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NBA Finals - The Problem with Steph Curry


Maithanet

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1 hour ago, Calibandar said:

And of course GS future looks very bright. Maybe Wiseman will actually be fit, and Kuminga looks excellent.

Plus if Wiggins can keep this up he's a keeper as well, only 27 years old, like LaVine.

Can't wait for GS payroll to hit $200m and paying another $500m in repeater tax or something. Don't think they can actually sign anyone given how far over the cap they are so its all in on Bird Rights until Steph/Klay/Draymond retires?

7 hours ago, Maithanet said:

Smart won defensive MVP and yet he was at best the third best defensive player in the series behind Williams and Wiggins.  And I feel like I could make a case for Brown and even Payton as well.  Not a strong showing for Smart.

Centers usually look better on the defensive end. And maybe it was just Curry making him look bad. Might have matched up better against Doncic or Paul/Booker, for instance.

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1 hour ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Don't do this to yourself. And never say that in public. Best free advice you'll ever get on the internet. 

Huh?  Not exactly sure what I'm not supposed to do, but I kinda want to do it just to spite this response.

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13 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Just don't pick Spurs as your team, when you get into football.  You might as well wear motley and say please mock me repeatedly. 

Like I said, if I haven't gotten into soccer at this point I almost certainly never will.  But if I did, really wouldn't care what anyone else thought about the team I chose to root for, especially randos on the internet.

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1 hour ago, DanteGabriel said:

I keep telling myself this team overachieved, were supposed to be still be a year or two away... But damn. The last three games were painful.

Despite the last three games you should be really happy. This team was horrible to start the year, I think they were still sub .500 at the midway and the only talk about them was Smart calling out Tatum and Brown and talking heads calling to blow it up. Now you have a clear 2-5 in Smart, Brown, Tatum and Williams, but you guys badly need to get a real PG and Brown and Tatum have a lot of work to do on some technical stuff. If Boston makes some smart moves, and I believe they will, it's either them or the Bucks coming out of the East next year unless Brooklyn finally puts it all together (not betting on that).

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58 minutes ago, Proudfeet said:

Centers usually look better on the defensive end. And maybe it was just Curry making him look bad. Might have matched up better against Doncic or Paul/Booker, for instance.

Big men usually win DPOY that's true, but not this time.  Surely Smart was playing great defense in the regular season to win that award, but it really didn't show in this series.  There were two guys in this series who made a bunch of highlight reel "how did he do that?!" kinda defensive plays.  Williams and Wiggins.  Smart on the other hand played tough, physical D, drew some cheap fouls by flopping and that was kind of it.  Not bad defense by any means, but nothing like what I'd expect from the DPOY. 

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37 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Despite the last three games you should be really happy. This team was horrible to start the year, I think they were still sub .500 at the midway and the only talk about them was Smart calling out Tatum and Brown and talking heads calling to blow it up. Now you have a clear 2-5 in Smart, Brown, Tatum and Williams, but you guys badly need to get a real PG and Brown and Tatum have a lot of work to do on some technical stuff. If Boston makes some smart moves, and I believe they will, it's either them or the Bucks coming out of the East next year unless Brooklyn finally puts it all together (not betting on that).

What's a "real" PG though? They had Kyrie and Kemba and the pieces didn't fit, and they were also defensive liabilities. I actually thought this team took off when they leaned into Smart being the PG as a playmaker and the director of the defense. He obviously has his shortcomings as a PG, but this is the best I've seen the team work together, right until it fell apart at the end.

Maybe if Smart shot fewer irrational 3s he'd be a proper PG?

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Just now, DanteGabriel said:

What's a "real" PG though? They had Kyrie and Kemba and the pieces didn't fit, and they were also defensive liabilities. I actually thought this team took off when they leaned into Smart being the PG as a playmaker and the director of the defense. He obviously has his shortcomings as a PG, but this is the best I've seen the team work together, right until it fell apart at the end.

Maybe if Smart shot fewer irrational 3s he'd be a proper PG?

I would say if Smart had fewer baffling turnovers he'd be a proper PG.  It was honestly strange to watch the Celtics this series, because at any moment the Celtics offense could collapse into farce.  Between Brown's weird dribbling problems, Tatum's tendency to lose the ball as he gathers it and Smart's passes to covered people, there were just so many preventable turnovers.  I don't think you need an all-star PG, just a decent one who knows his role, someone like VanVleet or something. 

