Point Blank – April 17, 2017
Playoff Passages – There is no Beast in the East…Did the Pacers miss their window (and do the Grizzlies even have one)…
The first weekend of the NBA’s Eastern Conference playoffs may have sent a few shockwaves across the Sports Mediaverse, where the seedings are often used as guides for folks not digging deeply during the regular season - if C. J. Miles would have knocked down a jumper that he had a pretty good look at on Saturday it would have been the #6-#7-#8 seeds going on the road and sweeping #1-#2-#3. But instead of that being a tremor across the landscape, the shrewd handicapper should accept it for what it is means going forward – there is no beast in the East.
One of the prime focus points in a take here two weeks ago was how hard teams were fighting for those final playoff spots in the Eastern Conference, which isn’t always the case – there are times in which you can see a team show that they would rather begin their vacations than cap the long grind with a #1 vs. #8 or #2 vs. #7 matchup that could lead to some embarrassment on the floor. Not this time. The lower seeds saw opportunity because of the vulnerabilities of the teams at the top, and in particular note Erik Spoelstra’s disappointment after Miami was nudged out of a spot; he knew that his Heat could compete with anyone in the bracket. When viewing those opening games, did they really look like upsets?
As we move on to the next encounters I will stay with “The Game Inside the Game” format throughout the playoffs, looking for one key talking point in each setting that can play a key role in the scoreboard outcome. And for today we leave the jukebox plugged in one more time to cap the J Geils tribute cycle, once again making it a double-shot spanning a long arc of a band that played some of the best live shows of anyone in the Rock and Roll era. This time it will be a cover of the Supremes “Where Did our Love Go”, first from Winterland in 1977, and then a New Year’s Eve show at the Mohegan Sun in 2009 that seemed like an ideal closing moment for this musical chapter (there will just have to be a Peter Wolf week sometime) -
Now on to the Monday matchups, and in this case a pair of psychological breakdowns come front and center.
INDIANA/CLEVELAND – The Pacers can hang with the Cavs, but did they miss their window
Often when a big underdog competes well against the favorite in a series opener there is a jolt of positive energy both physically and for the psyche – doubts of whether or not they could compete get erased, and they approach Game #2 with more confidence. I am not sure this one fits that pattern. The issue is that the Pacers already knew that they were good enough to compete, and in the course of doing the Saturday post-mortem there were some signs of frustration instead of getting a positive jolt for coming close. Oh how different it all might have been if Miles had made this shot, after Richard Jefferson leaped past his proper guarding position –
The ending was not a new one for Indiana on that court – just 13 days earlier the pacers had lost 135-130 in double overtime, in that one Myles Turner missing the final shot in regulation that could have won it. Paul George came up huge in both games, with 72 points, 16 assists and 14 rebounds, but the ball was not in his hands for the key final shot either time (on Saturday he had it at the start of the play, but an early Cleveland trap forced him to give the ball up, and he never got it back).
I’ll use George’s words to set up the conundrum for tonight - “We gave up a lot of open 3s just not matching up. A lot of lapses and just not communicating. If we limit that, we walk away 1-0. Just little stuff we need to do. I thought they walked wherever they wanted to, they ran wherever they wanted to and nothing about that has playoff written all over it. We’ve got to play a little more tougher.”
Again note how different that is from the usual discourse when an underdog took the game to the final possession. Often the focus goes to the positive things that the dog did in proving they belong, but this may be more about the frustrations of having one get away. And George was dead on about the defensive issues – the Cavaliers scored at a 119.9 PP100 clip, held back by only making 14-27 at the FT line, knocking down 53.8 percent of their shots and only committing 11 turnovers.
Here is where “a little more tougher” comes into play – Turner had four steals and a blocked shot in 32:27 of court time. In the 207:33 for all over Indiana players it was two steals and zero blocks. Naturally they need to be tougher tonight, but that also raises the question of why they weren’t tougher on Saturday, when there was so much opportunity in front of them.
