the other end.

The guests scored 28 points on 18 isolation plays, but ran just five isolation plays for their power forwards and centers. Real Madrid scored just 14 on 15 isolations, but that does not include the play-breaking drives of Laso’s explosive backcourt players. Those are indeed not isolation plays.

Pick and Roll: 63.6% Huertas

Barça outplayed Real in pick and roll both in volume and efficiency, but that does not say much. The pick and roll is not Real’s key weapon, Barça’s it is. For Barça standards, pick and roll production was probably subpar in Madrid, but we lack season data.

Barça finished 33 of 74 possessions within the pick and roll, with Huertas (21) featuring as the ballhandler almost as often as all Real Madrid players combined (23). After Huertas (63.6% of all pick and roll possessions), Eidson (24.2%) and Ingles (12.1%) also handled the ball for Barça, while Real distributed 17 of its 23 pick and roll possessions almost evenly between Rodriguez and Llull. It’s not about who’s there but about who’s missing: Barça’s backup playmaker Victor Sada did not run a single pick and roll possession.

Barça scored 30 points on its 33 pick and roll possessions, while Real had only 15 on 23. On the 21 Huertas pick and rolls, Barça scored 23 points, while Real scored just four on Llull’s eight pick and rolls, plus five on Rodriguez’s nine. The Huertas-N’Dong pick and roll, so efficient throughout most of the game, provided two turnovers in crunch time as Barça failed to find other solutions.

Both Barça’s N’Dong and, maybe surprisingly, Real’s Tomic were charted as the main shot-challengers on defense, forcing plenty of misses with their long arms, in some cases against one another. The minus in Tomic’s play is defensive rebounding. His defensive positioning and activity are solid, but problems do occur once the shot is in the air. Tomic failed to put a body on the rolling N’Dong, who finished with five offensive rebounds, on several occasions.

Veteran center N’Dong is arguably one of the most underrated players on the continent. He’s excellent when defending the pick and roll out at the three point line, a great shotblocking presence, and a better post defender than Vázquez. Vázquez’s inability to defend the post was on display once again, conceding four points (2/2) and two non-shooting-fouls on his four sequences defending the post. It is necessary noting, though, that he’s still excellent in many other facets of defense. Kosta Perovic is arguably the best post defender of the trio, and he’s playing a fairly solid season. All three Barça centers are top 15 in the Euroleague in Dean Oliver’s Stop Percentage.

N’Dong and Tomic also starred on the other end of the floor in very different manner, N’Dong scoring 12 points mainly on offensive putbacks and thanks to Huertas’ creative passing, while Tomic used his rich arsenal of half hooks and midrange shots. The Croat scored just two points on conventional post ups.

Transition defense: Good for long stretches, but not long enough

Since offensive rebounds, turnovers, pick and roll as well as isolation efficiency, even if the latter certainly turned into Real’s favour in the final two minutes, were all evidently not key to Real’s victory, we are inevitably landing in the field of transition plays. Barça was inefficient in transition, scoring six points in six sequences of fastbreak or early offense. Real, meanwhile, scored 14 on 8 possessions early on the shotclock, 17 on 9 if we include a Pocius triple to end the first half, which Llull created for the Lithuanian out of the timeout. That doesn’t qualify as conventional transition, but it was a result of Barça’s inability to cope with Real’s speed. Oh how the times have changed.

Barça did manage to keep Real Madrid’s high-octane offense in check for most of the game, but for a stretch at the beginning of the first half, which the hosts used to take a double-digit lead. Ingles in particular will not have slept well, having lost sight of Carroll twice right before halftime – six points.

Rodriguez, Llull and the screeners create plenty of half-opportunities for the wings. Carroll’s and Pocius’ abilities to both fire away and put the ball on the floor makes them incredibly difficult to defend in those sequences, which often occur early on the clock. Pocius was outstanding on defense, too, considerably slowing down Chuck Eidson, who was supposed to play a key role in Navarro’s absence but finished 3/10 from the field and without a single free throw attempt.

Five teams, that is a novum in the ACB, are now tied for first place: Barça, Real, Caja Laboral, Unicaja and Alicante.