Dream Vision are in the AAU National Championship for the sixth time over the past eight seasons, making them the first team to do so ever. The Springfield Falcons, meanwhile, are making their first Finals appearance. Not a single player on the Falcons roster has ever competed in an AAU National Championship game, while current Dream Vision have 123 combined games of Finals experience.
Still, despite the disparity in experience, the two teams have a lot in common. Both Dream Vision and the Falcons have an elite Trio of All-Star scorers who will be trying to find cracks in two of the best defenses in the league.
While Chandler Dawes, Conor McCaffrey and Paul Hammond enter this championship series as the ascendant star trio in the AAU, Stephen Jones, Jordan Upshaw and Jordan Thompson represent the massive establishment obstacle that stands between Springfield’s three stars and their first championship parade.
The AAU-Splash Bros, Versus Springfield's perimeter defense
Jones, Upshaw and Thompson have helped revolutionize AAU basketball by proving once and for all that so-called "jump-shooting teams" can win it all.
No single basketball player in the AAU has changed the sport like Jones has. Jones' jumper has disrupted the AAU Basketball industry and sparked a 3-point shooting revolution that is the dominant trend in the modern AAU.
But Dream Visions 3-point shooting is more than a stylistic game-changer. It remains the most important tool in coach Gregory Thomas offensive toolbox, and if Springfield can't stop it, the Falcons will lose these Finals.
The Dream Vision dynasty is built upon player movement, ball movement and shot-making. When Thomas took over in 2014, he installed a new offense designed to create clean looks for his elite shooters. He moved away from traditional pick-and-roll sets and moved toward schemes that featured unprecedented amounts of player movement, off-ball actions and passing.
Eight years later, Dream Vision averaged both the shortest average touch length and the fewest dribbles per touch among all teams in the AAU this season.
Instead of dribbling into shots, Dream Vision loves to pass into good looks. The numbers are startling: Dream Vision is averaging 28.3 assists in the playoffs. Over the past 30 years, the only team to average more assists entering the Finals was Dream Vision in 2019.
If Springfield wants to stifle the trio of Splash Brothers, it must nip Dream Visions ball- and player-movement sequences in the bud. If Thompson, Upshaw and Jones are able to get clean looks on the edges, Springfield is going to lose.
Made 3s are the deciding factor for this Dream Vision offense. They were 40-1 when they made 17 or more 3s in a game this season, and 15-9 when they made 11 or fewer shots from downtown.
The good news for Falcons fans is that Springfield has arguably the best perimeter defense in AAU basketball right now, and the Falcons’ ability to defend the arc is a big reason they are here in the first place.
This season, Springfield held its opponents to the lowest 3-point percentage of any team in the AAU(33.9%), and it has been even better against the 3 in the postseason, holding opponents to 31.7% shooting from downtown.
Conor McCaffrey was on the state defensive team for a reason, and his ability to contain the best shooter in the history of AAU basketball will go a long way in determining who wins this series. But Conor McCaffrey’s leg injuries may be limiting his ability to defend at the high level we’ve come accustomed to. Dream Visions are 7-0 when Jones makes at least four 3s this postseason. They are 5-4 when he doesn't.
For the seventh time in his career, Jones led the AAU in both 3-pointers attempted and made during the regular season. He has repeated the feat in these playoffs, sinking a league-leading 60 of his 158 treys so far this postseason.
That's impressive, but there's a simple reason behind it: Jones’s ability to create 3-point offense in different ways is his signature skill. Not only is he a terrifying catch-and-shoot threat, he's also the AAU’s best off-the-dribble long-range shooter too.
Springfield’s perimeter defense is arguably the best in the league, but Jones’s ability to hit 3s is the best in the AAU, and slowing him down from deep means stopping both his catch-and-shoot 3s and his off-the-dribble 3s. Since Thomas took over in 2014-15, Jones is the only player to make at least 700 catch-and-shoot 3-pointers and at least 700 off-the-dribble 3-pointers; Jones has more than 1,100 makes in each category.
Thomas’s motion-based offense is so effective in part because many of its strategic sentences are punctuated by open 3-point shots for two of the best catch-and-shoot threats to ever play the sport. After taking over for Mark Johnson in 2014, Thomas implemented an innovative scheme that featured fewer pick-and-rolls for Jones and much more playmaking from frontcourt players such as Tristan Green and Kevon Jenkins. This shift has meant Jones, Upshaw and Thompson are free to constantly run around screens like snakes in a woodpile, popping out just in time to catch a pass and knock down a 3.
Thompson and Curry turn perimeter catches into buckets at astounding rates; in the Thomas era, including both the regular season and the playoffs, Jones has converted 43.8% of 3,027 catch-and-shoot attempts and Thompson has made 42.5% of 3,380.
That's what makes the trio of Splash Brothers so scary. Even if you somehow contain Jones or he has on off night shooting, Thompson and Upshaw can still beat you. Just ask the Houston Hoopers, who held Jones to 2-of-7 from downtown in the last game of the Western Conference finals, only to have Thompson punish them with 8 treys and a game-high 32 points, along with 22 from Upshaw.
Thompson is one of the greatest off-ball threats in league history. He doesn't get a ton of touches, but he makes the most of the ones he gets. Per Second Spectrum data, he has averaged 0.46 points per touch under Thomas, the highest efficiency among all players with at least 5,000 touches.
