Well, I'm getting ready for the game and I'm looking back at the footage and thinking about what will happen tonight. I mostly covered what needs to happen on the floor in my recap of the last game—and was happy to find that Lillard himself had somewhat similar thoughts about what was happening.
It's very simple: Portland has to fight through screens and find some hole, any hole, in the Spurs' defense and exploit it until the Spurs make them stop. This is something that I feel may happen now with Williams out, since it shifts the whole dynamic of their offense and forces the Spurs to deal with some matchups they may not have been anticipating. Portland needs some kind of shift, something to kick them into gear, and it feels like they are running out of options they are prepared for. In those sorts of situations, improvisation and creativity are where solutions are found, and this group of guys has untapped resources in that department, I think--and there's no one more ready to give it to them than the People's Champ, Will Barton, who will be playing in Mo's place. But more fundamentally, Portland just has to find the determination to win this game. They have to do it. Three down is not something feasible to come back from, and they have to stay in the space where they indeed can still believe they can win this series—which they still can. And this will be tough, because the Spurs are at their very strongest when they know exactly what you need: they take exactly that away from you.
But because what would happen on the hardwood was somewhat clear, because it simply involves Portland simply acting like what they are—a team that is actually capable of going to the Western Conference Finals—I wanted to focus a bit on the larger picture involving how these teams stories are unfolding.
I feel like the series is being talked about as if these wins by San Antonio were both sort of blowouts, in the sense that Portland just doesn’t quite have what it takes to beat this good team. It makes sense we would want to be seen this general way, for several reasons. 1) We love an underdog, but against the Spurs it’s really unlikely any other team can win, so it’s better not to look too deeply into how well Portland is performing and get our hopes up, when they’ll inevitably come short of the mark. 2) The holes in the Blazers team are too obvious (only average defense, no deep bench, no offense against the Spurs matchups) and so victory, if it happens, carries something of the taste of inexorability to it, even if it is (as it was in the Game 2) quite unclear whether the Spurs would even emerge from a single digit lead to hold out the game. 3) Most importantly, the Spurs are freaking loveable as hell, and stressing how their veteran maturity simply eliminates people with machinelike efficiency seems an easier way to explain their dominance than actually trying to convey the actual magnitude of the cohesion and strength they in fact do wield. That is, it is easier to talk about how well “the system” continues to work, rather than state the plain and simple fact: this is a ragtag team of elite basketball players, who, after being one possession away from a championship last year have turned into serial killers, resolved to leave absolutely nothing to chance in their long path to calmly, coolly, exterminate everyone that stands in the way of their facing the Miami Heat again and beating them.
It’s this counternarrative however that we need to emphasize. Wesley Matthews in the shootaround before Game Two did indeed emphasize it, talking to Casey Holdahl of Forward Center:
“The Spurs are the kill you with kindness type team. […] They’ve always just been a vanilla team and go about their business and that’s the way they kill you. Don’t be mistaken: they’re killers. They’re definitely killers, they’re just quiet assassins about it.”
The business they are going about this whole year has been to utterly humiliate the NBA, and then to humiliate Miami. Nothing less will suffice. That loss was probably the toughest any sports team has suffered over the last five years or so—I can’t think of anything that comes close. And revenge is going to happen. The care and precision with which they have prepared for this postseason outdoes any of their previous attempts (even given the intensity of those). And their performance merely in the second half of the regular season shut up the doubters—let alone their performance in these playoffs, which has been obscenely good despite the hiccups Dallas caused.
So let’s not kid ourselves. Something of this serial-killer counternarrative might emerge if the Spurs beat Portland tonight, because they will be coming close to a sweep in the West—something no one would ever have thought possible, given the quality of the teams out here. But I honestly see people hedging their bets until the time comes and the Spurs are in the WCF, still referring to the Blazers as a good team who haven’t quite showed up this round, and still acting as if this is a loveable group of veterans past their prime, rather than an elite strike force, operating at peak efficiency, charged with carpetbombing the rest of the NBA back to the peachbasket era.
Because here’s what you get from this series if you begin to see things as developments in the latter story. Essentially every game is not a kind of happy coincidence for the underdog Blazers, wrested away from an inevitable winner. Rather it is a challenge by a likely future small-market powerhouse (given the money and resources they will have over the next few years) to a team who doesn’t want to be distracted at all from a much important task which has consumed them since the end of last year. The Blazers, at each renewal of their attack, with what comparatively limited resources they have, are attacking the team that made the entire NBA continue to play on after the last season ended—when the Spurs, instead of collapsing, said it didn’t end yet, and came back to prove Game 7 was not the end. They are showing a team that is has turned the past into its fuel that the future is also fueling NBA teams. Each attack, even if it looks at first like it is futile or outmatched, seeks, in principle, to be a disruption, a threat by which they may be forced to take their eyes off the main goal, and actually adapt a system that has, until this series, managed to decimate the entire NBA.
Because, quite frankly, I haven’t seen any clear indications by any analysts as to exactly how the Spurs have managed to emerge so very good this year. We think we know nearly everything about their organization. We find them absolutely boring, we know Pop’s system so thoroughly. We think we see the modifications to it that Pop is putting in place this year--they could only be modifications, little additions, we tell ourselves--namely greater flexibility, even less playing time to stay healthy, creative changes in the rotation, what have you. But at the end of the day they truly are showing deeper reserves of resiliency and flexibility than the entire league thought possible. The entire league. We speak this way readily about the Miami Heat, and the difficulty of their trying to three-peat. But they have had nowhere near the tangible success of the Spurs this season, who have simply annihilated an absolutely fierce Western Conference while staying just as—if not more—rested (a point I made in passing last time, which bears repeating). That they do it while managing to look relaxed should make their relentlessness even more impressive: they have a team composure that is just as disciplined as any one of their offensive setups and any one of their defensive schemes. There is something at the heart of this team, some secret, that has been at work and which remains completely invisible to us, and if you possess it, you absolutely destroy the rest of the entire league.
The Blazers, in this light, have the possibility to try and detect this secret, to make this carefully crafted, secret pattern or plan—because perhaps that it is what it is best called, this pattern in the serial-killer's murders—put together in the aftermath of last year, have to change, to adjust, to take account for the fact that someone may be on to it. They are a team without any such pattern at all (though they have murdered much of the NBA in their own manner), who merely have grit and determination and a heartfelt conviction that they could make a run this year even with the pieces not all there yet in the roster. And these detectives have a shot at exposing what the Spurs’ secret is and making it have to reconcile itself with a different and possibly new NBA, one they possibly do not have the key to dominating.
This by no means underestimates the likelihood of a Spurs victory in the series. It simply shifts the way we see the contest between the two teams. We see that what Portland did to Houston in the last series has the potential to disrupt whatever it is that the Spurs have figured out this year, and which has managed to annihilate the rest of the league. We begin to think—without inflating the odds that they will win—that they are quite capable of provoking trouble within an organization that has determined not to have any trouble, any distraction, all year, and has found the means to do it. And we begin to appreciate each wild and increasingly desperate attack of the Blazers seems to be directed at a deeper and less visible, less tangible target, which no other NBA team has come close to even grazing. And we begin to respect just how hard the Spurs have to work against the Blazers to keep it out of their reach.
No comments:
Post a Comment