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12 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

I would say if Smart had fewer baffling turnovers he'd be a proper PG.  It was honestly strange to watch the Celtics this series, because at any moment the Celtics offense could collapse into farce.  Between Brown's weird dribbling problems, Tatum's tendency to lose the ball as he gathers it and Smart's passes to covered people, there were just so many preventable turnovers.  I don't think you need an all-star PG, just a decent one who knows his role, someone like VanVleet or something. 

Yeah, the hardest part of watching this was not anything that GS was doing in particular (beyond the continued existence of Draymond) but the unforced errors from the Celtics. That kept happening over and fucking over and didn't get better.

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Just now, DanteGabriel said:

Yeah, the hardest part of watching this was not anything that GS was doing in particular (beyond the continued existence of Draymond) but the unforced errors from the Celtics. That kept happening over and fucking over and didn't get better.

I'm sure if I were rooting for the Celtics it would have been immensely frustrating. 

I would give the Warriors a bit more credit than that - they were taking away the easy stuff, and they had at least three excellent defenders in the rotation that series (Green, Wiggins, Payton), and of the other guys only Poole was a genuine liability defensively.  But basically if the Warriors could cut off easy looks, the Celtics would revert to some truly wild responses, which resulted in a turnover like 20% of the time. 

It's possible that this is just a case of "the NBA is cruel to the young" and that basically the same team could expect better results next year.  The team is young and they have to be burning with motivation after this missed opportunity.  But I do think that getting a more conventional (distribute without turning it over) PG into the rotation would be worth it. 

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40 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

What's a "real" PG though? They had Kyrie and Kemba and the pieces didn't fit, and they were also defensive liabilities. I actually thought this team took off when they leaned into Smart being the PG as a playmaker and the director of the defense. He obviously has his shortcomings as a PG, but this is the best I've seen the team work together, right until it fell apart at the end.

Maybe if Smart shot fewer irrational 3s he'd be a proper PG?

A player that can run the offense, control the pace, get the ball to guys in their favorite spots, generate a real play to end draughts, etc. Kyrie and Kemba are small SGs playing PG. Smart is weird because he’s more of a traditional PG, but still far from a floor general. Boston’s offense was so stagnant in the half court and a better traditional PG would fix that.

 

Can’t believe that Tatum only had one dunk this series. That can’t happen ever again.

 

And for fun, Curry is now 22-4 in playoff series, he’s never been taken out in less than six and both Jordan and LeBron have lost four series in five or less.

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Tatum shot 32 FTs in the Finals. He only had two when Wiggins was guarding him. Damn. Wiggins blocked him more times than that plus he turned him over a ton. Oh, BTW, Tatum had a record 100 turnovers in the playoffs. Yikes.

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I thought there were a lot of careless or naive turnovers. It's one thing if everyone was rotating and it gets messy, but sometimes they give it up passing backwards to the guy coming across half court. Or just passing it out of bounds.

And for all the hand wringing over the Celtics turnovers, the Warriors aren't exactly much better in that regard. 

Also, it wasn't all Smart's fault. Tatum and Brown had their fair share. A new PG wouldn't fix that.

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Certainly wasn't all Smart's fault, but I would say that of the three, Smart's turnovers seemed the most preventable. 

The Warriors have always had more turnovers than most elite NBA teams.  That has been sort of the inevitable downside of their fluid, motion based offense is that there will be some miscommunications and throwaways.  The fact that the Celtics, with a much more traditional offensive attack, had even more turnovers than GSW was pretty crazy. 

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I guess I didn't think of the turnovers as being a particular issue with Smart was because they all fucked up a lot. Tatum, Brown, I even saw Horford give away a few head-slappers. As the line goes, criticizing Smart for it would be like giving out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.

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On 6/17/2022 at 8:18 PM, Proudfeet said:

Can't wait for GS payroll to hit $200m and paying another $500m in repeater tax or something. Don't think they can actually sign anyone given how far over the cap they are so its all in on Bird Rights until Steph/Klay/Draymond retires?

Quoting myself. :ph34r:

ESPN released their article on the GS' financial situation and apparently they have to pay $390m in salary and tax if they sign Looney and Payton to $6m, and it goes up to $430m if they pay Porter a similar amount. No idea how much higher or lower they can offer, except for Payton who can be paid up to $11m.

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