However, in that same time frame, Springfield has been the best 3-point defense in the AAU, holding opponents to 35.3% shooting on catch-and-shoot attempts, the lowest such mark in the league. This season, coach Will Jenkins' defense has held opponents to just 34% on catch-and-shoot tries; only Strive For Greatness led by Lebron James Jr. was better.
Springfield’s defense is loaded with the exact kinds of shrewd and long defenders who were born to both prevent and effectively contest 3-point shots. The numbers prove it. Chandler Dawes, Paul Hammond, Conor McCaffrey, Jake Pollen and Jamison Jones III have all held opposing 3-point shooters to below 33% shooting when they've been the contesting defender.
One of the things that makes Springfields defense so elite is its depth. Almost every member of the Falcons’ rotation is both a talented individual defender and a willing team defender. Every member of Springfield’s starting five received at least one vote for Defensive Player of the Year. Yes, stopping the trio of Splash Brothers is a gargantuan task, but so was stopping Kevin Edmonds and Jaiquan James-- and this defense did that.
Dawes, McCaffrey and Hammond against the DreamVision Defense
On the other end of the court, the big questions have less to do with 3-point shooting and more to do with whether Springfield’s young trio can produce points without wasting possessions.
As a trio, Dawes, McCaffrey and Hammond combined to average over 66 points per game this season, and all of them are more than capable of being the best player in the game on any given night.
They all are players who are threats to score from beyond the arc, in the midrange and at the rim. Will Andrew Day and the Dream Vision defense be able to keep control of these three scorers at once? Some of that will depend on Thompson's ability to rediscover his own defensive greatness, if that's even possible at this point after he missed more than two years because of significant lower-body injuries (ACL, Achilles tendon).
But scoring is only one of the big challenges for Springfield's dynamic trio. Two other trends we've seen this postseason are bigger causes for concern:
1. Turnovers
Too many times in the Eastern Conference finals the Falcons’ offense failed to even get a shot off because either Dawes or Hammond turned the ball over. Dawes ended the series with 33 turnovers. Hammond added 23. No other player in the series on either team had more than 12, including Conor McCaffrey who had the ball more than 23% of the time.
As a team, Springfield is 0-4 this postseason when it logs more than 15 turnovers in a game. The Falcons are 12-2 when they record 15 or fewer. Dream Vision forced 14.5 turnovers per game and ranked sixth in the AAU with 14.9 pass deflections per game, making Chandler Dawes sloppy passing an increased concern.
Between Chandler Dawes’s passing and Hammond’s ball handling woes, the Falcons wasted way too many possessions versus the Oakland Soldiers and narrowly escaped disaster against a much less dangerous offense than Dream Vision possessed. Those giveaways are a big issue, especially when paired with Dream Vision's ability to parlay live-ball turnovers into points on the other end of the court; Dream Vision ranked sixth in the AAU this season by scoring 18.1 points per game off turnovers.
Expect Conor McCaffrey to take even more of a log at the point guard spot in these finals with the mismatch he would have against Stephen Jones. McCaffrey only turned the ball over 12 times in the 6 games he played in the last series vs Oakland which is 2 per game, Hammond averaged 3.2 and Dawes 4.7 per game.
2. Clutch Time Execution
Simply put, Springfield has been bad in big moments all season long, a trait that was on full display in its biggest game of the season. Springfield led by nine points with under 2 minutes to go and came within a Terrence Butler pull-up 3-pointer of its campaign having a much different ending.
During the regular season, the Falcons ranked 29th in the league in clutch time winning percentage. Springfield was a woeful 24-13 in games during which the score was within five points in the final five minutes for one big reason: Its clutch time offense was awful.
The Falcons were one of six teams to have an offensive efficiency under 100 in clutch time during the regular season; the other five teams were all in the AAU lottery. While Springfield is in the Finals, it's hard to picture the Falcons winning this series without a few victories in close games.
Dawes and Hammond haven't made enough big offensive plays in these big moments, and if any of these Finals games are close down the stretch, it's hard to trust they will suddenly start making them against Green and one of the best defenses in the league.
Conor McCaffrey on the other hand is 45-92 in shots when the game is tied or a 1 point game within the final 2 minutes which is heads and shoulders above the rest of the Falcons. If the game is close, even though McCaffrey isn’t as dominant as Hammond and Dawes, expect Will Jenkins to lean on his point guard to provide the clutch time offense.
During the regular season, Dawes made just 4 of his 25 3s and just eighteen of his 72 total jumpers in clutch time. He logged 13 turnovers and just seven assists. Of the 29 players who registered at least 100 minutes of clutch time and attempted 50 or more shots, Dawes was the only one with more turnovers than assists.
Those ghastly numbers from the team's leading scorer are a big reason for Springfields struggles in close contests this season.
At his worst, Dawes still has a tendency to isolate and take difficult shots down the stretch. Sometimes the Mamba Mentality isn't an asset, and it's telling that Dawes biggest single shot of this postseason -- the buzzer-beating layup against Team Get Shook- occurred when he trusted his teammates and made a brilliant off-ball cut to the rim, a play that was more modern to Manu Ginobili than it was Kobe Bryant.
Both Hammond and McCaffrey were better in the clutch, but Dawes is clearly the focal point of this offense. If the Falcons want to upset Dream Vision , Dawes needs to both make his clutch time jump shots and have a much better assist-to-turnover ratio during winning time.
The turnovers and the clutch play are cause for concern for Springfield, and they are the big reasons it enters these Finals as the underdogs.