The heroics of the 2013-2014 Spurs

Last night, amidst all the frenzy of the Spurs’ celebration after they won the 2013-14 NBA Finals, one reporter mused that summing up this win would be difficult.  The whole language of NBA writing centers around heroes.  This is a team.  We’ll have to learn to speak another language, he said, and we don’t really know what that is.

It’s true.  I’ve commented before on just how difficult it is to find a metaphor to describe these Spurs and how they work together—“machine” doesn’t get at their crazy, Manu/Tony center (as Zach Harper pointed out this morning), and to describe them as something akin to the 7-seconds or less Suns (as Zach Lowe did in his wonderful piece on them today) unfortunately doesn’t capture enough of their immense discipline and their ability to move and pass simply as one determined mind on the basketball floor (Boris Diaw in a way managed to suggest this by calling them the 10-seconds or less Suns, a length of time that requires a little bit more regimentation and structure than anything seen in Phoenix).

Yet a quick and dirty solution presented itself to my mind: simply celebrate every single one of these men who played significant minutes in the playoffs and their amazing heroics.

So, here they are:

Tony Parker – Tony Parker is thoroughly in the “who is the best point guard in the NBA?” conversation.  I don’t think he ever quite wins it—Chris Paul is that good, both offensively and defensively—but to be in that conversation, in a league this stacked with unbelievable point guards, at his age, is an amazing feat, and his finals performance only puts him more in it.  If the Spurs’ ball movement was not enough to pick this Heat team (and all the others in the playoffs) to pieces, get it overworked and tired, his continual movement and the constant threat of his jumper utterly destroyed them from the inside.  His ability to scoop up the ball from any position, out the window and around the roof of hands above him, put it high on the backboard so it can’t be blocked, and make it fall, with a suspenseful bounce or two, dead on through the rim—it is simply unbelievable.  He combines the wilyness of Steve Nash, with a dash of the craziness of Manu, and the composure and poise of CP3 into a truly formidable mixture that carried this team through this series, and set them up on every possession that counted.  Even when he wasn’t able to hit his jumper, as was the case early in that final game last night, he was able to set the table for his teammates with efficiency with a relentless onslaught of passes and curls and kickouts that brought them back into the game.  He’s an essential component of this Spurs team, and nothing showed it more than his performance in this Playoffs this year, on a team that worked more in sync than ever.  That’s saying something.

Boris Diaw – Diaw was graceful, was brilliant.  He passed more and better than any other Spur except Manu, and Manu is Manuficent, and can’t be compared to.  He really came out this series.  He basically invented a new basketball physique: he is perfectly formed for everything that Shawn Marion does.  He dribbles the ball like a point guard (because he was one), has the same court vision of one, is a knockdown 3-point shooter, and yet can post up and bang inside for rebounds as well as any power forward, nay, center.  He confused defenders throughout the playoffs with his strange set of powers, and allowed the Spurs to run lineups that wouldn’t make sense without him on the floor to glue them all together.  Throughout this season, he maintained a sense of style and cool that has always set him apart as an NBA player, and made him so interesting and so complete as a person—able, thereby, to hold together a strange and interesting role and never conform to the multitude of stereotypes of styles that NBA players are pressed into becoming.  He’s the most unique and most interesting of characters.  He was, more than anyone, responsible for allowing this team to be able to strive for the ambitious flexibility it set out to achieve, and he is the biggest single, isolated reason why the team was even better than last year’s.

Kawhi Leonard – Kawhi Leonard thoroughly earned the Finals MVP.  He was the most valuable player in that series.  He is, in general, the only player besides Paul George that can guard LeBron James.  And, unlike Paul George, he also matched LeBron in this series offensively.  His disappearance in the first couple games was largely due to getting into foul trouble, on some rather tacky foul calls.  Charged, though, in the third game, with not disappearing, he stepped up offensively, and still kept up the unbelievable defense that simply has to be watched and rewatched to appreciate.  His intense work ethic delivered results: he proved to be a dominant jump shooter and three point bomber that the Heat had to contend with on every single possession he was on the floor, which spread it crucially and opened up plenty of room for them to do all their work.  And while aggressiveness is usually present in the form of wild charges to the hoop through isolation plays, what was amazing about Kawhi stepping it up was that it never took place through a play called for him—as Popovich attested—but simply emerged out of the flow of the offense.  It was, therefore a cool and calm and composed aggressiveness, an incredibly smart, intuitive aggressiveness, that seized the occasion whenever it came time and made sure to carry it through.  The thoroughness of Kawhi’s dominance was probably what earned him the MVP: every bit of it came out of an effort not only to seize chances but to carry them through, to push all the way until the job was done the best way it could be.  This was more apparent on his defense—even into the fifth game he was thinking his work against LeBron could be improved—but it also blossomed into his offense.  Finally, his ability to unite teammates in a coaching role around him was wonderful to see: he sticks at his job, and allows other people to coach and advise him in a way that brings a community of people together in the process of making things work more efficiently.  It’s a subtle form of leadership, almost like leading-from-behind, but it is there.  There’s no more interesting player to watch develop next year than Kawhi Leonard, so great was his performance this year.

Marco Belinelli – Marco Belinelli hit one of the more pivotal threes of the year for the Spurs.  He has yet to fit as snugly, perhaps, as some of the others into this Spurs team, and this led to some hesitation among the fans to trust him fully to do his role to the utmost.  But he nearly always came through when the backs of the Spurs were against the wall and they needed him badly.  That three turned the game around entirely, and his inconsistency in terms of output in general gave way to his consistency on the offensive end and a very respectable defensive effort.  He may actually have turned out to be the member of the Spurs who ground things out the most, who stuck with it when things turned against them.

Aron Baynes – Baynes simply destroyed the Blazers and the Thunder, leading the way to the Heat in this playoffs.  To tangle with Lopez, with Ibaka, and with Steven Adams was no small feat, and was a crucial part of winning those series.  He also converted in huge moments on offense—showing the creativity and resourcefulness that Splitter has developed to use the rim, to use fakes and footwork, to get the ball consistently into the basket.

Matt Bonner – Matt Bonner played a huge role for the Spurs in the playoffs.  And he spread the floor.  He also hit threes with incredible reliability.  Most impressively, though, he played solid defense.  Not quite built anymore, he was able to do a respectable job even against LeBron James when switched upon him and to make him work—which is more of an achievement than perhaps we want to admit.  And when there was an extra rotation to be made, or a piece of help to be given—such as on a Rashard Lewis three in game 4 in the corner, Bonner rushed there and challenged and got a hand up.  He was not so much impressive as consistent.  Superficial critics of his starting appearance against the Heat pointed to his lack of scoring as disappoint—but individual scoring stats in general are overrated, as this Spurs team showed the NBA, and in the end wasn’t as important to them as the reliability in everything else that he brought.

