The Cleveland Cavaliers’ convincing performance in the 2015 NBA Finals is the latest manifestation of a very old story in sports: One team might be really great when playing at its best, but what if the team on the other bench is supremely skilled at preventing opponents from playing their best?
Especially when Kyrie Irving went down near the end of Game 1, Cleveland had to lean on its defense to win this series. We said so before Game 2, and sure enough, the Cavs — unquestionably better at the defensive end with Matthew Dellavedova. They have foiled the favorites in this series. More precisely, they have bottled up Golden State’s offense over the past 101 minutes. The 53 minutes of Game 2 and the 48 minutes of Game 3 have witnessed the affirmation of Delly’s defensive chops, and of David Blatt’s coaching acumen. LeBron James’s combination of supreme basketball excellence and even better leadership is apparent to everyone, but his coaching staff and supporting cast are putting forth just as much effort… with just as much of an effect.
How does Golden State change the equation in Game 4? You got a glimpse in the fourth quarter of Game 3, as Stephen Curry looked like Stephen Curry again. Everyone in Cleveland and across the country knows that Curry playing “Currier” for four full quarters, not just one, is the biggest key to a Warrior resurgence. After that, however, two other men wearing road blues in Ohio will have to step to the forefront.
What makes Game 4’s situation so fascinating from a strictly psychological standpoint is that these two important figures could not be more different in their demeanor and visibility.
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What’s even more intriguing as you go deeper into Golden State’s problems is that in Game 3, Green and Barnes had two different kinds of problems.
Let’s start with Barnes. The man who was a streaky jump shooter at North Carolina — but ultimately never met a shot he didn’t like — went 0 for 8 from the field in Game 3. One of the particularly sharp insights provided by San Francisco Chronicle writer Bruce Jenkins in his podcast discussion with Crossover Chronicles writer John Cannon is that the players on the Warriors are questioning each other as a result of seeing Barnes miss so many shots. This is not particularly different from the sense of discomfort that has permeated the Warriors’ roster when seeing Curry miss so many shots throughout Game 2 and in the first three quarters of Game 3.
To be just a bit more specific, one common point of basketball awareness is that shooters need to see the ball go through the net at least once. Seeing something positive — visualizing the right outcome — is consistently the thing which jump-starts a shooter and pushes his shooting stroke back into a groove. What is perhaps underappreciated, then, is that other players need to see other guys putting the ball through the hoop.
In these playoffs, one highly underreported and under-discussed story has been Golden State’s drop in jump shooting quality. Ask yourself how many times the Splash Brothers have shot well in the same 2015 playoff game. That’s a relatively small number. Then ask yourself how many times the Brothers Splash, Draymond Green, and Harrison Barnes have shot well in the same game.
If you went solely by overall shooting numbers, you’d find several legitimate examples of all four players shooting well at the same time, but mostly in the first two rounds of the playoffs. If, however, you further qualified your search for knowledge by asking, “How many times did all four players (Curry, Klay Thompson, Green, and Barnes) shoot well from both the field at large and from three-point range?”, you’d get an extremely small amount of results, very nearly zero.
In Games 4 and 6 of the Memphis series, all four players hit at least 40 percent of their shots, with at least two players at 50 percent or better. However, at least one if not two players failed to hit at least 20 percent of all three-point shots taken.
The Atlanta Hawks and Kyle Korver truly ran into a jump-shooting wall in the playoffs. Compared to Atlanta, Golden State hasn’t been as bad. Yet, the Warriors do depend on their ball movement and ball distribution to lead to makes, and those makes just aren’t coming. Barnes — 9 of 27 from the field and 3 of 10 from three-point range in this series — hasn’t made a single three since Game 1, when Cleveland’s defense had Kyrie on the floor and Delly not nearly as involved. That has to change in Game 4 if the Warriors want to fly back to Oakland with a 2-2 series.
For Draymond Green, the issue isn’t so much making shots as being smart about the shots he takes. A few plays from Game 3 on Tuesday illustrate his problem.
On a couple of occasions in Game 3, Green — so prone to turnovers in the first two games of this series — tried to take the ball to the basket more often. His desire to attack wasn’t misplaced, but he rushed toward the rim in a pell-mell fashion, instead of making a clever change-of-direction move to perhaps draw a foul on Timofey Mozgov, the Cleveland center who has made such a large impact on this series. Green’s forays into the paint with the ball have consistently ended in failure. The Warriors expect better from him, and that will be a key part of Game 4.
Green’s other issue, tucked inside this larger problem, is that he has to want to shoot the rock when the situation demands it.
Near the final five-minute mark of Game 3, when the Warriors were making their rally, Green received a perfect kickout pass from Curry, who had split a pick-and-roll and worked his way to the foul line. Green was in “ready position,” to use that basic basketball term, and had a catch-and-shoot corner three teed up. He passed it up, however, and just a few seconds later, Curry was heaving up a highly contested three from the opposite side of the court. It missed.
Making a jumper and trusting your shot are closely related. It is more than reasonable to conclude that Green didn’t want any part of that jumper late in Game 3. For a player who is so vocal, expressive, and so utterly convinced that he rarely commits a foul, Green’s timidity was — and is — conspicuous.
Green might be boisterous and Barnes might be bashful; one might covet the spotlight while the other might shy away from it; however, both men need to give Stephen Curry some help if the Warriors are going to enjoy a happy plane flight to California once Game 4 ends.
