Hoops Tonight - Steph Curry & Warriors blow out LeBron & Lakers in Game 2, Celtics even with 76ers

NBA Playoffs. I've beaten the crap out of the Lakers tonight. Bunch of adjustments that we all kind of saw coming took place and the Lakers did not handle it well. And some adjustments I expect them to make and what I project for the rest of the series moving forward. And then last night the Boston Celtics got back on track against the Philadelphia seventy six ers, notching a similar type of dominant victory. Have some thoughts on that one as well. You guys know the joke before we get started.

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All right, let's talk some basketball. So you know, over the years, you guys have probably heard me repeat many things many times on the show, And one of the things that I consistently say on the show is I just don't care about box score numbers, particularly counting stats.

I think they're part of the story. But generally speaking that you know, you might find some indicators for specific play that are indicators of their engagement level, right Like, specifically with Lebron and ad I'm always looking at things like rebounds, like when they're rebounding well, that typically means they're athletically engaged in the game. But like a lot

of times it was scores. We focus on the points per game and field goal percentage and stuff like that, and we don't pay close enough attention to the dynamic that's taking place on the court. Steph Curry had twenty points and twelve assists tonight. See relatively pedestrian stat line, right, nothing exceptional happening there. But I thought he was far and away the best player on the for tonight by a mile, right, you know, like Game one, Anthony Davis

was the best player on the floor. But the box score is much more revealing of that. Thirty points, twenty three rebounds. That's you know, I saw some metric. It's like only four players all time I've ever done that, and they're all the all time great centers. Right, But for Steph Curry, it's pretty pedestrian stat line associated with what I thought was an extremely dominant performance. And that's why we can't always look at the box score. Curry, in my opinion, got robbed of a Finals MVP in

twenty fifteen for this very same thought process. People saw relatively pedestrian box score numbers by his standards, and they saw Andrea Gudala have a good scoring season series, right, and then they looked at Lebron James field goal percentage and essentially we're like, oh, Andre Gudala most valuable player of the NBA Finals, And that just wasn't the story

of the series at all. Anybody who watched the games and I said this at the time and have said this repeatedly since you watch the game, and it's like Andre Gudala was pressured up on Lebron James in large part because it's Matthew Della Vedova and timoth Fay Mozgov and just a bunch of lower level NBA players that Golden State didn't have to guard, and so they had a wall behind him, and so Lebron's efficiency tanked as part of a team defensive strategy and a gap in

talent between the two rosters, and Andrea Gudala was getting all these points because the Warriors could not guard Steph Curry with Matthew del a dove was straight up and so they had to start trapping pick and rolls, and that was the beginning of the beautiful Draymond Green four on three short roll down the middle, drawing in the defender out of the weekside cornered kicking to Andre Gudala.

Like again, Andre was amazing in that series. He defended Lebron James extremely well about his Andre Goudala has defended Lebron James better than any defender I've ever seen defend Lebron James. So I'm not trying to take away credit for him. But what happened in that series was he was getting wide open shots in the corner because of Steph drawing multiple defenders from the top of the key.

The Warriors, by far their most valuable player in that series was Steph Curry, and tonight was a very, very similar type of dynamic we talked. I talked a lot about this over the course the last couple of days. But Steph Curry in Pick and Roll, it's just a little bit easier for him to get separated from Jared Vanderbilt, simple dynamic of physics. In a top lock or lock and trail system, he really only has to worry about one direction that Steph could run either into him or

or backcut. Or if he gets lost and he's in a lock and trail, then all he has to do is trail him right, just follow him around. But in an on ball situation. He's squared up with Steph. Now he has to worry about left and right. Steph can use multiple dribbles to get him set up for the ball screen, and that screen can flip its angle in

a way that they can't and off ball actions. It was just the obvious adjustment that was coming where I was super disappointed with Darvin Ham from a game plan standpoint. I'm not sure if this was Darvin Ham's game a game plan or if it was Anthony Davis from just a mental focus standpoint, and Anthony Davis had a nightmare game, or We're gonna talk a lot about him here later on. But Anthony Davis was coming way high on every single one of those screens. Now, I knew that was a

possibility as part of steph pick and roll. You guys, remember what I said was if he could get Jared Vanderbilt caught on the screens, he can get more separation, which will force Anthony Davis to occasionally have to come higher up out of his drop coverage, which you'll open things up for Draymond Green in the short role. Right.

