The Spurs last night were on some other, more ethereal plane of basketball existence. It can’t be described any other way.
During the game—during merely the first quarter—people in
the twitterverse were joking that we reached peak Spurs. But in a way we
reached peak basketball, as they think it may be best played.
The stuff they did in that first half was unbelievable, and
may have been just the most efficient, well executed basketball we will ever
see. Popovich after the game put it
frankly: he never expects to see anything like that again, ever. That’s how good it was.
And it’s not a coincidence that Tim Duncan, after the game,
when asked about their historic first half efficiency, said that at the time he
didn’t know how well they were shooting.
That he didn’t care. Because we
also saw last night a form of focus and concentration by the team that really
was like it was on a different sort of level.
At times, watching the Spurs looked like a kind of struggle simply to see
where this flow could take them—outscoring the other team was a kind of an
afterthought.
--
The most visible form of this, was simply in the fact that they showed no signs of fear at all. There are teams that don’t care too much about the Heat—the Bulls, the Nets. But on some level, there’s an awareness that they pose a threat, an awareness that causes hesitation, causes lapses. And everyone fears LeBron James.
But here’s what Danny Green thinks of the Heat:
And here’s what he thinks of LeBron James:
This fearlessness of the Spurs, this unwillingness to hesitate or to worry, was the most remarkable aspect of their effort last night.
LeBron didn’t faze anyone, really. Every time he closed out on Kawhi, Kawhi didn’t
flinch:
And if Kawhi didn’t care about LeBron, he surely didn’t care
about Lewis:
In fact, he didn’t care about anything. This was evident on his most amazing possession of the night, which you can see at the beginning of this piece. Leonard makes a crazy cut to the corner, Danny Green throws him the ball. James closes out on Leonard, and Kawhi turns, spins and just goes up. Bosh is there, closing out on him as well, and Kawhi doesn’t
mind at all—he just spun LeBron.
This seems like something we haven’t seen Kawhi do in a
game. We may have seen video of him do
it in practice and in college. But this
is the sort of basketball that he has only explored under duress in the game,
in crazy finishes or in drawing fouls.
Here he simply turns and shoots, uses his athleticism and his balance
and just drains it.
This is a fearlessness, a level of focus and flow, that was
just unreal to watch. It was as if
nothing mattered on the court to Leonard, as if everything disappeared—and yet
precisely by everything being factored in and accounted for and given its due
weight.
--
Compare Mario Chalmers or Norris Cole’s scattershot focus
this game and you get a sense of just on what level he must be working, how it involves
a completely different direction of energy and effort. Kawhi doesn’t look like he’s trying to
command the situation, like Chalmers and Cole; he looks like he’s trying simply
to let any excess go. The situation on
the floor isn’t too full of things to manage, to count up and count in; it is
if anything too full of things to let go, remove. It is not a deep but a
shallow intensity, one that lets the occasion roll off of him, so that everything
needless fall away.
Kawhi also had a great quote at halftime: he said that one
of the most fortunate things of the first half was that “my teammates were able
to keep up with me.” And that’s really it: his performance set the tone for the
rest of the Spurs. They simply didn’t
mind. In particular, what this led to is
a sort of realization: namely that at any one time, three out of five people
that the Heat have on the court can’t play defense at a championship level anymore. Rashard Lewis, Ray Allen, Chris Andersen and,
yes, Dwayne Wade, simply can’t keep up. So
Boris Diaw has no problem when he finds himself backing down Lewis in the post.
The young guys aren’t that much better: Haslem might be
fine, but Chalmers too isn’t effective alone, and Norris Cole can get fazed
easily. It’s only Bosh and James out
there, really. Look for the Heat to try
and correct this in the next game. But
it was one thing that caused such a decimation and demoralization by the Spurs
in this one.
--
As Manu Ginobili pointed out in the post-game, however, the
Spurs could be almost as proud of their defense as their offense. That’s where the concentration really showed
up as a greater attention to detail.
Green has reached Patrick Beverley-levels of peskiness, something
we’ve never seen him really do before.
His five steals were all taken right from the defender in the most
ruthless way possible.
And then there is Kawhi’s defense of LeBron, which was just completely
on point continually.
And together the team simply did this if he drove to the
hoop:
This absolute command of the floorspace produced all sorts of mistakes on the part of the Heat. You can’t win a Finals series if you do this:
That’s Danny Green successfully guarding Chris Bosh in the post, forcing an entry pass way too far baseline, which Bosh can’t catch. What should have been a matchup nightmare for the Spurs becomes for them an opportunity to force a Heat turnover.
That’s quite simply the level of efficiency that they are working at now, and it’s nearly frightening in its sheer indifference to the will of their opponent. Danny Green, like Kawhi, doesn’t act at all here like he cares that his opponent is bigger than him, longer than him, has more experience in the post than him.
--
People have been calling for the Spurs to be more aggressive,
to take it to the paint more often, to not let the ball to swing around
endlessly outside. This was the lesson
they learned, supposedly, against the Thunder: that they can be a physical team
if they want to.
But it may have been Cory Joseph’s example during that game
that actually gave the Spurs the key to what they needed to win a
championship. He simply didn’t care that
Serge Ibaka was in front of him: he would dunk on the man anyway. Serge Ibaka was, essentially, nothing to
him. Efficiency as a result of effort is
one thing. Efficiency as a result of indifference
to obstacles, is another. And the latter has brought the Spurs into another sphere altogether.
No comments:
Post a Comment