Patty Mills – Every Portland fan has a soft spot for Patty Cakes, and rues that he didn’t get enough time when he was here in the city, and was eventually let go.  God knows what that must have been like.  To come back, unchanged in his enthusiasm, even stronger in his determination and more consistent in his output, was a tremendous feat, and this year it came into fruition.  Patrick Mills throughout the year impressed continually while Tony Parker was out, and was a big part of carrying the team to its 62 regular season wins.  During the playoffs, he came off the bench and gave the team the fire that would carry it along, that made the team’s first string of bench support, essentially, as potent and as formidable as the starters.  He is also, clearly, the best teammate on any team in basketball, as well as one of the goofiest and most endearing.  But while this was clear last year, this year, he graduated to a different level of effectiveness, as this effort translated into extremely impressive plays on the court, and concentrated itself into crucial, clutch performances behind the three-point line.  He was invaluable to this team.

Danny Green – Danny Green, after one of the most memorable Finals games last year—the game of threes, with his and Gary Neal’s threes raining down on the Heat—made an even more memorable showing this year: nothing will look that spectacular, but everything about his presence was more important.  His five steals in in Miami were amazing, and his continual ability to rain threes when it counts, in the middle of coverage or in transition, was crucial to the Spurs success and carrying their momentum forward into the next play.  His presence in matchups that didn’t favor him was impressive: he forced Chalmers to pass across the court to Rashard Lewis rather than give the ball to Bosh right next to the basket because he was on him, and he tried to strip LeBron James enough that James had to think about what to do—he bought his team time, and allowed them to provide a wall of defense against the best player in the world thorough enough that they could stop him, more often than not, should he choose do drive to the hoop.  He stopped Dwayne Wade so many times it very clearly tired him out, as well.  In general, he provided the most defensively prominent presence on the court besides Kawhi: he was everywhere, he was doing everything, all the little gritty things that the Spurs needed to win.  He more than anyone did the disruptive work that was necessary not just to produce parity with the Heat but give them their thorough dominance.

Tiago Splitter – Tiago Splitter entirely redeemed himself.  Coming back with a big contract and lots of expectations and suspicion from fans after what seemed to many to be a questionable performance last year, he proved the believers right: he became an essential part of the Spurs defense over the course of the year and into the Playoffs, and, even more impressively, an offensive presence to be reckoned with.  How many amazing passes from Splitter to Diaw, from Splitter to Duncan, did we see this year, and during the playoffs?  Defensively, he was as essential as ever to the workings of the Spurs, and he came up with the most impressive block (besides LeBron’s amazing chasedown) last night in these playoffs, when he absolutely roofed Dwayne Wade at the rim.  This was a massive, massive moment of poetic justice that could have only been more fitting were it LeBron himself there getting stuffed, given what happened to him last—though he was too busy getting blocked by  didn’t really matter: LeBron blocking him right at the rim was humiliating, and to turn things around by stopping Wade so thoroughly surely made up for it.  That it was technically goaltending in fact doesn’t quite matter: what mattered about it was just how thoroughly Wade cowered before Splitter, withered underneath him, so formidable was his presence.  To be able to do that alone, to be able to command that sort of respect around the rim, by Dwayne Wade of all people, one of the best finishers in the NBA, was thoroughly amazing.  And Splitter did this to everyone in these playoffs—not just Wade: that’s what made it so impressive.  It only seemed to sum up how much of a presence he became on defense, and how savvy he was at all moments.  He also drew a bunch of fouls and hit his freethrows at huge moments for this Spurs team.  In general, he became more clutch, became better at rising to the occasion, when things were demanded of him.

Cory Joseph – Cory Joseph’s dunk against Serge Ibaka and the Thunder may simply have saved the Spurs’ season.  The preparation, the discipline of this Spurs team won them the championship, but it is not exaggerating to say that the Manu-esque throwdown, full of that crazy Patty-Mills-ish intensity, in that strange game against the Thunder where Pop pulled all the starters, reinvigorated the team, showed them of what they were capable.

Manu Ginobili – Manu proved himself this year to be quite simply the most thrilling player to watch in basketball.  LeBron James is the most amazing, most impressive, but nothing gets you more worked up and more carried away than when Manu does something.  He is, and has always been, the absolute knockdown argument against anyone claiming the Spurs are boring.  No team with Manu Ginobili could ever be boring.  On a team that passes beautifully, constantly, through traffic, inside the paint, everywhere and anywhere, he became the most prolific and the most amazing passer: he may well earn the title of the best passer in the NBA.  His pass in Game 1 was the highlight play of the night—this in the post-Sports-Center era where only dunks and blocks are genuinely considered highlights—and that tells you something: he’s able to change the conversation about what constitutes athleticism.  From the display of sheer brute physical force, we begin to think it involves something different: the display of an overpowering of force of will, in the most contorted, physically demanding postures possible.  Sport becomes, watching him, something less like greatness—the biggest and the best—and more like glory—the best thing to happen at the best possible time, what we will never forget.  Everything the man ever does is glorious, simply glorious, and this Finals was no exception to that statement.  In fact, it was more impressive, coming after his lackluster performance last season, which played a large part in leaving the Spurs vulnerable to a much more tenacious Heat team.  Unsure about what to do with his older body, he struggled to match his will with his strength.  It was unclear whether he was going to have to become a completely different player, a much more conservative one, in order to actually continue playing.  This year, however, he somehow made peace with himself, in such a way that brought him back to doing things no less incredible than ever.  It strangely involved taking more gambles than ever, really, but in an even smarter way: he would sprinkle more devastating and disruptive threes in there, and make longer, smoother, smarter passes than ever.  He would simply make less mistakes.  Everything he did this year seemed right: every bit of wildness he displayed this year seemed to come at the exact right moment—it wasn’t controlled, like we thought it might have to be, so much as even more intuitive.  He just became better at sensing when and where to trust to his own brilliance, the strange occult power he has to seize everything available in a moment that would lend itself to the unbelievable.  Manu is magical, there’s no better way to put it.

Tim Duncan – I saved the best for last.  Tim Duncan was, quite simply, brilliant in these playoffs.  Last year, embarrassed and frustrated by his many crucial mistakes during the finals (in Game 7 especially), Timmy came back this year focused, together, ignoring whatever rumors were around that said he was washed up and done, and played his heart out, averaging huge numbers in the playoffs and showing yet again that he can be the defensive anchor against the most formidable offensive threat in the league.  How many blocks did he have this playoffs?  Too many, for anyone else but him.  And it’s a testament to just how amazing he is as a physical being, how well and how thoroughly he has shaped himself into a historically effective hardwood soldier.  No one his age looks better than him, physically, on the court.  And he quite frankly puts people a decade younger to him to shame.  It isn’t the age, the simple physical specimen that is the most amazing though.  It is how his game has adapted and embraced a fast paced, absolutely ruthless style of basketball: he basically led the team into a completely new style of play by changing his body physically, its maneuvers mentally, and demonstrating to every one of the players underneath him the dedication that it took to actually make the new system work.  This wasn’t the work of just one season, but of several, three or four in particular—and it involved a discipline and a quiet, wry, insistent charisma that was cultivated throughout an entire life in basketball and athletics.  He cultivated, himself, a post-passing ability that rivaled his outlet-passing ability, which was simply second to none.  He learned how to hit jump shots, to not rely upon the glass.  Last night, he hit a turnaround fade towards the baseline without even touching the rim, which would have been a challenge to him early in his career: for anyone else in the league playing his position, it would have been a risky shot, but because Duncan was taking it, you knew it was going in.  He’s that reliable, he’s that dedicated, he’s that efficient, he’s that relentless as a competitor.  There aren’t enough words to describe how amazing Duncan is as an athlete, and as an example of a complete human being: he not only shows up Kobe Bryant definitively with this fifth championship in terms of career achievements, he definitively proves himself to be the best single basketball player since the era of Michael Jordan.  That Duncan couldn’t care less about these accolades only makes them more clearly his own.  There’s been nothing better than Duncan for this team, for this franchise; there actually is a good chance that there may never be anything better than him for the NBA as a whole.  He is that good, and he has given that much to basketball, by himself, and through this comrades.  In the end, he has built, with his coach, a team in which each member can perform heroic tasks, and has to be described like a hero.  I honestly don’t think there’s anything better that can be said of a player, or a team, than that.  And while the team he lead may not have been the very best team possible, it is certainly one of the all-time most heroic teams: there may be more effective teams in history, but there won’t be many that are more full of feats of continual, consistent, extraordinary brilliance than this one.  The 2013-14 Spurs were a team to remember, a team that won’t be soon forgotten.