But they did it every single time, like even when Jared Vanderbilt was there, there were possessions where it just looked like a blitz because Jared Vanderbilt is trailing Steph completely attached, and Anthony Davis is still coming way out, which doesn't make any sense, and we'll get to that in a second. But all game long, it was Draymond Green in that short role, and obviously the Andre Guadala in this situation was Jamichael Green and in many cases,

but it was a bunch of different guys. Andrew Wiggins hit a bunch of shots as well. Klay Thompson was fantastic, but like that specific dynamic of trapping Steph Curry thirty feet from the basket and allowing the Warriors to play four on three sprung their offense. And so even though Steph had twenty to twelve, which is a relatively pedestrian statline, like I said, he was by far the best player

on the floor. And it's been one of the most underrated parts of this entire era is that you know, Steph's impact just like many stars, just like Lebron throughout his prime, just like when we're talking about some of the top guys in the league now. But Steph, obviously, to I think he's the second best player of this era, so to a greater extent than most of those guys. He just has an impact that extends well beyond the

box score. You know, from a This is where the Lakers I think are gonna need to counter because we talked a lot about this concept. How do you guard Steph Curry during the NBA Finals last year? And it all to me comes down to your personnel, like, for instance, like I didn't. I think there's three ways that you can guard Steph Curry high pick and roll, and I think two of them are potential acceptable options, and then there's one that's like you should never do under any circumstances.

Number one is drop coverage. That means you let Anthony Davis or whoever the protector is hang back in the paint or not come out too far. Maybe you only come up to the free throw line so we can get to get to the role man, and then you ask your guard to chase over the top and to apply back pressure. The vulnerability there is Steph getting separated from the ball defender and knocking down pull up threes. Right,

that's the weak point in in that coverage. The strong point in that coverage is you never allow a short role and you show down the paint and you're basically forcing Steph to make tough contest to jumpers. Right, that's good option number one. Good option number two is to switch because then at the very least, you're forcing Steph to beat guys off the dribble. And he's amazing. He's, like I said, the second best player of this era. He's gonna beat dudes off the dribble. In a lot

of those cases. Option three is the one thing you could never do in my opinion, and it's to trap or blitz or to bring both defenders to Steph above the level of the screen, because that's what opens up those four on threes. And it makes more sense against other teams in the NBA when you're like playing Damian Lillard, Yeah,

go for it. When you're playing you know, Jamal Murray or some of these other guys, like if you want to Nuggets are actually a bad example because he Jokic, But some of these other on ball defenders or on ball guards, it makes more sense to do because they don't have the continuity in the personnel to they don't they usually don't have a role. Man. That's very good at making decisions, or they don't have like the the

bang bang pass sequences kind of lined up. This is a Warrior team that has been destroying this coverage for nine years now. Like you can like that. That's the one coverage you can never use against the Warriors is to bring both defenders up onto Steph because they're just too good at it. Draymond's too good at it. Even Kavan Looney's too good at it. They've they got their spacing down pat on how to attack that. It just it just it was a really bad strategy in my opinion.

Like when we look at the margin here and like, the Warriors beat the shit out of the Lakers tonight, but like I don't. I saw some Lakers fans and I mentioned when I because I predicted the Warriors would win by double digits tonight. Have had a pretty good feel for this series so far. I predicted the Warriors

would win by double digits. I had Laker fans and my mentions like, nah, we're gonna go up to well, this is gonna be a no. The Lakers might be a little better than the Warriors, They're not gonna blow them out every game. That's just not gonna happen. The Warriors might be a little better than the Lakers, they're not gonna blow them out of every game. A good portion of that margin was effort, But there were two things in particular from that game that translate forward that

could be a problem for the Lakers. And it's that Steph high pick and roll thing, and then something we'll talk about in a little bit, which is Klay Thompson and Austin Reeves and some of the damage that he did to him there. But like obviously, the margin doesn't tell the full story, but this specific battle. As we shift to the Lakers at home in Game three, it's gonna come down to coverages in that high pick and roll. Now, what I would do if I was coaching the Lakers,

I would start in the drop coverage. Jared Vanderbilt was the hero of Game one because of what I broke down for you guys, which was back pressure, his ability to pursue over the top of screens and bother Steph

from behind. It's beyond me that they didn't give him an opportunity to demonstrate that again in this game and just came way up high on those ball screens every single time basically removing Jared Vanderbilt's athleticism from the equation and putting your two best defensive players furthest away from the basket while everyone else is rolling towards the rip. Now again, like with the Celtics, I didn't like the drop coverage because I thought they had great switching personnel.

