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Five things I’ll tell my kids about the 2016 NBA Finals
Ian Levy | @HickoryHigh | FanSided
Right now, basketball holds very little interest for my kids. My daughter will be one next month, she’s mostly into banging on the sliding glass doors and trying to crawl on top of the dog. My son will be four this summer. He likes bouncing balls, looking at the pictures in FreeDarko’s Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, and watching his mouth move in the mirror while he says “Zaza Pachulia.” Basketball is irrelevant to one and an abstraction to the other; I’d like to think that won’t always be the case. Someday, I hope both of my kids will be interested in basketball, that they will have questions for me, seeking my sage hoops counsel and encyclopedic knowledge of Travis Best trivia.
The 2016 NBA Finals may not feature largely in these hypothetical conversations — I’d like to think my kids will be far more curious about the 2019 NBA Finals heroics of Paul George and Myles Turner, leading the Indiana Pacers over the evil empire of blinding talent that is the Minnesota Timberwolves. But just in case they ever ask, here are five things I’ll tell them about the 2016 NBA Finals.
1. Kevin Love was too beautiful for this game. I know what your mom says about his pick-and-roll defense and the way he disappeared at big moments, but she couldn’t see the forest for the trees. I know how hard it is to grok that a man so big, so strong, so talented, could also be so fragile. Shooting and size, rebounding and touch, incredible passing. He was a rare and beautiful flower, delicate. The failure was as much ours as his, Love was never supposed to be cut and trimmed, brought to the kitchen counter to add a splash of color to our drab interiors. He belonged out there.
2. This was officially the end of LeBron James’ prime. Remember when we talked about 14-time All-Star Draymond Green? Well, towards the end of Game 4 he made a bad choice and hurt LeBron. A few years before, when LeBron was at the height of his powers, he would have used that pain as fuel to become even more powerful — you know, like how I get super strong for a few seconds after scraping my hand on the shed door. Well, in that game LeBron reached back for that super power and it just wasn’t there. They lost the game and it never really came back. He was still great, for a good long while, but he was never the same after this series.
3. Watching Stephen Curry was like witnessing a tear in the time-space continuum. The release on his jumpshot was so quick, no defender had a hope of contesting it. Then, once the ball was in the air, time slowed to a crawl. The ball would languidly spin across its rainbow trajectory, leaving Curry time to head up court and chew on his mouth guard. As he curled around a screen, you could almost see the fabric of space between him and the rest of our universe ripple, as an errant breeze escaped from another dimension. Curry was The Golden Compass, The Amber Spyglass, AND The Subtle Knife.
4. I watched Richard Jefferson play in the NBA Finals as a rookie. Fourteen seasons later I saw him play in the Finals again. I am incredibly grateful for both opportunities, they were one of the simplest pleasures of my life.
5. The 2015-16 Golden State Warriors may have been the best team I ever saw. I’m not sure…I mean, how could you ever really know for certain? Their greatness was so fluid, so malleable, so adaptable. They didn’t have to climb over any obstacles, they went under, around, through them. I saw Jordan’s Bulls, Duncan’s Spurs, LeBron’s Heat, even Ingram’s Sixers and DeRozan’s Lakers. All of those teams had to, at some point, win by drawing their opponent back to their fortress, to familiar territory. The Warriors were always moving forward. It was some sort of journey, something incredible to watch.
All right, lights off now, time for bed.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you the Legend of Kenyon Martin again, I promise.
The inevitability of the Golden State Warriors
Ben Gibson | @CowboyOnPatrol | 8 Points, 9 Seconds
When the season began, Steph Curry was knocking down an usually high amount of 3-pointers. Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News joked with Steph Curry about making 500 before putting him down for 400.
First Curry laughed when I asked if 500 three-pointers was possible. Then he laughed when I said I had him down for 400. Curry: "You do?"
— Tim Kawakami (@timkawakami) November 7, 2015
At first, it seemed like a joke. Curry may have been the reigning MVP, but there was no way he would make 400. It just wasn’t going to happen. He would regress to the mean, and maybe be lucky to make 300 — a mark no one in the NBA had ever reached before.
Well, he ended up making 402.
That’s the thing about Curry and this Golden State Warriors team; they are remarkably consistent and efficient. There is a certain inevitability to their style. You can have the lead, or the game can be close, but you won’t have a chance to win if you don’t break up their rhythm.
In Game 4, the Cleveland Cavaliers never broke it up like they did in Game 3, and then they could hear the sound of inevitability, the sound of their death.
It was the first game of this Finals that wasn’t a blowout, but almost worse for the Cavaliers was the creeping sense of dread that foreshadowed the Golden State Warriors domination in the fourth quarter. Everyone in Quicken Loans Arena felt it coming, but no one for Cleveland knew how to stop it.
The two team exchanged jabs for the first three quarters, with the Warriors holding a 79-77 lead as the final quarter began. But unlike Game 3 or even the rest of the game, Cleveland’s offense bogged down while Golden State just kept moving along.
Even when they were behind, they never lost control of the game and weren’t pressed into a panic mode at any point. By keeping steady, they forced the Cavaliers into a desperate situation. As time ticked away and the margin grew into double-digits, Cleveland started to force their shots up from deep and drove into the lane with little more of a plan than “hope to get fouled”.
The Warriors only shot 41 percent through the first three periods while the Cavaliers were knocking down 48.3 percent of their shots, but unsurprisingly Golden State’s 3-point shooting made up for it. Laughably, the Warriors were shooting 50 percent from beyond the arc at that point. Their shooting actually got worse in the fourth quarter as it dipped below 40 percent, but it was their defense that proved to be the deciding factor in Game 4, as well as their free throw shooting.
