Let’s Rig This Thing To Go A Full Seven Games!
Like the two contests before it, Game 3 of the NBA Finals was a doozie.
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After experiencing the Ballmer-stress-ball-faced transcendence of the San Antonio Spurs v. Los Angeles Clippers first round playoff series, Ian Levy asked here at The Cauldron: Are the NBA Playoffs’ Best Days Behind Us? And prior to the NBA Finals, his inquiry seemed rather prescient.
By the conclusion of the conference finals, the playoffs had offered up a meager 75 games, last year’s version — arguably the most exciting NBA playoffs of all time — gave us a hearty, heart-in-our-throats 89 games. As Kirk Goldsberry pointed out, 2014 boasted five thrilling Game 7s. This year’s playoffs? Only two.
Who knew that whole patience and virtue thing actually has some validity to it?
Even after the mostly spectacular Game 1, the series—especially with the news of Kyrie Irving’s season-ending fractured kneecap—looked destined for a sweep.
Then Game 2 happened. Everything we thought we knew about the Warriors as an extraordinary machine and everything we thought we knew about the limitations of one man being able to carry an entire team in the new It’s a Team Sport Era of the NBA got twisted and turned upside down.
Last night’s crazy, weird, and sometimes sublime Game 3 had that damn look in its eyes — like it wanted to go to overtime. Case in point, the Cavs had a 96.3 percent win probability at the start of the fourth quarter, but that dipped all the way to 61.7 percent by the 2:45 mark of the fourth. I’m pretty sure we needn’t worry about the playoffs being boring anymore!
Seven games, you plead? Yes, please!
But how do we ensure this will happen? What do we need to see happen in Games 4 through 6 to ensure that on June 19, we’re still talking about David Lee and Matthew Dellavedova instead of Karl Anthony-Towns and Jahlil Okafor?
That’s Foul, Man
If we’re being fair, the Warriors’ extraordinary machine relies — at times, anyway — quite heavily on Draymond Green and Andrew Bogut doing things that verge on or sometimes flat-out bask in their illegality. It’s the NBA equivalent of the Seattle Seahawks’ defensive holding tactic. In other words, the refs can’t call them all.
Game 3, at least in intention, was no different. Yes, Jeff Van Gundy exonerated Green for his screen on Iman Shumpert, but donning my very best Zapruder-film paranoiac costume, I can’t say I agree.
It sure seems like Green thrusts himself into Shumpert, only it’s so well timed, it comes off like Shumpert propels himself into Green? There was no call on the play, but Green did get nailed later grabbing Timofey Mozgov’s jersey on a defensive rebound boxout:
There are two things (probably) at play when it comes to the officiating: 1) Either someone working for the league or someone from Cleveland has made the zebra’s aware of Green’s extracurricular efforts and/or 2) Green’s incessant — and I mean incessant — complaining and moaning to the refs has led them to call most everything that could be dictionary-definition considered a foul. How else to explain these two relatively innocuous fouls called on Green in Game 3?
Green got away with these things all day long during the regular season and even earlier in these playoffs. Defending and screening professional basketball players requires skill, obviously, but it also demands physicality and a certain degree of craftiness. Players like Green don’t defend angelically. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that if you want to see the Warriors succeed, you’ll want to see some no-calls on Green. He’ll find a way to get four or five fouls regardless, but it’s the fouls he doesn’t get — how far he gets playing with house money — that may dictate the outcome of this series.
In total, Game 3 wasn’t so much refereed well as it was refereed fairly. The Cavs got calls and no-calls. The Dubs got calls and no-calls. In the second quarter, Mozgov had a very iffy moving screen foul called on him, and later, in the fourth, as Golden State chipped away at its 17-point deficit, he once again got called on a supremely iffy offensive foul when boxing out Andre Iguodala.
Still, if you’re a Warriors fan, the subject of your ire is surely this egregious no call on LeBron James when he essentially slid into Steph Curry:
The Warriors were down just five at the time; who knows what would have happened if the right call is made there. Yes, this was clearly a foul, but it wasn’t a conspiracy. Considering the NBA came out and more or less apologized for a few crucial missed calls in Game 2, we simply need to understand how incredibly difficult it is for three refs to see everything that happens on the court. Whether you like it or not, what the refs see and don’t see will dictate just how beautiful the Warriors offense can be and just how on point its defense and rebounding can be. That’s definitely something to keep an eye on for the rest of the series.
Yeah, but what about the mismatches?
One of the best things about Game 3 was the emergence — or shall we say re-emergence — of David Lee. Lee, a two time NBA All Star, had not logged a single minute of play in Games 1 and 2, even as the Warriors offense stagnated.
As Zach Lowe mentioned in his Game 2 recap:
“But when Curry passes the ball, the Warriors offense can turn aimless against a dialed-in defense. Green or Andrew Bogut holds it at the elbow, everyone runs around and screens for each other, and if none of those screens work, no one really gets open.”
Not the case for Lee, who does four things pretty well: he creates his own offense, he thrives within the Warriors scheme, he passes the ball out of double teams well, and he dependably grabs rebounds. The downside, however, is that when Lee underperforms in any one of these areas, his absurdly bad defense can threaten the entire operation.