When you have Al Horford and and and Uh, Marcus Smart and Derek White, Jason Tatum and Jaylen Brown, you can switch everything because everybody's a great defender. And yes, Steph's gonna beat some guys, but it's gonna be more difficult, and you have more athleticism in rotation. This Laker team is fundamentally constructed different. d'An Angelo Russell and Austin Reeves

are below average athletes. You know, Lebron James is a defender that like he's when he's engaged, he's great, but he can kind of flow in and out of it. Sometimes switching is not the ideal coverage for this Laker team. For them, drop makes more sense because they have a longer defender that can actually bother Steph from behind in a way that Derek White and Marcus Smart can't. And they have a much better drop coverage big and Anthony Davis on the back line than Robert Williams and Al Horford.

So again it depends on the roster that you have, But for this particular Lakers team, I would go with the with the drop covers that they use in game one. Then what I would do is if if if Steph starts to just torch Jared Vanderbilt and pull up three point shooting, which, by the way, like again I have to rewatch the game, and there's a lot going on at the same time, but I don't think Steph hit a pull up three and pick and roll and correct

me if I'm wrong on that. But if he did, he only hit one or so, Like Steph wasn't torching them and pick and roll as a score. They didn't even give him an opportunity to get that going before making that adjustment. What I would do in game three is I'd run that drop coverage, give vayner Built a fighting chance. If Steph hits two or three pull up threes, then you can go to the next best option, which is switching, which is less than ideal for this particular roster.

But then you put the onus on Anthony Davis to sit there and defend Steph Curry, you know, and obviously then there'll be another accounter for the Warriors there, because then at that point they can probably try to use Steph as more of a point guard and to try to get the ball to other people with Anthony Davis away from the back line. Like this is gonna be a chess match that goes a bunch of different directions over the course of the next however many games this goes.

But I do think Darvin Ham made the wrong decision tonight, and I do think that there's a good option for them to counter going into Game three. The other biggest adjustment that we expected the Warriors to make in this game was to go small and get out in transition. At the time that we started the show, they had a seventeen to three fast break points advantage. They went small with Jamichael Green, which is a decision that I was a little confused by because I'm a big believer

in like, if you're gonna go small, go small. Like if you're gonna go small, go in on offensive skill. You know, I would have probably started pool. But that said, it worked out great because Jamichael Green kept getting those wide open corner threes. So again it's like it's less about like what your playing is and it comes down to execution at the end of the day. But they got out in transition more. They dominated the like as good as the Lakers have been in the half court

defensively since the trade deadline. All season long, they've been an atrocious perimeter excuse me, an atrocious transition defense team. They have too many guys that like to complain at the refs. Anthony Davis is super susceptible to games where he jogs up and down the floor in transition. They don't get matched up, they don't communicate. They're a bad transition defense team. We saw that at the end of game.

We saw that throughout this game. So the two counters that the Warriors made monumentally shifted this series, and it's gonna be up to the Lakers to adjust back. And again, I do think effort was the biggest factor in this game, don't.

I don't remember the exact stat, but I've read something the other day that like something crazy like fifteen consecutive times the when the home team that is the series, the home court advantage team loses Game one, they win Game two every time, Like, I don't even remember the last time the road team went up two to zero on the road. It just is extremely rare in NBA history. There's always gonna be an effort gap. It's a natural ebb and flow that you see over the course of

the series. The more desperate team usually comes out and plays a lot better in the margins than they end up getting a win, and the Warriors did tonight. Again, that's not to say they wouldn't have won the game anyway, but I think that's more indicative of the margin. I don't think the Warriors are thirty points better than the Lakers in a one game sample size, obviously, right, But moving forward in the series, Steph, I pick Roll going small and getting out in transition, and then the third

one Klay Thompson and Austin Reeves. So Clay had a bad shooting night in Game one, and a lot of it had to do with the Lakers keeping them in the half court a lot, But early in the game there was something that stood out to me quickly as Clay got off to a hot start. I think he made four of his first five shots or something like that.

