“It’s the Finals. It’s hard. It’s supposed to be hard.”
Those were Steve Kerr’s words after Game 2 of the NBA Finals between his Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers. If they sound familiar, they should; you could substitute the word “playoffs” for “Finals,” and he expressed that sentiment after almost every game of the previous two series. He certainly has said them after all four postseason losses the Warriors have suffered.
Each time he says them to the media, you get the distinct impression he’s really saying it to his team. I’m sure he says it to his players, too, but he knows they have many sources of information, and it doesn’t hurt to punch out that message to a few extra spots. We don’t have confirmation that he put it in a bottle and floated it in the Oakland Estuary, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
I said before Game 2 that Cleveland wasn’t in as much trouble as most people said it was. After all, the Cavs had lost only one road game in the playoffs, in overtime (on a banked-in 35-footer at the horn). They still had a chance for a split on this trip, and they hadn’t lost a home game yet in the Finals. The main reason I felt that way (and obviously still do after Game 2) is that I’ve spent the better part of the last month digging through 40-year-old newspapers researching a 3-part series on the 1975 Golden State Warriors.
That team was given no chance to win the Finals against Washington, a team which had won 12 more games and had the clear edge at four out of the five starting positions. The Bullets were so sure they’d win that they passed up the chance to host Games 2, 3 and 4 because of a scheduling conflict on the Warriors’ home floor. Instead, they chose to have Games 1 and 4 at home, but by the time Game 4 rolled around, they were down 3-0 and about to get swept. This information was clanging in my head ever since Friday’s announcement that Kyrie Irving would miss the rest of the series, and the Warriors’ coronation was suddenly in full swing.
Kerr, I am certain, did everything he could to get his guys to try to forget about the Cavaliers’ roster trouble and focus on the task at hand, but he had about as much success as he had when he tried to get them to take Game 4 against the Rockets seriously, which is to say none.
Despite the fact that the Warriors are made up of generally good guys, and they’re smart, they are (mostly) young people, and if you’ve ever tried to warn a young person about something bad that could happen, well, then you know what it’s like to be a coach in a situation like Kerr finds himself in. I’ve written before about how Kerr sometimes needs his team to lose before he gets their full attention. I’m going to now quote myself from something I wrote during the New Orleans series (which seems like a really long damn time ago, by the way):
It may sound crazy to say this about a team that lost only 15 games all season, but the Warriors seemed to grow more from each loss (and some near-losses) than they did from their wins this season. They won their first five games of the season, despite turning the ball over 20 or more times in four of those games. Then the W’s lost to Phoenix on the road, committing 27 turnovers. Then they lost to San Antonio on their home floor, a game where the Warriors shot 54 percent and still lost because of 20 turnovers.
Steve Kerr’s reaction? He said, “Maybe now they’ll listen to me about turning the ball over.” And they did. They ripped off 16 wins in a row, without hitting the 20-turnover mark once.
If you agree with me on this, can we then agree to stop saying that the Warriors “could easily be down 2-0?” If this was Strat-o-Matic, yes, but not in real life. Obviously, we’ll never know for sure, but I believe that had Iman Shumpert’s shot gone in at the end of regulation of Game 1, the Warriors would have been a different team Sunday night, Kyrie or no Kyrie. They would have been the “Game 4 in Memphis” Warriors rather than what we saw in Game 2.
Much will be said about the Cleveland Cavaliers after this game..
* About the incomparable LeBron James, who was nice enough to allow Steph Curry to borrow the MVP Award that should simply be his until he retires.
* About Matthew Dellavedova, a surprise to anyone outside of the people here in the Bay Area who watched him work at St. Mary’s College.
* About Timofey Mozgov, for whom I’m starting to wonder if the Warriors have an answer.
And about… well, that’s about it, isn’t it?
Great subjects, all of them. They’re well deserving of high praise, and in James’ case, the highest praise possible. However, none of those men, or their teammates or coaches, have the NBA Finals in their hands. This series will come down to whether the Golden State Warriors play the kind of basketball they played for most (but not all) of the regular season, and for most (but definitely not all) of the playoffs.
The Warriors went into overtime on a night in which they missed six free throws. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but two of them were missed by Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, who are the next best thing to automatic. They went into overtime on a night when Marreese Speights failed to achieve the proper lift coefficients for his massive frame and missed a wide-open dunk. They went into overtime on a night when Curry missed 13 3-pointers, more than in any game this season, including one from his favorite spot, the left corner, that spun out after going down so far it seemed to touch the net.