In Game 3, Lee checked in around the 5:25 mark of the second quarter. On the following Cavs’ possession, Lebron, clearly Lee-hunting, threw the ball down low to Mozgov. Mozgov backed down Lee in the post but ended up missing a turnaround jumper. (By the way, side note, can we all agree that posting your mismatch up is not the best way to exploit a mismatch and that the best way to exploit a mismatch is to get the mismatch in a pick and roll?) Anyway, shortly thereafter, after Lee made a good cut for a wide open dunk on the other end, Lebron exploited this bad mismatch properly by having Lee’s defensive assignment set a screen for Lebron, forcing Lee to cover Lebron.
Predictably, this sequence ended in a pretty clean drive to the basket for James, which would have resulted in two points had Tristan Thompson not endeavored in one of the more bizarre goaltending calls of all time.
On the offensive end, Lee went 4-for-4 for 11 points and two assists, his play keying Golden State’s comeback from 20 points down. Lee’s presence in Game 4 will be wildly intriguing. Clearly, he provides a degree of creativity on offense that Green hasn’t provided in this series thus far. The Curry-Lee pick and roll gave the Cavs’ defense fits, with Lee making several brilliant passes as the roll man.
Unfortunately, whenever Lee is on the floor, LeBron, who is virtually always on the floor (46 minutes-played in Game 3), tries to make sure Lee is switched onto him or, even worse, that Lee is the one who has to meet him at the rim.
One of those sequences came around the seven minute mark of the fourth quarter of Game 3. LeBron found Lee at the hoop for an easy layup (nobody makes rim protection look more futile than Lee), but on the very next possession, James, being covered by the not necessarily spry Leandro Barbosa, simply couldn’t get past his man, resulting in an ugly turnaround air-balled three and a 24-second violation. This is what you would call a reality check. Despite the clear on-the-ball mismatch and the vulnerability at the rim, the best basketball player in the world could not get his optimal shot.
LeBron’s inability to get the matchup he wanted should say something about the way we view mismatches. After all, this series may best be defined by each team masks its flaws — think Mozgov on Iguodala, Dellavedova on Thompson. The Cavs are hoping things continue as they have been; where they were able to endure the mismatches.
The Warriors, on the other hand, need this guy to show up:
Don’t these guys need a breather?
We still don’t necessarily know why David Blatt kept the red-hot Mozgov on the bench for the entire fourth quarter of Game 2. The conservative guess is that Blatt was playing the matchups and if Bogut wasn’t playing, then neither would Mozgov, despite Mozgov’s more-than-competent defense of Iguodala and offensive prowess.
Maybe Blatt, either via front office decree or his own agenda, didn’t want Mozgov overly surpassing his minutes average. Mozgov averaged 25 minutes per game in the regular season and by the third quarter of Game 2 he was already at 29. Still, it’s THE FINALS!
Mozgov played 32 minutes in Game 3, so this seems unlikely, but everyone in the building was nonetheless wondering if LeBron would get some rest during the fourth quarter — a quarter in which the Cavs entered with a 17 point lead. Blatt certainly tried to give his superstar player a breathe, but then things like this started happening:
At the 10:56 mark of the fourth, James would check back in and never leave. He’s now averaging over 47 minutes per game in the Finals, after averaging 36 minutes during the regular season.
So, if we’re trying to mentally and spiritually rig this series to go the full seven games, we’ll need to see King James and his cast of characters get some rest at some point — via blowout either way. Thompson has put up 47, 39 and 44 minutes over three games, and Matthew Dellavedova, last night’s 20-point-scoring, hustle-play-making X-Factor, has played 42 and 39 minutes in the last two games.
Keep in mind, these guys have been playing since October. One of the plays indicative of their fatigue — and something the Warriors have to do more often in order to turn the series around — was this Iguodala dunk in which he pretty much just outran all the Cavs:
In Game 1, Cleveland ran out of steam in overtime. In Game 2, they fumbled a fourth quarter lead that really never should have been fumbled in the first place. In Game 3, they came close to giving it away before pulling away in the last minute.
None of this had much to do with the influence of the refs or the Warriors suddenly finding some super exploitable mismatches, but instead had everything to do with fatigue.
Due to the injuries, Cleveland is more or less running out a seven-man rotation versus the Dubs’ 10-man squad. Something has to give for Blatt, whose key players are logging mind-blowing minutes. It helps that the series is spread over so many days, but in order to see a Game 7, a blowout is in order. Otherwise, all this talk of grit may devolve into something unsustainable, a caricature instead of a virtue.
Let’s have a conversation!
As I said in my Game 2 recap, I’ll respond to any reasonable responses, I really enjoy the back and forth, even it’s just a cordial little thing. If you’re down, but wanting of something to write about, let me suggest a few things to get the ball rolling:
DAVID “Basketball” LEE! Do you start him Game 4? If you’re Kerr, how many minutes are you aiming to get him? Into which matchups are you looking to insert him?
Doubling Lebron? Is it time to start sending more doubles Lebron’s way and seeing if the other Cavs can beat the Warriors? Here’s an example of the Warriors doubling Lebron last night. What do you see?
