NBA Finals focal points
The latest Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza covers all the angles from the championship series and reviews a flurry of news conferences as only #thisleague can deliver
The Boston Celtics did what they absolutely had to do in the Bay Area. They won one of the first two games of the NBA Finals to avoid a dreaded 2-0 series deficit.
We’ve mentioned more than once lately how the Golden State Warriors always win at least one road game on their playoff excursions. It has happened in 26 consecutive series, dating to the 2012-13 playoffs, and that league record is why I wrote Friday that I expect these Finals to be 2-2 when the teams return to San Francisco.
As the series shifts now to Boston for Game 3, here are five focal points heading into Golden State’s opportunities Wednesday and Friday night to prove me right:
The Warriors, famed for their bursts in the third quarter, are playing their best third quarter basketball of the Stephen Curry era.
Golden State 73, Boston 38.
That’s the composite score through the first two third quarters of these Finals.
Of course, with a disparity that lopsided, Golden State really should have won both games at home and might come to rue its failure to take the 2-0 series lead such dominance after halftime merits. Boston’s fairy-tale fourth quarter in Game 1 ensured that the Celtics, who possessed a collective zero minutes of NBA Finals experience as recently as last Wednesday, returned home with no worse than a split, as well as the satisfaction of ushering the Warriors to a historic collapse.
You have to be OK with the modern game’s reliance on 3-pointers to enjoy what you’re watching.
These teams, through two games, have combined to average 80 3-point launches per game, according to @StatMuse. More than 47 percent of the shots in this series have been hoisted from deep.
Something tells me Bob Ryan, The Boston Globe’s venerable columnist and one of the greatest basketball scribes of all time, is not enjoying what he’s watching.
Jayson Tatum did not really bounce back.
Adam Himmelsbach, another Globe scribe, shared a great stat entering Game 2 when he noted that Tatum — who shot 3-for-17 from the field in Game 1 — responded to his 12 previous games this season marred by sub-30% shooting by shooting 55.1% from the field in the very next game.
While Tatum did muster 28 points in Game 2 on 8-for-19 shooting, he also registered an unwanted playoff record with a plus/minus of -36. Andrew Wiggins, as seen in the previous round against Dallas’ Luka Dončić, is making the Celtics’ leading offensive threat work harder than he’s accustomed to.
Even without an NBA Finals MVP award on his résumé, Stephen Curry has a ridiculously good individual history in the championship round.
How good?
The much more significant concern for the Warriors, in their sixth Curry-led trip to the Finals in a span of eight years, is that he isn’t getting consistent assistance from a second scorer like he has in the past. My pal Howard Beck from Sports Illustrated has a good column on it here.
The standout story of the series so far, sadly, is a Game 2 refereeing controversy — and a hit to the league's credibility.
Draymond Green knows. He knows that, far more often than not, he can play on the edge in the playoffs even after getting hit with a technical foul. Green knows that the referees won't want to sanction him with a second T and eject him from a game on the foremost of basketball stages.
Yet this is suddenly a massive image problem for the NBA because of an in-game interview with longtime former referee Steve Javie during the ABC broadcast. Javie outright said that he would have officiated Green's second-quarter tangle with Brown more leniently because Green already had one tech.
“You have to consider one player has a technical foul,” Javie said. “Is this enough to call a double T and eject the one player? Personally I would say nothing and I would let it defuse as that.”
Much of the angry discourse since Javie’s comments has obscured the fact that the technical Green did get was soft and questionable. That shouldn’t be forgotten.
That said …
Green surely would have been ejected had Sunday’s scenes taken place during the regular season. Green, after all, pushed Brown in the back, tugged on his shorts and hurled some invective at him … all after they tumbled to the floor. It was all there on video review for the refs (and the world) to see. But Green didn't get that second tech and played a pivotal role in the second-half surge that delivered Golden State's crucial Game 2 triumph. The retired Javie, in explaining that he, too, would have allowed the situation and stakes trump the rule book, made it sound like official league policy to do so.
Javie retired after the 2011-12 season and is a member of the media now. That's why it's highly unlikely that the league will issue any form of official comment about Javie's TV analysis. He doesn’t work for the NBA.
