Warriors vs. Lakers recap
Can I recap a game a half hour before my flight?, the Lakers luck on broken plays, and Frank Voegl's big adjustment to stop running PNR's with Anthony Davis
I’m trying to bang out this recap as quickly as possible while I wait to board my flight back to Mexico at SFO. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had some family things to attend to so last night I watched the first half of the play-in game on my phone, which was propped against a cup of water, at the dinner table. The 3rd quarter I watched as I took care of my baby brother, so I didn’t get the full experience, nor did I get to take notes. For that reason the bulk of my recap will focus on the fourth quarter, which is where the game was decided.
The first half of the game was a dream. It was more or less exactly what you wanted to happen — the Warriors locked in defensively and held the Lakers to 32.6% from the field and role players like Kent Bazemore, Juan Toscano-Anderson, and Mychal Mulder hit enough three pointers for the Warriors to weather a fairly quiet half from Steph Curry. The Lakers kept trying to get Draymond Green into PNR’s against Anthony Davis and it did not work for the Lakers. Green got his hands on passes, made brilliant rotations to vertically contest Davis drives, and generally caused the type of havoc that you’d expect from a motivated Draymond. Anthony Davis was a total nonfactor, to the point that I actually thought the Lakers were making a huge mistake trying to feed Davis over and over again, who went 1-8 in the 1st quarter with two turnovers.
The Warriors managed to build on a 6 point lead in the 2nd quarter, despite somewhat shaky halfcourt offense from the Jordan Poole led bench unit. The Warriors forced turnovers — 4 of them in the second quarter — and got out in transition where they found easier buckets than they did against the Lakers’ set defense. The final minutes of the first half more closely resembled the game that was billed and hyped up by the NBA and its media partners as Steph Curry and LeBron James and Anthony Davis started to trade buckets. And yet, the Warriors managed to survive a brief Lakers surge at the end of first half and went into the 3rd quarter a 13 point lead.
The third quarter got ugly quick. The Lakers got into the bonus about four minutes into the second half. Truly shocking! The fouls they got were generous, to say the least, and Steve Kerr was beside himself on one particular foul where Dennis Schroeder drove to the hoop and got free throws despite not being in a shooting motion when the foul got called. With that said, the fouls that got the Lakers into the bonus were bad, but I didn’t count that many fouls after the Lakers went into the bonus. The bad calls were irritating, but mostly harmless in the 3rd quarter, unlike a few egregious bad calls in the 4th quarter that I feel ashamed to complain about, but am going to take note of anyway.
The bad calls were frustrating, but what hurt the Warriors way more in the 3rd quarter were a bundle of live ball turnovers from Draymond Green. The Lakers did what many teams have done this year against the Warriors and adjusted their defensive scheme to overplay Draymond’s passes and it worked — Draymond was unable to thread the needle on passes into the paint and the Lakers got a few much needed easy buckets. At the end of the 3rd quarter, the Lakers had shrunk the Warriors 13 point halftime lead to two points and it was at this point that Frank Voegl made a brilliant and simple adjustment — LeBron James started the beginning of the 4th quarter.
My principal complaint with Steve Kerr’s coaching is that he can be somewhat inflexible and slow to adjust within single games. Over the course of a series, he and the coaching staff usually figure things out and come up with smart offensive wrinkles and creative defensive gameplans, but Kerr’s stubbornness was something that concerned me in a do-or-die situation. Even a casual NBA observer would know that Steph Curry sits the beginning of 4th quarters. This is an ideal time for an opposing team to steal some points by simply playing their own star player and that’s exactly what happened — in just a minute and a half, the Warriors went from being up 79-77 to down 83-79 and Steve Kerr called a timeout to bring in Steph Curry at the 10:23 mark, which is as early as I recall ever seeing him in the 4th quarter.
Things got real weird with the Warriors’ rotation in the 4th quarter. Steve Kerr pulled Juan Toscano-Anderson at the 8:48 mark, which seemed to me an overreaction to JTA giving up two very difficult buckets to LeBron James. To my eyes, JTA defended them as well as he could, but LeBron just did LeBron things and so Mychal Mulder came in and played the next five and a half minutes in the most important game of the season. Bonkers. I’ll say this though, I don’t think Mulder played that badly in crunch time. He made a few nice rebounds and acquitted himself well on defense, but I did keep jotting down the same note over and over again, “how the fuck has Kerr not pulled Mulder yet — how is Mychal fucking Mulder playing crunch time minutes against the Lakers?”
The only bad thing that Mychal Mulder did was fail to sell an obvious foul where Anthony Davis literally tossed him out of the paint to get an offensive rebound and putback. Seriously, what the fuck was Mulder supposed to do here — other than, say, writhe on the floor for two minutes while the refs review the play for a possible flagrant? That play put the Lakers up 93-91 with 5:13 left in the game.