Game 4 recap: What the Spurs and Heat leave us with

Tony Parker drives inside and underneath, then slips the ball out to Patty Mills, who has drifted down to the corner.  Mills is open, his hands ready.  Parker, under the basket and carried out of bounds, sidles up near the hoopstand then skips a little to his left, out away towards the wing he came from and far away from Parker, already leaking back towards the fast break and opening up the lane.

In the lane is where Tim Duncan has been for the majority of this possession.  After slipping a screen for Ginobili, who passed the ball to Mills, who swung it to Parker, who made his drive—after this screen Duncan fell towards the baseline, moving between the left elbow and the left block and opening up his body to show for the ball, and then parked himself comfortably on the left block.  But as soon as the ball crossed over to Mills in the corner, Duncan turns his body in the opposite direction, pivoting around and moving backwards square into the body of Bosh, who has gone over to block Parker’s shot.  It’s like Bosh had a target on him.  He’s the only player over 6’8 on the floor, and Duncan hits him right in the chest with his back, pins his left arm behind him, and backs him out of the paint.

Space also opens up in the lane because Manu Ginobili, on the other side, has darted in front of Dwayne Wade, after shoveling the ball to Mills, who swung it to Parker.  As soon as Parker leaves his feet to sling the ball  back over to Mills, he slides in front of Wade and puts a body between him and the basket at the left block.

There’s been much talk of how the Heat were lazy on this play, watched the ball, didn’t box out.  But Kawhi Leonard, who speeds down through the open lane, grabs the rebound for the most spectacular putback dunk of the playoffs and perhaps the whole season, also found his way there because every single Spur was doing what he needed to do, to a T, to make it happen.

If the Spurs win the Finals tonight, as they seem poised to do, it is because of this sort of sheer determination by every single one of the players to get the small things exactly right, all of the time.  After every game, this has been their refrain: we got to keep doing all the small things right.  While Erik Spoelstra talks excellently and eloquently to his team about focusing, about grinding, about executing, everything we hear from Popovich—and while we do not hear much, really, but the difference in what we do hear is telling—is about boxing out, about getting a loose ball, about running towards the chest of the defender, about getting the next rebound, about putting in five minutes of effort.  We talk about the Spurs as a machine, but the Heat use a vocabulary to describe themselves that is more process-based, that emphasizes abstract and vague mechanical workings.  The Spurs talk about concrete, definite, extremely small and extremely precise objectives, and attaining them every single possession.

Playing on this level, in an almost uncanny state of communion with the exact requirements of the moment, the instant, is indeed the only way they could put on the spectacular display they do.  So much work goes into every single use of the ball, so much effort risks being wasted through extra cuts, extra screens, extra passes which don’t go anywhere, that we begin to think that the question the Spurs ask themselves continually is not, “what extra work do I need to do to make the right move here,” but, “why would anyone ever do anything less than the right move?”

And that is the question they leave us with, ultimately: why would we ever want to do anything less than what is exactly demanded by the moment?  Why would we respond with anything less than full effort?  The answer is supplied by the Heat, who now have left themselves in the position of having to make history to come back from their 3-1 deficit—something no one has done: namely, to risk saving up that extra something for efforts that are more than what is required, that are exceptional and great and frankly unbelievable.  To not just respond, but to make a statement.  This, however, risks dismissing the fact that responses to what the situation demands are statements also, and that to be able to put in effort in the here and now, may be really also the only way to achieve as much as the Spurs have in the long term, to achieve something historic.

Game 4 recap: on the Heat's "extra gear"

Erik Spoelstra said after the fourth game of the NBA Finals on Thursday that he would be “checking under the hood” of this Heat team, to try and see what could be fixed.

Maybe he’ll find that something in the gearbox was missing.

We all hear about the Heat’s “other gear.”  The metaphor is used loosely, but it’s meaning is clear.  The Heat possess something that steps up their game when the time calls for it.  That raises their top speed, that allows them to move faster.  The other gear is what allows the team to coast along the smooth wide roads of the regular season, and then, when they hit the highway of the playoffs, to speed up, shift, and blow by the other traffic. 

In the 107-86 Spurs victory, there was no evidence of any other gear there.  The team seemed merely to be clanking along.

Something of the same thing happened in Game 3, as San Antonio blew out the Heat 111-92.  But because the Spurs played so exceptionally well, and because the Heat were able to mount something of a comeback—nothing like an “extra gear” performance by any means, just a solid, determined effort to grind away at the lead and reduce it—it wasn’t clear whether the Heat’s inability to challenge them was a fluke thing or not.

But after an hour and twenty minutes of looking at film of the Spurs’ miraculous performance, and their own failure to keep up, we would expect the Heat to have come out in Game 4 at least with some better sense of what to do to make the Spurs work for what came to them so easily in that third game.

Instead, they played almost the exact same way: sloppy on defense, tired on offense, not finding open players, making bad decisions.  “I was surprised,” Spoelstra said.

He may well be surprised because what he thought was always there, and what was always there for the Heat, didn’t seem to show up.  It’s a real possibility the “extra gear” the Heat rely upon so thoroughly, and which is supposed to bring higher levels of performance out of them, isn’t there.

Indeed, it becomes dubious as to whether the intense effort that they used to step up their game ever constituted anything like an extra gear in the first place.  The better metaphor might have been something like putting nitrous oxide in the fuel supply.  The Heat’s inner workings may well not be designed around the presence of some special and separate level of performance so much as simply given a boost from outside additives that increase the pressure and make things run faster.

The Heat play an extremely difficult brand of defense (as Grantland's netw3rk pointed out well), as well as an extremely tasking brand of offense.  The fuel needed to speed it up, to make it work better, doesn’t come from it’s inner workings, the way it is schemed, the way it is run.  The Heat’s defense, when it is playing better, simply goes harder: the “blitz” that they use on the pick and roll play, for example, can work efficiently enough through its mere aggressiveness as a ploy.  It becomes better, it goes to another level when it is done with extra focus and added intensity—not when anything crucial or strategic about it is changed.  Offensively, their isolation plays create through constant, focused improvisation, and only becomes better by simply working more intensely: when LeBron, that is, or Wade, begin to simply play harder.