Curry’s had bad nights shooting threes before, but he hasn’t missed 13 of them this season: When he’s having a rough shooting night, he generally stops shooting them. Even the night in his hometown of Charlotte when he hit only one, he had the good sense to stop after attempting 10.
When the Warriors lost Games 2 and 3 to Memphis, Kerr stressed poise as a key ingredient that was missing from their game. Well, they lost it for long stretches of Game 2, and, come to think of it, much of Game 1 as well. Cleveland is doing similar things to the Warriors’ offense that Memphis did, at least when they had Mike Conley and Tony Allen both in the game. They put pressure on the Warriors at the 3-point line and beyond, making it difficult to do anything even approaching running the offense. The result was the Warriors getting impatient, throwing up early shots, or making bad passes. Game 2’s total of 16 assists is a pretty low number for Golden State, and it’s indicative of how hard it was for the W’s to move the ball like they usually do.
My prediction is that they’ll figure it out, as they did against Memphis. They did catch a break in that series when Tony Allen’s hamstring got worse, but they had already pretty much gameplanned Allen out of the series by that point. Again, this is not Fantasy Basketball. You don’t just remove Irving’s points from the box score; he is replaced by a human with a totally different skill set, and by the way, Dellavedova is, as we saw in Game 1, a much better defender than Irving. People focusing on how Cleveland will create enough offense without Irving forget that he has to score to get back the points he gives up, and in this series, that was going to be a lot of points.
So Kerr and his highly-paid, super-sharp staff have to figure out how to attack Delly. I think we saw that he can’t guard Klay Thompson last night, so look for action that tries to create that matchup. I think they’ll get it done and win the championship, but I wouldn’t bet hard-earned American money on it, because, thanks to the 1975 Warriors, I know what a team with one great player and a bunch of guys willing to be led by that player can accomplish.
Rick Barry led the Warriors in 1975. In 2015, the Warriors’ opponent in the Finals is led by LeBron.
Barry’s team won 40 years ago. None of us should be terribly surprised if LeBron’s team wins this series, which will almost asssuredly turn into the long series many people never thought it could become.
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A few notes on Game 2:
I wrote after game 1 that I wondered if the Warriors were getting concerned about Draymond Green. His production has been steadily declining since the second game of the Memphis series, a game in which he picked up his second foul early in the first quarter and never recovered. Game 2 might have been a turning point for the better. He saved the Warriors (temporarily, as it turned out) by scoring his first two baskets in the final minutes of overtime, both on putbacks. He played 43 minutes of good defense without fouling out, and he had 10 points and 10 rebounds. He also shot only one 3-pointer, which is an improvement. He does have to figure out how to score, though, and get teammates involved. The Warriors are at their best when the offense is running through Green.
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Klay Thompson had a magnificent shooting night, but made a couple of mental mistakes that really hurt the team’s chances Sunday night. I’ll mention the second part of that summary first. He didn’t box out Dellavedova on James Jones’ shot with ten seconds left. That led to Harrison Barnes having to foul Dellavedova, who hit the free throws and created the last (and biggest) lead change of the night. Earlier, he committed a second foul in the first quarter that required Kerr to remove him from the game. He was having one of those crazy Klay Thompson nights, hitting four of his first six shots for 9 of the Warriors’ 11 points. While his hot shooting continued after he returned in the second quarter, the Warriors could have really opened up a lead on Cleveland if Thompson had stayed in the game.
It’s not the first time Thompson has had trouble with silly fouls (and when you’re shooting like he can shoot, any foul is a silly foul). In Game 5 against Houston, the game in which he took that knee in the head from Trevor Ariza, he had committed several fouls on reaches with a very low probability of success. He picked up his fourth foul, and Kerr decided to leave him in for just one more possession to see if they could get him another shot, and before the Warriors got the ball back, he had fouled again. The scene of him on the bench with his head in his hands was all too familiar. Obviously, this is a part of the mental game of basketball that Klay needs to master, the quicker the better.
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NBA TV’s presentation of “Clutch City” runs Monday night. I’m sort of looking forward to it, I guess. You see, I was part of the Phoenix Suns’ TV crew in 1994 and ’95, hosting the pre-game, post-game and halftime shows, as well as doing sideline commentary. Thus, I literally had a front-row seat as the Rockets “did their thing” to the Suns two years in a row. Phoenix led 2-0 (and coming home for Games 3 and 4) in 1994, and then 3-1 in 1995, losing both series in seven games. That’s another reason I won’t count out Cleveland in this year’s NBA Finals. The Rockets had a great player and a bunch of good ones, and they played as a team. It’s a simple formula, but you have to find a great player somehow.
