AR (literally) made a living off the PnR last year. What really jumps out this year is that teams are actively icing AR on PnRs, forcing him to reject the screen. This is especially so when he’s the one to bring it up the court and there isn’t prior action to displace defenders. Perhaps this is because film on AR is now available compared to when he was an unknown.

When not iced, AR tends to jail the defender on the back of his hip, setting up a kind of 2 on 1 or 3 on 2 with his roller and whoever is in the dunker’s spot. He was deft at dropping pocket passes or shovel passes to these big men, or creating contact with the trailing defender for AND1 floaters in the lane.

When he’s gets iced on outside picks, he makes the right choice driving middle, and teams have their wings dig center to stop him. He’s not shown the speed or craftiness to split these defenders yet. However, he has been attempting the right counter - the skip pass - but hasn’t yet nailed the tempo down it seems. These skip passes are also quite rigid and textbook without the little miscues (look-aways, timing the defensive tagging by the weakside defender) that makes players like Doncic and Ginobili great skip passers.

AR seems to realize this too, so he’s sometimes trying to fight against the ice defense. He does this by pretending to reject the screen and then taking the screen again, hoping his man is not in a position to ice. This results in quite a bit of dribbling sometimes, but when it works it’s great - he gets the defender trailing, stops at the elbow, patiently waits for the trailing defender to fly by and nails the shot a la the 1Q of the Kings game.

You’ll also notice against teams that ice him, he tends to hang his dribble a lot more when the pick is being set, as that gives him time to read whether he’s being iced. Aggressive defenders reach for that and he dribbles it off his feet. It’s a very small moment of indecision that makes it look like he has amateur handles.

So it’s going to be ugly for a while as AR is learning on the fly to take his game to the next level with the skip passing other counters to the new coverage. Coaching staff could of course set up schemes to make his job easier but there doesn’t seem to be a coach on this team. The encouraging thing is that AR doesn’t have the ego to insist on playing one way, or going 1 on 4 like some younger “stars”. Instead, he’s working on being able to execute the correct play. He’s like a slightly talented but very hardworking student who’s been dropped into his first AP class.

What has been working this game was LeBron pushing the ball up to the WING in semi-transition and AR running down to the top of the key and slightly to the weak side. This forces a smaller defender on LeBron, which pulls in AR’s defender to shadow Bron slightly. Out of these situations, AR’s defender usually has no time to ice him when he receives the ball and a screen concurrently, and he gets to his comfortable spots.

On a related note, why don’t we ever run any nice weak side actions??