In a way, understanding how they work this way, makes their achievements more impressive.  They almost reached through their effort a level of efficiency that made us suspect the whole vehicle was set up differently than we thought it was, internally, on the inside.  They played so hard that whole vehicle in general almost turned into a differently configured machine than the one we saw during the season.

It makes their achievement last season in particular quite amazing, really: the suggestions floating around which LeBron James is worried about—that the Heat didn’t really win it, but got lucky—are all the more baseless (and not just because luck is part of the game and doesn’t invalidate anything in it when it falls one way or the other).  They played with such effort that things which happened because of the intense pressure they put upon themselves looked like opportunities only the most fortunate could have for themselves.

Even more than that, though, understanding them this way doesn’t give credence to the notion that because the Heat are simply worn out, they don’t “really” want the championship in the same way they did before—because if they did, they would switch it into that extra gear, presumably.  This is something that has been insinuated in all this talk of the “gear” in general, and put in franker and different terms by Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy during the Game 4 broadcast, and their hounding of the Heat to “want it more.”  The Heat may indeed be bringing the extra intensity that won the championship last year.  It is just that, because this doesn’t make them into a different machine, but the same one only moreso, it can be beat by greater intensity.

Against a team that knows the workings of their machine inside and out like the Spurs, that has reverse engineered them over and over again, and that can pick them apart with a tinkerer’s precision, it becomes clear that the difference involved in the “extra gear” is simply one of intensity, not of kind—of quantity, not quality.  Because if the Spurs play with extra levels of intensity and effort—as they indeed are in this series—they can completely counteract everything the Heat can throw at them.   It just involves picking them apart more swiftly, thoroughly, ruthlessly.  And that is exactly what they did to them in Game 4.

So why did we think that the Heat’s “extra gear” existed in the first place?  Perhaps because the inner motivation that makes a player simply, frankly, merely play harder is quite opaque to us.  “Wanting it more” is a strange and almost empty notion: if we have a desire, it motivates us.  It’s that simple.  To want the thing more, doesn’t really alter the nature of the desire—unless this makes it another desire.  Also, to want something means wanting it practically, wanting it in a way that can translate into action—not disappearing into the realm of magical thinking where we think it can be gotten just merely because of the intensity of our want.  And if everything you are doing is indeed translating into action and effort, it is hard to see where further effort can be put in.

With all that being the case, it may just be easier to think that the Heat aren’t trying at the limit of their efforts, but actually just fiddling with the gearstick when they want, and becoming whatever they want to be.  What’s clear is that if any of the Heat themselves share this conception of their efforts, the Spurs surely are disabusing them of it pretty thoroughly.  Through this championship series, in other words, the Heat may finally learn how to appreciate their history of intensity and effort a little more than they already do.  It would be however sad to have to learn it through such thorough, crushing defeat.

Spurs reach basketball equivalent of nirvana: NBA Finals Game 3 Recap and Analysis

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Weekend Review - Expecting the best and seeing the right kind, or: witnessing Jordan and discovering Timmy, Tony, and Manu

After a day off yesterday, I think I decided Sunday should be something like a week in review—some of the best pieces I found myself reading during the week, rather than another day of news and selections.  How’s that sound?  Good? Okay then:

SBNation simply had a huge amount of great content this week, with two really great articles to which I want to draw attention.

The first was Doug Eberhardt’s must read guide to NBA screens.  It’s helpful as a guide—along with his mid-April article on the various ways NBA teams defend the pick and roll.  But it’s also helpful for the tone in which it is discussing the intricacies of basketball.  It’s a progressive tone.  It’s a tone that is on the lookout for novelty.  It looks at what’s happening, and goes, hey maybe we’re all wrong in looking at this and comparing it to what we already know: something new is here, let’s make sense of it.  And it reminds us that it is possible to see these things from a more conservative angle too, and why that doesn’t tell us anything:

“I always hear that NBA players just don't know how to set a solid screen anymore. A lack of old-school fundamentals, they say. Damn that AAU basketball!” Eberthardt says.  “In reality, the nature of setting screens has changed along with the style of NBA offenses.”

As he explains: "you don't always want to stop the on-ball defender. Sometimes, you want to force the defender to actually get over the screen and trigger the rest of the defense to react to your action. Rather than a lower-value medium-range jumper, you want to end up with a strong roll to the rim, a free throw, a pop for a jumper or a drive-and-kick pass for an uncontested three. Points per possession, kids."

That last remark is an invocation of “analytics,” but the division between a progressive and conservative look at basketball goes deeper than that and moves along different lines.  I have the suspicion that in many ways what is being talked about when analytics is invoked is one which trusts in the skill of the NBA player and is comfortable with ignorance in the face of it.  Instead of explaining things in terms of expectations based on experience, it analogizes to past experience in order to ask whether we might generate new expectations—whether we can expect anything new from what is happening.

Of course you need both approaches.  But it’s helpful to analyze from a position that understands that the NBA is a black-box: we don’t know what’s inside it unless we talk about it from the inside.  We can try and open it—by talking to former-players-become-analysts, being on the beat and getting inside scoops, or by analysis of stats—but the important thing to remember is sometimes we don’t need to open it to speculate on what is being done.  We don’t need to know the intentions behind a strategy to understand what the strategy does.  That’s the perspective with which this article views its subject (though the intricacies and details themselves came to be known through from Eberhardt's experience and his more intimate, inside view of NBA coaching), and it’s the perspective from which it teaches readers about strategy.

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I bring all this up because the other article that was rewarding to read this week revolved around it also.  David Roth also at SBNation wrote an amazing piece trying to appreciate the Spurs, and to explain why he never did appreciate them.  He explains his relationship to the Spurs as a form of growing up, of, in a way, learning how to watch the game observantly.

It is a piece trying to put the nail in the coffin of “the Spurs are boring” argument, by saying this is an immature way to judge them.  He says that, as a kid, he used to cheer for the Nets and their very individualistic team, rooting for them to do more and more amazing individual feats.  Accordingly, he hated the Spurs precisely for their consistency.

He didn’t envy Spurs fans: he had a blast rooting for a team that wasn’t really as team-centered.  But… "But while it served its purpose," he goes on to say, "I missed a great many things by making this team so thoroughly my own and myself so thoroughly its. I told myself lies about Derrick Coleman's potential, and I made Kenny Anderson into something he couldn't possibly have been. I saw Michael Jordan play at his very best and did nothing but curse the slack, goofy, inevitably-overmatched Chris Morris for not being able to stop him. I screamed myself blind. I was a fan, forgive me. I was not nearly grown."

Essentially what he’s explaining is what I’m trying to say about evaluating without expectations.  I myself wouldn’t call that view childish, or exempt professions (non-fans) from it.  But it is a great statement about how that view is blinkered.  And it is apt because it also points to the possible origin of that more demanding, more close-minded analytic approach.