There is also a key aspect to the Pacers winning the fourth quarter 24-17 that is not easily answered – how much of that was Indiana picking up the intensity, and how much was that Cleveland shifting too early to a slower gear on offense. Let’s go to Tyron Lue for that one - “We didn’t push the ball in the fourth quarter. We got stops and we just walked the ball up the floor and that put us in one-on-one situations. We took some bad shots. We didn’t keep playing with the same intensity, the same pace offensively once we did get stops.”
File that away because it may matter, and will have me looking at the Total if it drops any lower (211.5 has now become 210). Saturday’s series opener was at 210 with 3:00 to play before the end-game turned into an extreme grind, including no points at all over the final 0:40. Will there be a genuine Cavs mindset to keep pushing if in the lead this time? If only Lue could be trusted…
MEMPHIS/SAN ANTONIO – Can the Grizzlies find an identity
There were two major talking points laid out for this series in the Friday edition - that we were going to begin seeing a series of challenges for the Spurs at the PG position, but that outside of that particular aspect they had the chance to control just about everything else, there being some real questions about the Grizzlies having either a rhyme or reason behind some muddled rotations. And that is pretty much what this one is about, the San Antonio PG issues filed away for later because Memphis might not be able to make them matter enough (it really is worth noting that even in a 29-point blow-out, Tony Parker and Patty Mills only had two assists across 39:10 of playing time). In fact, unless the Grizzlies can find some kind of functioning chemistry, it may not matter at all.
David Fizdale’s shuffling of his rotations after the All Star break was made a lead topic here because it appeared to be curious – Memphis had been playing well, the Grizzlies almost to the point of being labelled over-achievers. But Fizdale may have seen something that told him there was more to be had out of that roster, so the tinkering began, which included Vince Carter being moved into the starting lineup. What happens when Carter is starting against the Spurs? There will be many San Antonio plays that will lead to Carter guarding Kawhi Leonard. And how is that going to work out?
Leonard had 32 points in 32:05 of Game #1, including 10-11 on FG attempts inside the arc, and the Spurs shot 53.2 percent, despite the starters barely playing half of the game minutes.
Is this where a badly beaten underdog steps up and plays with some pride in Game #2, taking advantage of the oddsmakers having to make adjustments against a team that won’t have many takers from the recreational marketplace? That temptation is where the day begins because we have the anti-Zig Zag in place, the -9 from Game #1 now sitting at -11. But are the Memphis rotations just so disjointed right now that they can’t be trusted?
One of the things that can go under the radar when a team changes the starting lineup is that it means that so many other roles have been shuffled, impacting the chemistry of the supporting cast as well. That can be magnified when playing a team that brings the precision of the Spurs, and look at just how badly the Memphis reserves that played at least 10 minutes in Game #1 were scorched –
Player Minutes +/-
Randolph 26:28 -39
Ennis 20:17 -28
Harrison 19:37 -19
Daniels 15:31 -29
Yes, that is a “yikes”, and if you pro-rated Daniels out to 48 minutes it would be the equivalent of a team losing a game by 90 points.
At another time that +11 would be awfully tempting, but two components keep me away – first is the fact that Gregg Popovich threw so many different defenders at Conley that one can see that he has a plan laid out; the second being that the Memphis rotations just may be too muddled to be trusted. Since the All Star break this is a team that has lost to the Mavericks twice, and to the Pistons, Lakers, Kings and Nets, Saturday’s blowout the 9th time in 25 post-break games they have lost in double figures.
Baseball Being Baseball
Dan Straily and three Miami relievers carried a no-hitter with two outs in the eighth inning vs. the Mets yesterday. Only one pitcher for the Marlins gave up any runs. David Phelps came in with a 2-0 lead to close it out in the ninth, and after laboring through 33 pitches and allowing three hits, he walked back to the dugout in the middle of the inning with the game tied 2-2. Four batters into the bottom of the ninth J.T. Riddle hit a two-run homer off of Addison Reed, and Miami won 4-2.
Phelps, by far the worst mound performer for the Marlins in the game, goes down in the annals of Baseball as the winning pitcher.
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