With 10:21 left things were looking good for Cleveland as they held a 83-81 lead over Golden State after LeBron James’ tip slam, getting the crowd the Q riled up. For the next five minutes, Cleveland’s offense fell apart as Golden State went on a 12-1 run.
The strange part was that Golden State more or less let Cleveland shoot themselves out of the game. The Cavaliers would run a play, but it looked more like a two-man game that soon became an isolation play. Even when they got decent ball movement and open looks, their shots weren’t falling as they went 0 of 5 from beyond the arc and 9 of 21 in the fourth quarter. They weren’t picking up the fouls that they had earlier in the game as Cleveland only had 12 free throw attempts in the final period, making only 6. While the Cavaliers were struggling from the line, the Warriors made all 10 of their attempts.
It wasn’t as if the Warriors did anything special. They kept the pressure on the Cavaliers on both sides of the ball, but as the time ticked away, Cleveland started to panic and kept missing shots while the Warriors slowly pulled away.
Golden State never panicked, something that their leader, Steph Curry, doesn’t do either. Neither he or Klay Thompson had scored more than 20 points before Game 4, but they combined for 11 of 22 shooting from beyond the arc, scoring 38 and 25 points, respectively.
Thompson told CBS Sports’ Ken Berger that he wasn’t surprised by Curry’s performance:
"“I’m not surprised by the way he played tonight,” Klay Thompson told CBS Sports on the way to the team bus after the defending champion Warriors beat the Cavaliers 108-97 behind a 38-point outburst from the MVP. The Warriors took a 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven series, with the potential clincher Monday night at Oracle Arena.“That’s what we expect of him every night,” Thompson said. “That’s how talented he is. I expected him to have a big game, man. All the chatter, the NBA Finals, all that, with the huge spotlight, everything’s going to be over-analyzed. But Steph never panics, man. Probably the most composed athlete I’ve ever been around.”"
When the season began, most experts pegged the Warriors to repeat as champions, and other than the scare against the Oklahoma City Thunder, there was little doubt that they would repeat.
They came out of the gates and ripped off 24-straight wins, but they never wavered along the way, just keeping calm as they won 73 regular season games without losing any back to back. It took until the Thunder in the Western Conference Finals to give the Warriors two straight losses.
We knew this was going to happen, we knew that the Warriors were going to win another NBA title (assuming they don’t lose three games in a row) because it was inevitable. Every team fights and practices in hopes of being consistent, but no one has done it at as high of a level as the Warriors are.
With both their offense and their defense in the fourth quarter they showed they don’t have to make a dramatic run to beat the opponent. They won’t ever break stride, and when their opponent stumbles, they casually finish and claim championship.
The Richard Jefferson series, or, the marginalization of Kevin Love’s skills
Kevin Yeung | @KevinHFY | Hardwood Paroxysm
There’s a highly accessible hot take baked into Tyronn Lue’s decision to start Richard Jefferson in Game 4, and ever since Kevin Love traded in his featured role as a 25+ points per game scorer with the Minnesota Timberwolves for a collectively stronger opportunity, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing over said hot take. The call for Jefferson, even if we don’t assume full health for Love (who didn’t clear the league’s concussion protocol in time for Game 3), is steeped in some sports-hollerin’ truth: Love isn’t changing the game for the Cavaliers.
Jefferson’s contributions weren’t reflected in the box score (three points on two field goal attempts in 25 minutes) as they were in Game 3, but his role is very simple. He doesn’t need to take shots to offer value, and he earns some back on the other end where Love really struggles.
Bless his creaky joints, Jefferson is giving it his all on defense and playing a decent enough 3-and-D game, if not a downright good one. As much as the Cavs tried to hide him on Harrison Barnes or Andre Iguodala, Love doesn’t blend into churning defensive rotations in the way that Jefferson can. By virtue of downsizing alone, the Cavs are a couple shades faster on defense, a few seconds quicker on close-outs or some inches tighter on shot contests. That’s a crucial difference in the matchup game against the Warriors.
It’s to Love’s credit that he took to his new role with grace, whether it sprung from genuine selflessness or just damage control. Either way, the company line is what the Cavs needed.
According to Cavs play-by-play man Fred McLeod, Love told Lue that he’d do “whatever you need me to do” and bolster the second unit. Starting the second quarter alongside Channing Frye and against the Warriors’ vaunted small-ball combination of Draymond Green and Harrison Barnes in the frontcourt, Love played defense in earnest, shuttering Barnes along the perimeter more than once and keeping his feet moving against an uptempo offense. He’s still slower than Jefferson and it showed, but his best effort was adequate and the Cavs needed that for spurts.
The Warriors simply strain defenses too much to field two minuses on that end, and downsizing plays to the Cavs’ advantage. Given how they’re playing right now, deploying Jefferson as a stand-still shooter is ostensibly the same as having Love out there. The beginning of the fourth quarter was when the Warriors really ran off with the game, and it was no coincidence that it happened as the Cavs’ offense reverted to isolations with Love standing still in the corner. Jefferson can do the same while assimilating on defense against a ping-ping-ping pass-and-cut game.
The advantages that Love provides (and they’re very real, no matter what sports radio hosts would have you believe) have been marginalized on this team and especially in this series. He’ll probably be of better use coming off the bench, especially if he keeps putting his nose to the grindstone like in Game 4. Jefferson isn’t saving the Cavs either, and if they want to regain footing in this series, everyone will need to play an airtight game. That continues to include Love, but most likely not as a member of the starting lineup from here on out.
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