For the mention of Jordan isn’t coincidental.  I’m currently making my way through Roland Lazenby’s wonderful new life of Michael Jordan, and one thing I find myself wondering is whether watching basketball can ever be the same after seeing him challenge opponents like he did with Chris Morris here.
That is, I find myself wondering about his effect on the game—and whether it was good.  One thing that wasn’t, I’m speculating, may have been what it did to us watching them.  He taught us to expect more.  To raise our expectations higher of what a basketball player can do.  And to look at other players as insufficient performers, as people—quite simply—you should ask more from.

It’s not Jordan’s fault he accomplished this, if this is so.  And it couldn’t be intentional, though it surely also came out of the immense drive that motivated him.  We might say he introduced into the analysis and evaluation of basketball a quantitative idea of qualitative excellence: the idea that the best is the most perfect.  This would be opposed to the right kind of perfect: a purely qualitative idea, a holism.  And in a way our fascination with the former may have blinded us to the latter.

This might be a typically “soft” approach to basketball, one that enjoys the “new” NBA and analyzing with “analytics” rather than on guts and the eye-test and memories of the Bad Boys and Bird (for the record, I’m actually quite a believer in the eye-test as the only real test, but that’s for another day).  It’s the view that would see holes in what Jordan does, that would see something wrong with his game, and that ultimately wants to say other people are better than him—people like Lebron.

In truth, I’m probably more of the school of Bill Simmons (on this point, at least), who spends pages and pages precisely saying that we can’t go down these lines, and compare Lebron to Jordan: that Jordan is the best, the most perfect, that we’ll never again see anything like him.  But I also think that in a way all this does is say that the most perfect is the most perfect, when there are also other kinds of perfect—the kinds that are the right kind at the right moment.  Jordan, in short, won the entire game of basketball.  But perhaps—here’d be the furthest reach of this argument—he also was only the right kind of perfect for the right moment.

If that’s the case, then it’s possible also to appreciate the Spurs, right now, as the best.  Because we wouldn’t be expecting more than our previous notions of the best from them, so much as simply looking for what they do.  "Some of these players did more than others," Roth says, "but the defining characteristic of the various and oddly-similar championship teams on which they [the Spurs players] played was that none were asked to do things they could not do. This was true of the team's stars, too, who could of course do so much more."

We wouldn’t be evaluating with expectations: we wouldn't be asking them to do anything more than what they do either.  Instead, we might be participating in a kind of discovery of new things to do with a ball and a hoop.

And yet, this is also ultimately what I find a little problematic about what Roth goes on to say: because he doesn’t quite go on to say what is so right right now about this kind of basketball, what makes it a new and appropriate kind of excellence for this moment, and within the history of the game.

"The Spurs have not changed,” Roth says, "and that is the essence of what makes and keeps them great. They have found a way to do things that work well and maintained the humility to work that way for a shared end. For all the reasons we might watch a game, this more modest transcendence -- individuals into a whole, faith in a process made legible and even beautiful -- is not nearly the most vivid."

That’s true, but it would seem from what he says that it’s a tradeoff between the amount of excellence we can see in a player, and the type of excellence the Spurs display.  That it isn't a bad thing to leave the one behind and go on to understand and appreciate the other, just as growing up isn't a bad thing.  It’s the difference, as he'd more particularly characterize it, between rooting for best that an individual can accomplish, and merely appreciating the beauty of what a team does—team basketball.

But it feels less like holism and maturity than a sweet fondness, a different kind of fandom (one better than a thousand analyses): it's an evaluation that hasn't come to its end yet, that is waiting for an even better way to explain how good they are.  Because it’s not true that the Spurs haven’t changed.  What is most impressive about these Spurs, and what makes their basketball so interesting, is their adaptability, is their immense flexibility.  It is, in other words, the sort of ability to how players can "fit" which Roth points out, only with the flip side of this acknowledged: that it is also ability to expand into new dimensions as a unit, to do new and weird things.

This would be the area to expand upon if we were really to try and see what is right about this team; it seems not only to prove the excellence Jordan’s era gave us as something that blinded us to what the Spurs have been so good at doing, but also to show what they have been doing is something precise that they are supremely, historically excellent at.

It's hard to stay together: Spurs vs Thunder Game 2 recap

Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker became the winningest teammate trio in NBA playoff history last night, with the San Antonio Spurs' 112 to 77 defeat of the Oklahoma City Thunder.  San Antonio's "Big Three" surpassed the 110 total playoff victories shared between Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Michael Cooper  from 1980 to 1988.  Parker led the group with 22 points and 5 assists, Duncan followed with 14 points and 12 rebounds, and Ginobili contributed with 11 points and 4 assists coming off the bench.

Much of the scoring that led to the win came from a different, but equally impressive component in the Spurs offense: guard Danny Green, who shot 7-10 from the three point line, and eventually put up 21 points.  Green was quick to attribute much of the credit for his impressive performance to his teammates and the longtime center of the Spurs triad, Tim Duncan.  "When I'm running down the court," Green says, "I'll hear Tim yell 'Light it!' or something similar...and that gives me a little more confidence to take the shot, because I already know he's behind me."

Green hit one three in the first quarter pulling up out of a fast break.  It would set the dominant tone the Spurs would have all night, and was followed, in the second quarter, by two more.

Crucial to the continuous pressure San Antonio put upon the Oklahoma city was their defense of the Thunder's Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant, who were held to a meager combined total of 30 points.  Westbrook was 7-24 shooting for 15 points, while Durant went 6-16, and 0-4 from the 3 point line.

Their struggles, however, may have come less from their inability to do the work of scoring themselves, than the complete lack of scoring by anyone else on the team.  This was no more evident than in the second and third quarters, in which Durant and Westbrook scored every single one the team's baskets from 8:04 in the second, to 4:29 in the third: that is, for over 12 straight minutes.  This ensured Oklahoma City would fail to mount anything similar to the comeback they had in the last game in this period of time.

The only other figure to score in double figures for the Thunder was Jeremy Lamb, who (except for a minute-long contribution in the first quarter) was brought in along with many of the other Thunder bench players for most of the fourth quarter to finish out the game.  He scored 13 points, going 6-8 from the field, and came up with two steals.

The Thunder will now travel back to Oklahoma City for Games 3 and 4 of the series, though going down 0-2 makes their situation much more dire.  At the same time, they face a Spurs team that is looking like one of the most cooperative teams in NBA history.  Looking ahead to Game 3, Durant pointed out the very different situation his own team now faced, which would seem to require something of their opponent's unbreakable integrity.  "With a big loss, like that, and two games in a row, it's hard to stay positive.  It's hard to stay together," Durant said.

Let's get physical: Thunder vs Spurs Game 1 Recap, Game 2 Preview

Oklahoma City, meet Kawhi Leonard, aka DEATH

So after watching Game 1 between OKC and San Antonio live, I went back to it and looked at the tape.  I was confused, I was befuddled.  Overall it was a simple standard Spurs-dismantle-whatever-opponent-they-are-facing night.  But there were some twists to it that led to some questions as to how it happened and what kind of domination it was.

