After spending the second half of Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals impersonating a non-73-win basketball team, the Golden State Warriors got back to business in Game 2, running the Oklahoma City Thunder out of Oracle Arena.
Now the series moves (after another three-day break, of course) to Chesapeake Energy Arena, where Game 3 looms as possibly the pivotal game in the series… unless the Thunder win it, in which case Game 4 becomes the pivotal game.
Aren’t playoffs fun?
The concern for Thunder fans is that in Game 2, these two teams returned to form. The Thunder offense devolved into a batch of Kevin Durant turnovers and few Russell Westbrook shots. Their defense was stout for most of the first half, but it then conceded an 8-0 run before the buzzer. OKC then had a difficult time finding Steph Curry in the third quarter. This was the erratic, too-often-inattentive team NBA analysts observed during the regular season.
The Warriors, on the other hand, moved the ball much better than they did in Game 1, and their bigs were much more active and effective on the boards. They threw the kitchen sink at Kevin Durant in the third quarter, forcing him to pass out of double- and triple-teams. His teammates failed to make the Warriors pay for that strategy.
#basketball https://t.co/N4ZK0eef6V
— BBALLBREAKDOWN (@bballbreakdown) May 19, 2016
I wrote before this series that the mental game would make the difference in the outcome. In Game 1, Oklahoma City played with poise down the stretch while the Warriors were unable to do so. It was a totally different story in Game 2. Twice the Thunder fouled 3-point shooters, and on one of those occasions, Durant also picked up a technical foul which sent Steph Curry (the league’s best free throw shooter, in addition to everything else) to the line for four foul shots.
The key sequence in the game came at the end of the first half, after the Thunder had cut a nine-point Golden State lead to one with two minutes to play. Serge Ibaka, who has been practically invisible in this series, fouled Andre Iguodala in the act of shooting a three-pointer. Iguodala is a decent 3-point shooter, but at 35 percent, you probably want to let him load it up. He’s only a 60-percent free throw shooter, but he managed to sink all of the free ones in this instance, giving the Warriors the lead again. OKC answered with a Thunder-ous alley-oop from Westbrook to Durant, as “The Slim Reaper” scored the last of his 16 second-quarter points to tie the score at 49.
That dunk, at the 1:35 mark of the second quarter, would also be the Thunder’s last score before intermission.
The Warriors finished the half on two beautiful baskets by Iguodala, one a running layup during which he was actually looking at the floor while he spun the ball off the backboard and in, and a dunk on an incredible one-hand bounce pass from Draymond Green.
Wut. How. Iguodala. Wut. How. https://t.co/X0tcZqPbec
— BBALLBREAKDOWN (@bballbreakdown) May 19, 2016
https://twitter.com/JCannonSports/status/733117630668800001
As in Game 1, the Warriors had closed the half with a flurry. Unlike Game 1, they made sure it stuck. The teams traded baskets for the first half of the third quarter (sorry, threw a lot of fractions at you there), and then Steph Curry put on a clinic. He scored 15 straight Warrior points, on a variety of mostly open jumpers (how does that happen?) and the aforementioned quartet of free throws after the Durant foul and technical.
When the smoke cleared, the Warriors had stretched a seven-point lead to 20 in two minutes and 12 seconds. The Thunder spent the first part of the fourth quarter deciding what they were going to do about it, which turned out to be not very much. They had their road split, which is what they came for.
You could almost instantly tell which team needed this game and which team merely wanted it.
I personally feel the Thunder will regret not being more competitive in this game. Even if they ultimately lost, they could have achieved something if they had kept contact with the Warriors, as the Blazers consistently did during the previous round: Chiefly, they would have pushed the champions physically and emotionally. Instead they gave the Warriors a very comfortable second-game romp, one in which nobody played more than 32 minutes.
The other advantage to maintaining contact with the Warriors is that they might have actually won the game. Look how things turned out for the Thunder against the Spurs, just because they were close late in the fourth quarter after trailing by 10 to 13 points in the third quarter of multiple games.
In that series preview I referenced earlier, I wrote that we won’t really know who the Thunder are for at least one game, maybe two. We don’t know how much of their success against San Antonio was due to something they figured out, or to the Spurs’ decay. Turns out I was wrong. We’re two full games in, and we still don’t know if the Thunder are the heady, poised team we saw in Game 1 or the sloppy, slow-rotating, foul-the-three-point-shooter group we saw in Game 2.
I have to say that since the Game 2 Thunder more closely resemble the regular-season Thunder, I’m inclined to believe that’s who they are, but they can prove me wrong by sweeping the Warriors at home. That’s right, they need a sweep. If this series goes back to Oakland 2-2, I really don’t like their chances, because we know who the Warriors are, and it’s not the team we saw in Game 1. You don’t win 73 games in the regular season and go 8-2 in the first two rounds of the playoffs playing like that.