The reality, though, is that there's no PR spinning that could change anything now. As a former prominent league employee, Javie just said out loud what had merely been public fodder for fans and the media to debate for decades: Stars get preferential treatment sometimes. And: The rule book is selectively enforced.
If the Warriors go on to win their fourth championship in the past eight years, something tells me Sunday night’s shenanigans will live in the memory well beyond most Game 2s.
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News Conference Monday
I watched a lot of NBA TV on Monday even though the NBA Finals don’t resume until Wednesday night. That’s what happens when three major press conferences, without warning, get scheduled on the same supposed off-day … two of them so significant in terms of news value that the league’s official TV network decided to carry them live.
At roughly the same time in Monday’s lunch hour, Miami’s Pat Riley sat down for his (highly entertaining as) usual season-ending press briefing while Utah’s Quin Snyder — with owner Ryan Smith and Jazz CEO Danny Ainge to his left on the dais — reflected on his decision Sunday to walk away from the job after eight seasons in Salt Lake City.
Then a couple of hours later, Darvin Ham was formally introduced as the Los Angeles Lakers’ new coach … after Ham had previously interviewed with nine other NBA franchises in recent years in search of his maiden head coaching opportunity.
Here’s one standout subject from each of the pressers (as we call them in the news game):
When Utah’s season ended with a first-round exit to Dallas, Ainge let Jazz general manager Justin Zanik meet the press, with the explanation given that part of the appeal of his new CEO role in Utah was the promise that Ainge could bequeath some of the day-to-day duties of GMing to Zanik. Utah’s sudden need to find a new coach, though, ranks as yet another major development for a franchise in the uncharacteristic throes of significant change, with Ainge poised to lead the search for Snyder’s replacement. So he had to speak.
“I think it’s pretty clear we desperately wanted [Snyder] to stay,” Ainge admitted. “At the same time, I've walked away from coaching and I’ve walked away from being a general manager for 18 years in Boston. So I trust that Quin knows more what's best for him and his family much more than we do.”
Ainge went on to explain that, when he hired Doc Rivers and later Brad Stevens as his coaches in Boston, he benefited from his much more regular presence in scouting and broadcasting venues that allowed him to form “in my mind who the best coaches were.”
Now 63 and having brought Stevens to the Celtics way back in July 2013, Ainge doesn’t have that type of knowledge base, which complicates a process that both Ainge and Smith acknowledged is crucial because of the void Snyder’s departure creates.
“Now I’m in a position where I haven’t been looking [around] to the same extent,” Ainge said.
There was no single utterance during Ham’s address that grabbed me the same way as with the other two press conferences. Ham’s overall confidence and comfort at the mic made the lasting impression on his first day as the front-line representative for all the uncomfortable questions that, once the season starts, get flung at the Lakers on a daily basis by media pests like me.
The trouble for Ham, of course, is that you can trick yourself into believing that a fresh start with a new lead coaching voice for the LeBron James-Anthony Davis-Russell Westbrook trio sounds almost feasible in June. Ham insisted that a Westbrook renaissance is more than feasible and that Davis can stay healthy enough to be the Lakers’ difference-making “key.”
We repeat: All that’s a lot easier to say (and buy) in early June than it is to picture actually happening in the fall.
“If there’s mistakes made, I have to be able to coach those three guys like I do the rest of the roster,” Ham said.
There’s at least one line to indicate that Ham, deep down, understands the size of the challenge he’s inherited. He’ll surely start the season with LeBron’s backing, but how receptive will Westbrook really be to constant pushing from the rookie coach if the Lakers can’t trade him and decide they don’t want to stomach the considerable cost of waiving him?
In an ESPN interview separate from the group session, Ham said that he wants Westbrook “to go back to being a pit bull on the defensive end” and to “set a tone defensively for our team.” Seem feasible to you?
We got a Vintage Riles performance as Miami’s team president tried to put a bow on what he described as “a bitter loss” in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals at home to Boston.
Riley spoke of how “the dragon hasn’t left my body yet” after missing out on an NBA Finals trip by one win. He scoffed at the mere suggestion of potential retirement in the near future by telling longtime Heat beat writer Ira Winderman of The South Florida Sun Sentinel that “I can do more pushups than you right now” at age 77. Most of all, Riley addressed the current state of several players’ strengths and weaknesses with a candor uncommon in today’s NBA, ultimately issuing public challenges to the likes of Bam Adebayo, Tyler Herro and Duncan Robinson to work harder to expand their games.