Austin Reeves is just a little too small, and he's not as in a little too like I should say small from a muscle standpoint as well, And Clay was just really good at setting him up for his off

ball actions. And like, even even with Clay with this little step back jumper that he takes from the mid range, you can always tell when Clay gets like great separation and great lift, that shot goes in almost every single time, versus when he's really being bothered by a bigger, stronger defender, he fades more and it's a much tougher shot, right, Like, I was worried about the Clay Reeves matchup in Game one,

even though the box score looked pretty solid. I kind of I believe I mentioned that in our Game one show. I don't remember exactly, but that specific matchup is going to be another one that's going to be a problem for the Lakers moving forward in the series. So as we sift through the effort related stuff, those are the positives for the Warriors Steph pickenroll getting out in transition by going small Clay on Austin Reeves. So let's move

to the Lakers side a little bit. Lebron James got his jumper going in this particular game, didn't shoot particularly well in the second half of the game, was kind of out of out of the grip at that point. I said this a bunch in the show with the Nerd Sash guys yesterday. But Lebron James is a great

postseason jump shooter. Has been forever, like basically since the ever since the twenty thirteen playoff run when he won a second title in Miami, all the way to this year, with exception of the twenty fifteen postseason, he's been an above average, good volume jump shooter. I want to say he's like thirty seven percent from three on like six attempts in his previous five playoff runs. Like, Lebron's a good jump shooter who happens to be in one of

the worst slumps of his career. And so that's why I was never really overly critical of Lebron James continuing to shoot, because he's just trying to shoot his way out of the slump. And most importantly, they're gonna literally need him to be to knock down those shots in order to have any chance to win this series in the long run, and really any of the series moving forward, so that I think is a relatively good sign for the Lakers that he got that going a little bit.

Anthony Davis look like. I'm as big of a believer in the Anthony Davis ceiling as anybody, and I think a lot of times, like some of my AD takes get pulled out of context as is if I'm an AD hater, that's not the case. Like I'm so high on AD and what he's capable of that I've said this on the show and I believe it. I think he is capable. I should say his ceiling is every bit as high as Nikola jokicch and Joel Embiid arguably higher.

Coming into this game. Anthony Davis might have been the best player in the postseason so far overall when you factor in his de defensive impact. But he just has this tendency, especially after he plays well, to relax and look like I'm not sitting here expecting every game to

be this unbelievable MVP type performance. That's not true for anybody Like Lebron James is the only guy I can remember ever in NBA history my time watching the league to like be dependably great in every postseason game, and that that those days are gone too as he's gotten older. But from basically twenty twenty to twenty thirteen, like I said during that that span, Lebron is the safest bet

in sports. Like it's just oh big playoff game. Lebron at a minimum is going to be twenty eight, eight and eight with excellent defense and and and apply a ton of rim pressure and make a ton of plays for his teammates like he was dependably great and then and then he would be, you know, with the upside if potentially going for forty twelve and thirteen on any given night, right like like that. But that's why he's the second best player of all time. And I'm not

trying to hold Anthony di to that same standard. But for Anthony Davis, his fluctuations are even more extreme than what you would expect like a normal superstar level player in the league. It's like sometimes he's great, sometimes he's not so great. Sometimes he's great, sometimes he's not so great. Ady will have stinkers like straight up play awful well below a superstar standard, Like one day he's the best

player in the world, next day he's Clincapella. Like that's the kind of thing you get from Anthony Davis this. I saw this stat earlier, and this is crazy. Game three against Memphis thirty one and seventeen, Game four against Memphis twelve and eleven, Game five against Memphis thirty one and nineteen, Game six against Memphis sixteen and fourteen. Although I thought he played great in that game, overall, he

just didn't need to score very much. Game one against Golden State thirty and twenty three, Game two against Golden State eleven points and seven rebounds, Like, we're not talking about the difference between you going like, oh, you know, Jokic was a little offt He only had twenty four eleven and seven and he was kind of inefficient. No, Like, that's not what you get from these Anthony Davis bad games.

He's a complete no show. The same dominant defensive performance that he had in Game one was a He was a step slow on all of his rim reactions. He was jogging back in transition. Like I said, I don't think Darvin ham wanted ad to blitz every ball screen.

I thought he was making bad reads. So like, I don't know what was going on with Anthony Davis tonight, But this is a thing that I've consistently seen, and that like, I would love to say that Anthony Davis is the best player in the world, but like, he's not gonna be in that conversation ever until he finds a way to cut out this like one out of every three games as just a total stinker. It's like a legitimate part of his basketball identity. And I don't

have a good explanation for he's not soft. This is not like a, oh, we switched Draymon Green on him and he shut him down. I've watched Anthony Davis earlier this year towards Straymond Green, including hitting the dagger in his face on the left baseline. Like Anthony Davis plays great in physicality, sometimes it's just he'll bully the hell out of a team one game, and then the next game he just won't be there. He just won't be engaged physically the way he is. It's not a soft thing.