First, was it the general effectivity of the Spurs offense (ball movement, spacing) or the individual matchups (Kawhi and Baynes, say) that produced this result?  What led to the Spurs’ domination in the paint in the beginning of the game besides the lack of an Ibaka on the court?  What was OKC actually trying to do this game—what was their game plan?  Why were there so many OKC lineups that we saw?  Were the Spurs more destructive in the first or the second quarter?  What caused that run by OKC in the third quarter?  How did Pop stop the bleeding (not Collison’s, but the Spurs’).  Why couldn’t OKC make a run in the fourth?  Were the Thunder really as rattled as they looked?  Were the Spurs as in control as they looked?

In particular what was bothering me was whatever the hell the Thunder were doing for just about the entire first quarter.  They looked completely out of sorts.  The score (which was Spurs 30, OKC 27 at the end of the quarter) gave no indication as to just how wild OKC seemed, and how consistent and efficient the Spurs looked.  This continued into the second quarter, really, even as they stayed close: when Derek Fisher is keeping you in the game with his strange random threes, you’re in trouble.  Watching every possession for OKC gave me a queasy feeling: it was like watching water torture.  You were just waiting for something to break—and when it didn’t, you weren’t relieved so much as amazed that the inevitable was held back a little. …Not that I’ve ever seen any water torture before.  Just… well… you get what I mean.

A look back revealed this:

That’s Kevin Durant getting a high screen to space the top of the key and get Leonard off of him.  Two people are deep in the corners—Collison and Sefalosha—and Westbrook is at the wing there to mess up the coverage by forcing Parker to either commit to help or to cover him and give up the pass to the corner.  What Durant does next is dribble the ball with his patented trans-continental crossover, fakes to get the recovering Leonard into the air and neutralize his threat to the upcoming pass, and dishes the ball to Collison for the three.

What happened next has to be symbolic in some way, though I’m not quite sure how yet.  Collison takes forever to get his shot off, Splitter dashes to the corner and gets a hand near him, and Collison misses by five miles, hitting the side of the backboard.  The ball floats down gently after chilling in the sofa-like backboard pads for a moment and lands in Danny Green’s hands and the Spurs return to offense.  (That’s what it felt like: the Spurs didn’t “go back on” offense, they simply “returned” to it, as if it was something that the distraction of OKC’s offense just kept them from doing for a couple seconds.)

They did this on about four or five possessions in the first quarter until Westbrook got impatient with it not working and began calling plays pick-and-roll with himself involved—a good strategy too but one that would have worked better had the previous one succeeded.  The aim seems to have been to spread the floor and open the paint, as well as to hold onto the ball—that is, not give the Spurs any chance to pick off passes or bother any excess dribbling.

Unfortunately that is still exactly what happened.  It was more pronounced in the second half, when they made more baseline cuts and Leonard swatted a few balls away and then ran the fast break.  But this was already happening in the first quarter too:

Essentially the Spurs countered everything about this strategy by challenging passes well and forcing people like Collison and Butler and Fisher to freeze when they got the ball and just put up long shots.

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Now, to everyone who said, after seeing all this, that the Thunder are done without Ibaka, and that Brooks doesn’t know what to do now—I include myself in that overzealous category—that’s not a horrible strategy to come out with, given the setback.  It gives up offensive rebounds entirely (which they weren’t going to get without Ibaka anyway) and lets everyone get back on defense.  The alternative—having Durant or Westbrook go to the basket, or depend on baseline cuts, as OKC is wont to do—would lead to Tony Parker absolutely destroying them possession after possession on the fast break (it also probably would have forced OKC to start Adams instead of Perkins, which they have been reluctant to do for some reason).

Granted, it’s a little odd, given that the Spurs are one of the best teams at three-point defense, and have a defensive scheme and policy that very effectively deals with the corner-three.  But the Spurs are good at everything defensively and the point is just to try and get something going against them, not find any hole in their schemes—since they don’t exist.  If they can get something, anything like what happens here, involving some ball movement, they may have a chance to keep the floor spread:

In short, it was not a horrible thing to start with, and shows we slightly underestimate Scott Brooks here.  As Matt Moore recently pointed out, he’s a great on-the-ground strategist, rather than a big-game planner or a micromanaging play-drawer.  He works well on the middle scale of things.  This is exactly the sort of thing we should have expected him to do, and it wasn’t horrible.  It just wasn’t effective.

And it was entirely typical of Brooks to do what he then did, and which was equally ineffective: instead of abandoning the strategy he changed lineups.  This initially seemed to be because of defense, but the lineup that came out seemed to favor a smaller offensive threat as well.  Which brings us to the question of small-ball.  What’s easy to forget about this is that it doesn’t actually get around the Ibaka-problem at all, really, so much as plunge one directly into it.  Everyone seems to be talking as if going small will help the Thunder since they can’t get anything with Ibaka going.  But in truth Ibaka was essential to their small ball at the center.  In many ways, they have to find some other way of running this offense as well.

Out of the first timeout Westbrook simply ran a pick and roll with KD, and this might be their best strategy, in the end: that’s an entirely unguardable pick-and-roll in itself, and if the Spurs are anywhere near late on the help in the middle, it’s two quick points for Westbrook.  Of course, again, they are amazing at that particular help: people have been pointing to just how many points the Spurs made in the paint (over 60), but what’s also remarkable is just how few they gave away to the Thunder.

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This brings us to the other amazing thing I saw last night: the Spurs defense.  It wasn’t as crushing as it has been in other games, but it came through big more than enough to shut down the Thunder when it counted.  Everyone talks about how great and efficient the Spurs are on offense, but on defense is where they really shine.  If you do not execute perfectly, they make you pay.  Any slip-up and you’ll find yourself watching them kiss the ball gently off the backboard at the other end of the court from the turnover they just forced from you.  Everyone talks about how they pass the ball—what is almost more impressive is how they force you to pass the ball where they want it to be passed, and where it will be easily taken away from you.

Above all, what was interesting was the physicality.  This is an OKC team that prides itself on its physical presence on the court, and yet continually San Antonio was playing with a defensive intensity that they actually ended up winning that battle. Watching them, what I realized is that there are simply more kinds of "physicality" than we like to admit.  While the Spurs may not be physical in the sense of being aggressive, they simply know how to endure and keep up the pressure.  Diaw gets hit in the eye by Adams.  He goes and sees the doctor, then just gets back on the court and plays big minutes.  Then later he goes to the hoop and gets hit on the back of the head by Westbrook.  He gets up and takes the free throws.  Then Kawhi gets up in Durant’s grill and takes an elbow from him right to the temple.  This doesn’t faze him.  He literally doesn't step back but in fact gets closer on defense.  This is not agressiveness, but it is physical nonetheless.  While they don’t dominate, they slowly constrict around you with their physical pressure and squeeze the life out of you, like one of Danny Green’s snakes:

