GRINNELL, Iowa — During the third quarter of the N.B.A. playoff game between the Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets on Monday night, a college basketball coach perked up from his sofa. He caught something he needed to see again.
“Watch this,” David Arseneault Jr., the men’s coach at Grinnell College, said as he paused the broadcast and backed it up to the start of a possession for Houston. “Count the number of screens.”
It was the sequence when it became obvious to Arseneault just how far the Rockets were willing to go to try to isolate Stephen Curry of the Warriors and force him to defend James Harden of the Rockets, one of the league’s elite one-on-one players.