Yet nothing Riley shared, at least to me, was more weighty than his declaration that Kyle Lowry has to make significant improvements in the conditioning department. After missing numerous games during the regular season due to personal reasons, Lowry appeared in only 10 of Miami’s 18 playoff games because of persistent hamstring trouble and mustered worrisome postseason averages of 7.8 points, 4.7 assists, and 3.6 rebounds per game.
It was Lowry’s first season on South Beach after the Heat awarded him a three-year contract worth $85 million. The onus is now on the 36-year-old to respond after joining the team known for demanding its players stay in peak condition more than any other on the NBA map.
“The bottom line with me and for me, as far as hoping that you can get the most out of a player — and I don’t have to go back and talk about it — is that you’ve got to be in world-class shape,” Riley said. “You just have to be.”
While acknowledging that Lowry “plays the game in a manner where he needs his strength and his size,” Riley reiterated that he thinks Lowry “is definitely going to have to address that.”
“And I do believe that the pain of losing and the reminders that you send out about this might change his mind a little bit," Riley added.
I could have listened to Riles all day. And, frankly, I wish I had flown to Miami to attend the press conference in person, because someone in the room absolutely needed to ask him the most important question of all: What did you think of Adrien Brody’s portrayal of a young Pat Riley in HBO’s Winning Time? That one regrettably went unasked.
Numbers Game
🏀 25
Updating our recent piece on lead decision-makers in the front office who have met with the media to field questions since their teams' seasons ended: Twenty-five of the 28 lead executives whose offseasons are already underway have conducted interview sessions. After recent press conferences that featured Miami’s Pat Riley, Dallas’ Nico Harrison and Utah’s Danny Ainge, there are only three holdouts: San Antonio (whose franchise patriarch, Gregg Popovich, speaks to the media near-daily while the Spurs are in season), Milwaukee (Jon Horst has yet to hold his expected season wrap-up) and the New York Knicks (whose president of basketball operations Leon Rose simply refuses to take questions from any media entity apart from MSG Network).
🏀 372-264
Quin Snyder posted a .585 winning percentage across eight seasons as Utah’s coach, winning 372 of 636 regular-season games. The Jazz lost six of their nine playoff series under Snyder.
🏀 26
Snyder’s decision to step down in Utah has established Denver’s Michael Malone as the coach with the NBA’s fourth-longest tenure (seven seasons). Malone trails only San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich (26 seasons), Miami’s Erik Spoelstra (14) and Golden State’s Steve Kerr (eight seasons).
🏀 4
Updating another recent item: The NBA has committed to play games in three foreign countries next season — with a fourth expected when the league officially announces a San Antonio-Miami regular-season game in Mexico City that is reportedly planned for mid-December. Exhibition games in Abu Dhabi and Japan and one regular-season game in January (Detroit vs. Chicago) in Paris have already been announced by the league. The NBA last staged a game abroad in January 2020 (Milwaukee vs. Charlotte in Paris) shortly before the coronavirus pandemic. Its last exhibition game abroad was a Nets-Lakers game in China in October 2019.
🏀 24
Dallas’ Luka Dončić is just the fourth player in league history to make the All-NBA first team three times before the age of 24, joining Kevin Durant, Tim Duncan and Max Zaslofsky.
🏀 $2,735,546
A game-worn Kobe Bryant home jersey from his rookie season in 1996-97 that Bryant used in two playoff games in Year 1 as a Los Angeles Laker sold for more than $2.7 million Saturday in bidding hosted by SCP Auctions. That’s the second-highest price ever for a game-worn basketball jersey, SCP says.
🏀 $73,253
At the same auction, DeShawn Stevenson’s 2011 Dallas Mavericks NBA championship ring sold for nearly $75,000, while an autographed 1997 Skybox Metal Universe Precious Metal Gems Bryant trading card sold for $403,664.
Still staggering to me how long Pop has been a coach. Just don’t see that kind of longevity anymore. It’s equally staggering that Spoelstra is the 2nd longest tenured coach. Feels like he just started with the Heatles. Time flies and the ball never stops… 🏀
Somehow the first time I've ever heard of Max Zaslofsky. Thanks for that.