So it looks as if
Portland has turned up the heat and figured out some things that will
work. This despite setbacks--including,
but not limited to, snakes.
They will play
Matthews on Parker. They will go fierce at the hoop through the middle with Lillard, and if
they don't do that they will run everything through Aldridge and get the
guards on the wings involved--even if there is no doubleteam coming. Most significantly--and what I think is a very smart move they should stick with, though it was occasioned by an injury--they will adjust the offense to do without Mo Williams. That is, instead
of bringing constantly, without reprieve, the threat of three knockdown
three-point shooters, they will instead play long and lanky, and bring in with
Barton and Robinson and encourage them with Nic to take long twos out of little picks and penetrations.
Most important though, it simply seems like they resolved to work
harder. The intensity Portland brought
to this game was absolutely wonderful to see.
They moved the ball quicker. They
simply ran the court faster. They also
seemed more desperate in the way they did it, but desperation is perhaps also
what this Portland team needs to reach another level.
And the Spurs are
having to work. They seem genuinely
afraid of Portland--no game in the Dallas series looked like this. They brought this game the long three threat
of Kawhi, Manu and Parker, the lanky guys.
Let no one say Portland got beat in the first half. They put up 51 points. The Spurs just put up more--many more
(namely, 70).
This happened mainly
because Portland just looks simply outmatched on defense. The Spurs move the ball too quick for an
average defense--which is what Portland has--to be effective against them. An average defense is specifically what San
Antonio is crafted to annihilate.
Usually an average defense produces one thing, which is some sort of
trade off on the offense… that's all you have to produce, that's what makes it
better than mediocre, and it allows then some opportunity for stoppage. But San Antonio eliminates all
tradeoffs. They come at you from every
angle--it is a beautiful thing to see.
The spurs just have so many options they can use of offense. If you try to stop them one way, they come at
you another way, and another way, and another way.
The main problem
however continues to be Lillard on defense.
They are bringing everything they have at him. Putting Matthews on Parker doesn't
significantly cut into the true problem, though it stops Parker and makes them
have to set up the offense slightly more than if Parker had the option of weaving around inside. They just take the 2-guard Lillard is
guarding and run him through several screens or all around the court, and run plays
for him.
Guarding Marco Belinelli in the third quarter, Lillard had to keep up
with him as he threatened to perform first one, then two, then three backcuts from the corner along the
baseline. This meant jumping in front of
Belinelli one, two, three times, on one possession. And all this doesn't quite get at the nub of
the issue, which is simply that Lillard just has problems fighting through
screens, and the Spurs are probably the most prolific screeners in the
NBA. Coming over them, he more often
than not gets tripped up, and trying to sell a foul is not a gamble you want to
take (though he attempted to in this game on occasion, with no luck) when it
means your man will have a clear path to the basket; if he goes under and gives
space, that simply is death: every two- and three-guard on the Spurs is so good
at catching and shooting (just like Parker too is) that any space is a
threat. Let's be clear: it's not the
roll really that is the problem, it is simply Lillard's trouble dealing with the
screen and staying on his man, which he needs to do, since Lillard is also (it
turns out), one of the easiest post-ups for any mismatch the Spurs roster will
produce and therefore switching is not an option.
Nevertheless,
Lillard offensively is looking better than ever. What was most impressive was his
ability to get to the basket. Stopped up
by all the bodies in the paint in the first game, he was not able to make a
move to the basket. His solution this
game was just to harder at them. Lillard
is truly good at this, and it's actually an underrated aspect of his game which
should be emphasized. Over the course of
the year he has shown himself able to bring himself into the same category as
John Wall and even Russell Westbrook in terms of the intensity with which he
goes to the basket. I've seen him
throughout the year explode, slip through two men, clutch the ball, and roll it
up off the glass, more times than I can actually remember. But tonight, Lillard was going at three men on occasion, all collapsing on
him--something I don't think I've witnessed him do except in transition. This is a truly interesting development,
because the Spurs genuinely have to change their defensive priorities to react
to it, and can't rely simply on their manipulation of spacing to do the work
for them--and if that occurs, this will open up shooters on the wings. For all the talk we heard after the first
game about how Lillard could thrive and bring Portland back into the series if
they would only stop playing team basketball and let him go off from the three
point line, I think that the more he looks like Russell Westbrook in this
series and puts up twos driving to the basket, the better the Blazers will
fare.
Aldridge, too, looks
like he is reaching deeper and deeper within himself and discovering new
reserves of power and energy. The
Blazers seemed to have come to the conclusion--one they seemed not to have
fully reached in the first game--that dumping the ball to Aldridge has to be an option on every possession, or
else they are simply out of the series, done, kaput. This I think squares with the reality of the
situation. But it requires Aldridge simply
to get more physical than he has ever quite been, and in a particular way that
he is not as comfortable as other big men with doing. Aldridge typically seeks out precision
contact with other big men. He does not
bang around in the post like Robin Lopez, say: the physical fight for position
simply is not a challenge he quite wants to put up. This is not to say he is not physical, by any
means: he is absolutely more physical than Dirk, say, who he often gets
compared to--wrongly. It is just that
Aldridge plays like he enjoys the intellectual aspects of working upon
opponents, and would rather turn over one or another shoulder or face up and
dribble at a man than back a guy down.
In this game, however, we saw him shift priorities. He fought for space on nearly every
possession before he got the ball. I
mean, like, he banged around for it. He
properly posted up. And he did similar
things in getting rebounds and working on the inside too on defense. Overall there seemed a shift in his game from
the intellectual to the physical aspects of dealing with opponents, and it
seemed to work: the dump to him was there, and Portland could run things
through him. Not surprisingly, Matthews
and Batum put up many more points this game than in Game 1.
In the end though,
the Spurs are simply a beast. What is
great to see is them bringing it into another gear. After watching the Heat sloppily struggle to
contain Brooklyn, this was not only a relief to watch: it brought up the
question of whether in fact the Spurs are better. Everyone is fascinated with the Heat's
"extra playoff gear," their ability to step up their game in crunch
time. But no one talks of the Spurs
having something of the same sort of gear.
But we shouldn't take the consistency of their excellence to imply that
they lack fierceness. Their performance
in these two games began to hint that they are capable of reaching levels of
ferocity in precision execution that I genuinely suspect the Heat may not
actually possess. That is to say, after
watching the Heat stumble through games against a mediocre East, and watching
the Spurs (who may in fact, despite all the talk of how well the Heat are
rested, be actually even better rested than them, with everyone on their roster
averaging numbers less than 35 minutes a game) finding more and more ways to
rip through the best Western Conference ever, in a Heat vs. Spurs matchup, at
this point I have no hesitation going all in with the Spurs. The Western conference--and specifically here
the Blazers, who brought it to them this game and nearly made a run to lead in
the fourth--are simply challenging them to reach new levels of ruthlessness,
and they are responding.
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