The answer to the question of why exactly the Thunder were able to make a third quarter run lies somewhere around here, however.  The only time the Spurs distinctly let up this brand of physicality was in the third quarter.  The lack of anything that would physically stop Westbrook or anyone who came into the paint was thoroughly apparent.  While the Spurs continued to cover the three point line well, they simply just let too many drives to the basket through.  For their part, OKC started playing good in the middle here, using a bigger lineup, and they started making stops.  Most importantly, Westbrook played brilliantly.  As soon as he got the ball, he would look downcourt to find Tony Parker there.  And as soon as he spotted him, you could nearly see Parker turn into a big juicy T-bone steak before his eyes.  Over and over again neither Diaw nor Baynes could get quite the angle they needed to help, and so Parker was left alone facing Westbrook on several possessions when what Westbrook needed to be facing was the usual wall of San Antonio arms that they put in his face.  Credit Westbrook for this—who is a genius at getting to the basket: he got a good enough angle consistently to just pressure the defense enough that they couldn’t get enough of a physical presence in front of him in transition.  But what it also did is restore the effectiveness of KD, who needs a physical team to create enough space and fatigue for him to have room to shoot.  KD is a physical player indirectly speaking: he himself may not totally play the most physical style of ball, but surrounding him there will sprout up a huge network of bruisers that make him absolutely deadly.  Take that away, and it becomes harder for him to do his thing.

Appropriately, as soon as the Spurs came back physically--through a combination of making more shots and taking more time with the ball, bullying and tiring out OKC on offense through tough pick and rolls using Baynes, and basically slowing the game down so that the fast break became more high-risk to push—OKC was shut down.  By the fourth quarter, we were seeing a half-court game again and actually a quite imposing physical presence on the court from San Antonio.

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So what can we expect from the Game tonight?  It's hard to say.  Judging from everything here we've seen in the last game, more crazy lineups from Brooks, more physicality to counter the physical nature of the Spurs--expect much more Collison bleeding, but also expect more of that big lineup--and also more of that KD-Russ pick and roll, I think, whenever the going gets tough.  Expect too, I think, more shots from Westbrook.  He is willing this team into competition with a better opponent, and I don't see any reason for him to stop pushing the intensity and become suddenly more of a distributor.  And expect more Adams, because Perkins had a horrible game, got too many fouls, looked winded and out of shape, and couldn't do anything more than his role required to try and help compensate for Ibaka.  And from the Spurs, well, I think you will see more of Baynes and Manu doing this:

Once the Spurs began running these pick and rolls, control shifted back into the hands of the Spurs: Manu got involved, the load could shift off of Parker, and everything began to flow.  Also, strategically, it just means death for OKC: the Baynes-Ginobili pick and roll is a particularly beautiful pick and roll to watch because there are just so many options that come out of it. Because OKC lacks Ibaka, Ginobili can let his passing genius take over, and effectively turn Baynes from someone making a mere roll into a crafty cutter, as in the above.  Or he can do his Manu stuff and take the ball to the hoop himself with Baynes taking Adams out of the middle and using his body to slow up any help:

Baynes’ screens in general are a thing of beauty: he always makes a cut in some other direction to get the defender off of him even before he runs to set the screen.

Another thing I think we might see is even more of this:

There's no incentive for San Antonio to push the ball, but I feel like Green is due for an even bigger game and the OKC defense is going to try and stop bleeding points in the paint like they did last game--at least early on.  This means many threes will be open, and the clip above shows just how quick he can get them up.  The man's balance is an amazing thing--however much OKC will pressure him, he will be able to get a good shot off.

Above all, I think we'll see an even more physical game from San Antonio.  People will be diving for balls, sticking arms out, and especially making sure the paint is absolutely covered.  Any time there is small ball from OKC, they will--as they did in the last game--simply go at Reggie Jackson on the block and destroy him (Diaw and Kawhi both ended up being posted up by him and absolutely taking away anything he could do to counter).  Look at that gif at the beginning of this article: that's the kind of hustle, concentration, focus you're going to be seeing  much more of tonight.

Morning Roundup, May 20, 2014: Shameful extroversion, DiaOWW, terrifying complex organisms, Hibbert a PR genius?

Danny Green's shameful display of extroversion courtesy of Hardwood Paroxysm

Well, it's morning in Hawaii still, I think.  Got around to this a little later than I wanted to.  Will be a bit smaller than usual, hopefully, because I got a lot of other content to put up here (game recap, that analysis of The Hand article I promised yesterday, plenty of gifs), but here you go:

Trevor Zickgraf at 48MinutesofHell has a wonderful collection of the twitter comments as the game unfolded last night.  There were several discursive regularities the debate in the public sphere raged on, and out of this the collective will of the citizenry expressed itself in a few consensus-built proposals.  They were: That Serge Ibaka's absence from this series will make it a sweep.  That Danny Green's ta-da pose (see above, and also the shot, which deserved such a reaction) signals the immanent corruption of Spurs internal culture, and leads one to speculate their atrocious lack of discipline, if it continues, may threaten to doom the franchise.  That Boris DiaOWWW's eyeball is made of adamantine, since it was apparently strong enough to withstand Steven Adams trying to gouge it out with his massive steamshovel fingers.  That Aron Baynes is the best person on the planet.  That small ball doesn't work for OKC. That Charles Barkley doesn't know what the hell he is talking about, as usual.  That Tim Duncan in the postgame continues to make fashion statements that would make Russell Westbrook blush.

J.A. Adande has the leader of the day (well, sorta yesterday, but I'm counting it as today) at ESPN.com: "We've been suckered by the San Antonio Spurs. We spend so much time hammering on the "Team, team, team" concept that they preach that we forget they can present some hellacious individual matchups."  His great article explains how this 2013-14 Spurs team is far from being the team-centered sort of "machine" we all talk about--something I myself have been harping on continually this year to friends until I was blue in the face (thank you, Grant, for getting me to the emergency room all those times).  The truth is it is full of players who are so good at what they do, in so many ways, that they produce huge matchup problems.  The team concept produces the roles for the individuals, and the individuals that fit the roles become something better than the team concept.  Ken Berger's great, thorough article in April got at just how productive this "adaptability" of the Spurs is for the development of individual talent.  You heard it here first, folks: the right metaphor for the Spurs system is not a "machine," but something more along the lines of a complex organism.  It's less like a machine than one of those transcendent freaking self-aware blobs that will eventually become our overlords.  Specifically, in one aspect: individual elements produce fields of action within which the individual effort becomes more effective than if it were working by itself.  Then, in turn, its collective contribution then becomes through feedback more than the individual actually could produce.  The upshot?  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Harvey Araton in the New York Times has a nice good article on how Hibbert is "stabilizing" the Pacers, not unlike what Tom Ziller said yesterday.  Except this dwells on his "sensitivity."  There are some good quotes: "He wants to be a guy we depend on," David West tells Araton.  This is significant, coming from West--who really is the guy the Pacers actually depend on.  That "wants" contains a lot of ambiguity.  It's interesting to speculate on whether West thinks Hibbert has actually become that guy yet in a positive sense.  Because in a negative sense, it's certainly come true: essentially, the Pacers now do depend on Hibbert, in the sense that if he doesn't show up, they don't win games.  Maybe threatening the team in this way, was ultimately Hibbert's only way of really sort of attaining something of that role.  Obviously this wouldn't be conscious--it's just the fact that sometimes human behavior takes a pattern whereby it gets a result along lines that in retrospect look like they achieve their goals less directly than indirectly.  Of course, that hurts his career in the future, but for now, it definitely secures for him what he wants.  This, however, contributes to a stranger impression you get after reading the piece and thinking about the whole arc of the Hibbert story, and comparing the attention Hibbert is now getting to the relative lack of attention that Paul George--by far their most essential player--receives.  At the beginning of this whole situation, some writers noticed that it was Hibbert who was becoming the scapegoat of the team, and speculated this was because of something unfair.  But maybe it was sought out (mostly unconsciously, of course).  Because in the end, by doing so he also risked something that George didn't risk: namely, the glory of ending up being the "savior" of the team.  George puts up 20-30 a night semi-consistently now and we don't say a word: he is averaging the highest field goal percentage and (in so many games this has been crucial) the highest three-point percentage of his career in the playoffs (44% and 42%, per Basketbal-reference.com); in the Washington series he put up 18, 11, 23, 39, 15, and 12 points, and in the first game against the Heat he had 24, together with 4 rebounds and 7 assists; he has been positive in the plus-minus category in 10 out of the 14 playoff games played already--not too bad given how cruddy things have been.  Hibbert puts up 10 and we freak out.  It's the wrong sort of risk to take, morally speaking, but it was a risk nonetheless that George didn't dabble with.  And now Hibbert seems to be reaping the rewards from it, becoming the "erratic" team's stabilizer.