It's not a skill thing. It's strictly a mentality thing. He struggles to bring it with the same level of intensity every night, and his down intensity isn't just down, it's way down. And that part is confusing. But again, I expect the Warriors to stick with the same game play moving forward, maybe tweak the Jamichael Green thing. We'll see. I think the Lakers will start with more of a dramatic eight drop coverage, maybe go to some switching, and

then the role players need to play way better. Austin Reeves played really poorly in this particular game. D'Angel Russell. I thought it was pretty sloppy overall, like they're gonna need better performances from some guys on the margins as well. This to me feels like a series where Game four is gonna be the determining game. I expect the Lakers to come out with a similar type of chaotic and for an effort in Game three. I think they'll have

a better game plan. I think the Lakers will win Game three, probably not quite as comfortably as Game too, because the Warriors are a little more resilient in those down bigs. They're less likely to let go of the rope than the Lakers are. But in this game, in Game three, I expect the Lakers to win by ten

to fifteen points a little comfortably over the Warriors. Game four is gonna be the knockdown, drag out rock fight of a game that is close late, and it's gonna be Steph Curry in high pick and roll versus Lebron James and Anthony Davis and what they can do on the game, in the game physically on both ends of the floor. That's gonna be the game that determines the series. In my opinion, the Lakers will either go up three to one and win the series or they'll drop that game.

It'll be two to two, and then the Warriors will have a huge advantage heading home for Game five. So that's kind of where I'm sitting right now. All right, let's move on just really quickly. I'm not gonna spend too much time on it because it was a kind of a disgusting blowout. But the Celtics Sixers game last night, and you know, when I saw the score, I thought it was be much more lopsided than it actually was

when I ended up. Uh, when I was watching, like Embiid was amazing defensively in the first half, the Sixers kind of hung in under like a crazy Boston Celtics effort, and it was actually fifty to forty five at one point. I thought Jalen Brown and Marcus Smart in particular, really set the tone with their defensive ball pressure to start to start that game. And again kudos to the Sixers for hanging in tight, but boy did they let go of the rope in that in that third quarter. And

Boston just has a ton of offensive skill. And when they start driving and kicking you to death, they start getting these wide open threes for good shooters and they can do a ton of damage very quickly. I here's what I'm worried about Embiid because again, like I thought, Embiid was great to start that game, making all these out of area defensive plays. He was doing his job

on offense, drawing attention. But there in the end of the second quarter in particular, you could see he started to get tired and there was like a layup that he blew right at the rim. This might have actually been in the third quarter, if I'm if I'm I

might be messing that up. I think it actually was in the third quarter, but he, like early third quarter, Embiid like blows a layup right at the rim and transition and where he just didn't didn't go up with force, just kind of like try to tap it in and missed it. Then he missed like three or four jumpers in a row short and I'm like, okay, that's fatigue, Like he's tired. And again, like I would have been

so much more. I would have viewed this series as so much more of a toss up if Embiid was really in a groove the way that he was when they beat the Celtics like a month ago, right, But that's just not the case. Embiid is coming off this injury, He's clearly not moving as well as he usually does. That disrupts his rhythm and his conditioning, and like Embiid always struggles a little bit with conditioning, but it's exacerbated when he has to take a week off and all

he can do is stand still shooting. And then again when you need to dominate games from the free throw line with the live dribble and triple threat situations the way that Embiid does, it just is really really difficult to be as effective there when you're not in a really good playing groove, Like basketball just moves at a certain speed in a real game compared to a practice environment or a stay in still environment, and it's just really hard to replicate. And so like as much as

I again Game three, we'll see. I wouldn't be surprised if the Sixers had a crazy effort in one that game. They're that talented. And the Celtics are every bit as capable as the Lakers as just letting go of the rope as soon as they have a moment of prosperity. Right, But I just don't know that they can beat this talented Celtics team unless I'm beat is at his very best, and I just don't think he's at his very best. All right, guys, That is all I have for tonight.

I believe I think we're taking Tomorrow off and then we'll be covering those games on Saturday morning and then going again on Saturday night. As always, I sincerely appreciate you guys, and I'll see you on Saturday. The volume