Plays like that sum up the 4th quarter and demonstrate what made this loss so frustrating. The Warriors played very well in the first half and mostly got away with a few weird tactical decisions in the 2nd half. But the Lakers got very lucky on loose balls and broken plays. The Davis putback is an obvious stroke of luck, as is LeBron James’ game-winning three. But luck isn’t really a thing you can statistically quantify. At the end of the day, the only way a team can get lucky is to put themselves in the position to catch those breaks and the adjustments the Lakers made in the second half allowed them to close out the Wariors.
The biggest adjustment I saw from the Lakers was that they stopped going out of their way to hunt shots for Anthony Davis. I’d argue that this decision was what won the Lakers the game. LeBron James led teams of the past have learned that the best way to attack the Warriors on defense is to avoid Draymond Green. What’s the best way to do that? Don’t give the ball to the guy he’s guarding — give the ball instead to LeBron James (or Kyrie Irving) and hope that the pressure he puts on the rim creates clean looks for him or other players who get open 3’s or can cut off of LeBron’s restricted area gravity. Just look at this play here:
Wes Matthews sets a screen for LeBron James at the top of the key and he takes one dribble before throwing the ball to a cutting Alex Caruso on the right wing. Caruso takes one dribble, Draymond Green rotates off of Anthony Davis in the corner (note also that Steph Curry doesn’t scurry down to the baseline quick enough to cut off Davis) to contest the Caruso drive, and Davis gets his easiest bucket of the night — an uncontested baseline dunk. That shot gave the Lakers the lead at 100-98. The Warriors got two free throws to tie it from Steph Curry at the 1:23 mark, but LeBron hit his miracle shot with about a minute left in the game and the Warriors were unable to score in the final minute when the Lakers used Anthony Davis at the top of the key to aggressively double team Steph Curry. Jordan Poole managed to get a good look at a corner 3 that he missed — and that was a huge surprise to me. The game came down to one last possession and I don’t think the Warriors would have gotten a great 3 point look for Steph Curry out of this sideline out of bounds play and I doubt they’d have won in overtime, but just look at this shit.
I’ve mostly focused on the Lakers side of things while talking about the fourth quarter, so I’ll just touch on a few Warriors related thoughts before signing off and getting on my flight. Steph Curry regressed to the mean and hit 6-9 threes at Staples Center. He was the best player on the court all game and he made clutch shot after clutch shot. But because the Warriors’ second best creator is Jordan Poole, the Lakers felt comfortable aggressively trapping and doubling Steph Curry in the final possessions of the game and Steph basically had no clean looks available to him. It was the nightmare scenario in crunch time and it felt mostly unavoidable. But I did feel a little heartened that Steph played such a good game that he pretty much made it impossible for any blowhard talking head to talk shit about him. It was a very good Steph game in the most important game of the year and he gave it his all.
Draymond Green had a very Draymond game. He was a monster on defense all night, but he only scored 2 points and his turnovers hurt the Warriors. Draymond giveth and Draymond taketh, but he mostly gaveth last night. Kevon Looney was mostly solid, albeit a little more invisible than usual. Kent Bazemore hit open threes and let the spirit of Kelly Oubre Jr. live through him on dumb and feckless drives to the hoop that resulted in ugly bricks. Juan Toscano-Anderson and Jordan Poole both showed that they were ready for playoff minutes. Poole missed a few good looks at the end and he looked a little rushed in his first stint in the 2nd quarter, but he seemed to loosen up after he dusted a defender on a gorgeous pass fake in transition where he used a push dribble to fake a pass to the corner and get a clean lane to the hoop. JTA made big shots and was more aggressive offensively than I expected he’d be. Even though Mychal Mulder did fine in his unexpected fourth quarter moments, I still think I would have preferred JTA be out there in crunch time, but what’s done is done.
The Warriors face the Grizzlies tomorrow tonight. They should win. They better win. If they don’t, this Lakers loss will haunt me all summer. But if the Warriors do lose, I don’t have to worry about missing the final three games of the Warriors’ first round series against the Jazz while I’m in Hawaii, so I guess there’s that. I don’t want to spend too much time writing about the Grizzlies matchup, considering that I wrote a recap on their most recent game here, so I’ll be brief — the Warriors have the best player on the court, and possibly in the world. As long as he has the ball in his hands a bunch and the Warriors’ supplementary players make enough plays off of Steph’s gravity, they should win. The only things that really concern me are Jonas Valanciuinas’ offensive rebounding and what it might do to the Warriors’ transition game — he just had 23 points and 23 rebounds (5 offensive) against the Spurs — and the Warriors’ leaning too much into off-ball stuff that can get mucked up by playoff defenses and playoff reffing. Dillon Brooks, who mercifully fouled out in the fourth quarter last game, just played the most important game of his young career and held Demar Derozan to 5/21 shooting.
If the Warriors can survive Valancuinas’ brute force in the paint and manufacture Steph Curry good looks against Dillon Brooks they should win. I’m about to board now, so I’ll leave it there and hopefully my next posts are a jubilant recap of the Warriors’ win against the Grizzlies and a deep dive into the Utah Jazz matchup.