Spurs Crush Thunder 122-105

I'll have an analysis and look back at the game after watching it again tomorrow morning, but for now I'll just let this serve as a recap of how it all went:

You'll always be The Hand to me

Approximate size of sugar packet relative to The Hand

Okay, "Sugar K. Leonard" is indeed a good nickname.  But c'mon, Shaq.  Let's be frank.  We don't need a pretty good nickname for Kawhi.  We already have a freaking badass one.

Perhaps this is just a way to draw attention to just how amazing Kawhi Leonard is.  Kudos to Shaq for trying to give him some love.  And no one understands the power of such a move than Shaq.  He's "Shaq," after all.  He's remade himself several times over in ways similar to that. He just thinks that way.  And it's not the worst idea in the world to do so.

What's interesting about the new name though is that its many connotations provoke analysis of his game as much as sum it up.  It's a nickname that, like all nicknames, tries to define Kawhi's style.  But it also asks us to take apart that style, because it tries to bring out something in Kawhi's game that is really interesting to bring out.

It first tries to bring out something of Kawhi's potential.  The parallel to Sugar Ray Leonard isn't unapt, and to accomplish it by means of the simple abbreviation of Kawhi's first name is truly a stroke of genius.  The name was given to Ray Leonard in a similar way, with a gesture back to Sugar Ray Robinson, on on the basis of his promise as a boxer--and there are few players in the NBA who have a more promising career ahead of them than Kawhi.

But more than that, like with the original Sugar Ray Robinson, it is meant to bring out something about the athlete's finesse.  Like a boxer, his game involves as much touch and accuracy as fierceness and domination. Sweetness gets at the elements of precision in his game, in a way that "The Hand" may not, and it also stresses his offensive powers more than his defensive ones.

But "The Hand" is still so much more what Kawhi is.  No one hits the glass, paws rebounds away from bigger men, and then rockets down the court like him.  The "Sugar K." too implies something like smoothness, and that simply just isn't what Kawhi is.  He moves jerkily, aggressively along the court, and the impression one gets continually watching him is that he'll outwork you more than he'll outstyle you.  Behind each step is quiet intense effort, more than any sort of slickness, and the final result is more like silent domination and control--an invisible hand--than swagger.

But there is indeed sweetness in his game.  It is in the genuineness of this effort.  It's visible in everything he does.  There's something pure about Kawhi's work on the court, something which combined with his unprotesting willingness to do many of the less desirable tasks on the court, gives it a kind of innocence.  Combine with this his relative silence and directness--more exaggerated than real--off the court, and you get the near-adorable Kawhi we find in the great HEB commercials.

Perhaps there's no purer version of this Kawhi than in "Tough Talk" one.  Here everyone on the team promotes a protein after-workout drink in the typical manly way we'd expect of a protein-drink commercial.  But Kawhi is unable to engage in such aggressive rhetoric:

He can't but be honest.

In the "Laundry Sorting" commercial--

--when Kawhi is able to pick up an entire load of laundry and palm it in his hand, and the whole team looks in wonder, and Manu says the memorable phrase "It's like you are part bear!!" he's alluding to something almost utterly simple about Kawhi's game, something completely endearing about the essence of his skill as a player and how he uses it, and which is the other side of The Hand as a nickname.  It's an image of Kawhi that suggests he plays almost without any comprehension of the ways that others, given his talent, would artfully use it.  His big bearlike hands dominate--but they do so naturally, almost as if he didn't want them to do so so intensely, so thoroughly.

This image of this type of innocence is one we find often in sports.  It's a fantasy about athleticism in general: that it isn't acquired but in a way simply given naturally to some individuals.  It's a fantasy about how that athleticism is developed: purely by the cultivation of good intentions, rather than through grueling hard work and repetition and boring, but essential, training.  Ultimately it is a fantasy about the use of that talent: that utter dominance itself of a game of whatever sort (whether it be on the court or in life) is in truth a good thing, a natural thing.  And it isn't entirely wrong, just because it is a myth.

I find this a much more appealing image of Kawhi than the one that "Sugar K." conjures up, and a riskier and almost more daring one too.  What also comes with Shaq's nickname is the expectation that Kawhi will not just dominate through dedication, within a role or outside of it, but through star-player sort of fireworks.  People have been wondering whether Kawhi--undoubtedly the future leader of the Spurs franchise--should demonstrate something of this flash or simply stay where he is.

As The Hand, however, all we want from Kawhi is that he dominate as he usually does--The Hand is something like the effect as well as the cause, and we don't quite know how it came about except through the sheer athleticism of his body.  The Spurs play this up with his other nickname, "Whi," which conjures up its helpless homonym: players often refer to many of his plays as "Whi" plays, as in "Why did he do that!!?"  They don't know exactly why he did what he did, and he might not know himself, but they trust him to do it. With The Hand, similarly, we are about what he is, and about his own capabilities, we feel that uses them all the more genuinely--that he simply is them.  He simply has The Hand, is The Hand: he's a part of himself that he doesn't quite get.  As Sugar K., he may be taking on the identity of a person larger than who he is already--with the name comes a history, a legacy, of greatness, which isn't quite his like his hand is.  We have to remember that Shaq above all loves glory and fame.  It's not clear that this is what Kawhi would like.

At the same time, the capaciousness of however we decide to define the "sugar" also makes the name appealing.  And fundamentally expecting sweetness from a player, expecting a certain taste, isn't the same as expecting something like a show.  This might allow that ambivalent state Kawhi inhabits between role player and dominant third banana to develop.  For me though, he'll always be The Hand.