My favorite part of the 1984 movie “Top Secret” is when Val Kilmer’s character is being introduced to members of the French Resistance. Each of the men have names that are French phrases or foods, like “Escargot,” “Montage,” and “Avant Garde.” When he is introduced to a man named “Deja Vu,” the man squints at Kilmer and says, “Haven’t we met?”
That’s how I felt watching Game 4 of the NBA Finals. We’ve definitely been here before.
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After Game 4 of the Memphis series, I wrote that Steve Kerr had coached that game like San Francisco Giants Manager Bruce Bochy manages in postseason. I won’t go back into the details, but the point is that Bochy has won three World Series championships in five years, at least in part because he is willing to make drastic changes from what he did all season long. This is unusual. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a coach or manager in any sport explain a loss by saying, “Well, we got this far doing it that way, so we did it that way today.”
Kerr, like Bochy, is different. Man, he’s really different. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how Kerr’s post-game press conferences are actually informative, even educational. After Game 4, he took that to a new level. He explained exactly how it happened that he said earlier in the day that Andrew Bogut would start, when in fact he did not.
“I lied,” said Kerr. “When Tim Kawakami (the very sharp columnist for the San Jose Mercury-News) asked me if Andrew would start, my choices were to tell the truth, which would be like knocking on David Blatt’s door and explaining our strategy, or I could evade the question, which would start a Twitter phenomenon, or I could lie. So I lied. Sorry. I don’t think they give the trophy based on morality, they give it to you if you win.”
Okay, now you want to know how completely, over the top, never-seen-anything-like-it-before different this guy is? Watch this clip of Kerr talking to CSN Bay Area’s Ros Gold-Onwude about how the decision was made to start Iguodala.
Yes, you heard him correctly. He gave full credit for the idea to the Warriors’ video coordinator, Nick U’Ren. Gold-Onwude asked a very good follow-up question, and Kerr added that U’Ren had been with him in Phoenix (as has a lot of Kerr’s staff) and that he’s 28 years old but “wise beyond his years.”
Have you ever heard a head coach do that before? I mean, ever? It’s rare to find a head coach who would even listen to a guy that low on the totem pole, but to then give him public credit for an idea? Just to give you some perspective, Kerr’s predecessor, Mark Jackson, limited the media’s access to his assistant coaches, lest any of them out-shine him.
What we have in Kerr is a complete anomaly. He’s a head basketball coach who, while he has spent years preparing for this opportunity and clearly loves coaching, refuses to change who he is to try to meet anyone else’s expectations. There have been some really high-quality profiles written about him this season and especially this postseason, so I’ll pass on trying to explain why he’s like that, but suffice it to say his background is singular. You will not find another person on the planet, let alone the NBA coaching ranks, who has his particular combination of education, life experience, and basketball experience.
But know this. While all the cucumbers may agree that Kerr’s the coolest in the crisper, his friends will tell you that if you get him over a four-foot putt he needs to win a golf game, and he misses it, he’s not so cool.
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Notes from Game 4
There is another similarity between Game 4 of the Finals and Game 4 of the Memphis series. After that game, during which Kerr had made several significant strategic adjustments, he downplayed those as he did changing his starting lineup Thursday night. Instead, he said this: “Tonight we took a step towards understanding that sense of urgency and kind of competitiveness and physicality to the game,” Kerr said. “It was probably our most competitive effort, definitely of the series, but probably of the playoffs just in terms of understanding you got to play every second.”
The Warriors, having never been this deep in the playoffs before, have periodically had to get knocked around in order to understand that the price of poker keeps going up. They even had to do it in the Houston series. While history will show that as a 4-1 near-sweep, Houston fans will remember Game 2 and James Harden with the ball in his hands and time on the clock trailing by one point. That series easily could have been 1-1 heading to Houston for Game 3, and 2-2 heading to the Bay Area for Game 5.
Cleveland’s best chance to win this series would have been in a sweep. In retrospect, the 1975 Warriors won the Finals against Washington that way, and the Bullets were down 3-0 before they really knew what they were up against. The 2015 Warriors’ luck in winning Game 1 (Iman Shumpert’s shot at the buzzer missed by less than an inch) bought them time to figure out how the Cavs would adjust to losing Kyrie Irving.
I said Warriors in seven at the beginning of the series, but I will be surprised if Cleveland wins another game.
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I wrote after Game 3 that one of the things the Warriors accomplished was to keep that game close enough that LeBron James had to stay in the game to the very end. If the Warriors had folded up their tent in the third quarter when they trailed by 20, James could have sat out the fourth quarter. My thinking was that with only one day between Games 2 and 3, and one day between 3 and 4, those 45-minute games were going to take their toll.
Much was made coming into the series of how James wasn’t shooting very well from the perimeter in the playoffs. When he literally dragged himself off the floor after the Cavs beat Atlanta, he looked like he would never play again. Eight days off, however, solved that, and he looked very spry in Game 1, but with each passing game, that shot has become less reliable. In Game 4, he came out of the game at the end of the third quarter, at a crucial juncture; the Cavs had made a run and cut the lead to three, and Steph Curry hit a 3 to double the lead. Cleveland had 17 seconds to get off a last shot, but the best James could do was dribble out the clock and fire up a three at the buzzer that wasn’t close. If the Cavs were going to have a chance to win, they needed to maintain that run. Instead, James stayed out for two minutes, and when he came back in, the lead was 10 and the game was over. After the game James said he was “gassed.” and while NBA TV’s Isiah Thomas acknowledged that, he felt that James should still have been in the game. We’ll never know, of course, but I have to think that sitting out the fourth quarter in Game 3 would have made a big difference.
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So Steve Kerr is an honest coach, and he has at least one very honest player. Draymond Green has been very openly disappointed in his play in this series, and Thursday night, he sat triumphantly on the NBA TV desk after the game and explained that his mother and his grandmother, as well as college coach Tom Izzo, had been instrumental in helping him through that tough time. Green also gave credit to teammate David Lee, saying that watching Lee run pick-and-rolls with Steph Curry in the fourth quarter of Game 3 reminded him of what he needed to do when he got the ball back from Steph. He was much more decisive on Thursday, making good passes, driving hard to the basket, and he even hit a 3-pointer, only his second of the Finals.
