Boston seems to have landed on eight: Tatum, Brown, Smart, Horford, White, Pritchard and the two Williamses. He held his own against Luka Doncic last round and he did just fine against Boston in Game 2.Īs it tends to go in the Finals, after two games against one another, the Warriors and Celtics seem to now have a good idea of which players can survive in this series and which ones can't. He's a brilliant cutter and nuclear athlete, but Golden State still needed to inject spacing in other ways, especially considering Green's limitations as a shooter, so they tried Nemanja Bjelica, whose defensive weaknesses seem to have been greatly overstated. The problem with extended Payton minutes is that Boston has little interest in guarding him on the perimeter. The Warriors scored 33 points off of turnovers in Game 2, 18 more than the Celtics. Coincidentally, that is the exact margin between Boston's playoff wins and losses. The Warriors generated 3.3 more turnovers per 100 possessions during Payton's regular season minutes than when they played without him. Statistically, this was a fairly predictable development. Not coincidentally, the Celtics committed 18 turnovers in Game 2, five more than they did in Game 1. That allowed him to give Gary Payton II, who was a DNP-CD in Game 1, 25 largely meaningful minutes. Andre Iguodala was ruled out before Game 2 due to knee inflammation. Steve Kerr's revelations were forced upon him. The moment he decided to try to play drop-coverage against Stephen Curry should have been the moment Ime Udoka decided to banish him for the rest of the series. The Celtics managed to get outscored by 12 points in the seven competitive minutes he played in this game. Anything Daniel Theis could give them would be greatly appreciated. ![]() Robert Williams III is playing hurt and Al Horford just turned 36. The Celtics would love to be able to play four big men. Rotations tend to get smaller and smaller as a playoff series progresses, and tonight was a perfect example of why. We're starting to figure out who these teams really are They couldn't reach 90 points as a result. It's the fact that the Warriors held the Celtics to 12 fewer attempts (45 vs. In that sense, the number of 3-pointers Boston made hardly tells the story here. But aside from White and occasionally Grant Williams, the Warriors were much more aggressive in hounding Boston's shooters. Boston is better than 3-of-14 from deep and worse than 10-of-19 because every team in NBA history falls somewhere between those two extremes. There's going to be a middle ground here. The role players that shot Boston into a Game 1 victory went ice cold in Game 2. In fact, even with garbage time factored in, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown still managed to combine for more than half of Boston's points (45 of 88). ![]() Horford and Smart combined for 44 points in Game 1. Green played Horford so aggressively that he forced a jump-ball.īoston still managed a hot 10-of-19 start from behind the arc, but finished 3-of-14 in the second half. Green had spent much of Game 1 sagging off of Horford to focus on help-defense, but in Game 2, he set a new tone on the very first possession. ![]() "Those guys are good shooters, but they combined for what. ![]() "They hit 21 3s and Marcus Smart, Al Horford and Derrick White combined for 15," Green said. When Boston shot 21-of-45 from behind the arc in Game 1, Draymond Green was less than impressed. Here are the biggest takeaways from Game 2. Now, the series shifts to Boston for Games 3 and 4. Jayson Tatum paced the Celtics with 28 points and six rebounds, but his production wasn't enough as only two other Celtics players scored in double figures. As a team, the Warriors forced 18 Boston turnovers and they scored 33 points off of those turnovers. Stephen Curry led the way for Golden State with 29 points, six rebounds and four assists, while Jordan Poole added 17 points off of the bench. They went on to coast to a 107-88 victory, and they tied the series up at 1-1 in the process. Golden State outscored Boston 35-14 in that quarter and they never looked back. The game was extremely close through the first 24 minutes, but in the third quarter, the Warriors kicked it up a notch and gained some serious separation. What the Golden State Warriors did against the Boston Celtics in Game 2 of the NBA Finals on Sunday night was the definition of "response." After dropping the first game of the series in front of their home fans thanks to an abysmal fourth-quarter performance, the Warriors were well aware that they needed to bounce back quickly, and that's exactly what they did.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |