"They are in their peak in the flow."

-Legendary Hubie Brown on the Warriors, in a recent Spurs-Warriors broadcast

Early in Gothic Ginobili's run, Aaron and I had grand plans for a week of Tennis-related posts -- a Gothic Ginobili Tennis Week. It never materialized. Part of it was my sprawling impossible-to-edit 4000-word rants about Federer vs. Nadal that used sprawling 2000-word segues about the rivalry between Tim Duncan and Steve Nash. [Ed. Note: That was most of it, yes.] But part of Tennis Week's demise was attributed simply to the fact that the connection runs too deeply, is too multifaceted, and it led us to make over-eager connections between every aspect of tennis and every aspect of basketball. It kind of fell flat.

Every direction we tried to take a piece about tennis led to yet another direction about basketball, and vice versa, until the only way to get a proper reckoning for what we were writing is basically to write a book about tennis and another about basketball, and then to be reincarnated in 1989 (when I was born) or 1997 (when Aaron was probably born, because he is a freakishly young person, although he owns a house. He is 12. He is BJ Lawson.)  So... we had some issues with the audience we wanted to reach, put it that way. Fun stuff, but hard to really get a hold of the whole picture and distill it down into something. But obviously there is tennis and there is basketball, and we enjoy both, and given that we are relentlessly, neurotically teasing out reasons for things, we found a lot of overlapping reasons for liking each sport. And so, every once in awhile, I'll get a hold of a connection between the sports that is accessible, simple, well-reasoned, and easy to tell someone over a glass of beers, or a bowl of milkshake. [Ed. Note: Did Alex Dewey just revolutionize milkshake science?]

And I do, and I write a blog about it. So here it is.

 • • •

Ed. Note: The following section was written prior to game six.

As the Spurs and Warriors dually enter a closeout and an elimination game tonight, it wouldn't make me smart to note that Stephen Curry probably has to step up at this point, or that otherwise another Warriors player(s) have to disguise themselves as Stephen Curry. Right now the teams are pretty evenly matched, but the Spurs have a clear advantage - they're a deeper team and have more of a vocabulary with which to gameplan, and after one round of articulate gameplanning by Pop, the tide has turned towards the Spurs.  This isn't to say Pop's outcoaching Mark Jackson. But with his resources, Pop has been able to construct a killer gameplan.

In its simplest form, that gameplan is thus: Make Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson run for their Earthly lives on both ends whenever they're on the court. Yes, yes, they're the Spurs, so they're doing it with "the system": loop plays to free up Tony Parker's jumper, Danny Green flaring out to the wing with elaborate, effective screeners to help him out, kick outs & backdoor cuts. Chip Engellend getting them to hit those wing and corner 3s, Tim Duncan working in the offseason to sprint with Danny Green in triple-digit weather (truth), Pop bein' a good dude and coach overall. Manu and Tony and Boris Diaw finding him consistently. Every writerly cliche about the Spurs except "boring". Yes, yes, it's all true.

But they're making him run. And it's working. The Spurs have done more or less what is at all possible for a team to do defensively against Curry (at least in games 3-5 [Ed. Note: And Game 6 too.]) while still respecting most of their other options. Steph Curry has a bum ankle and the Spurs want to run him out of the gym. Klay Thompson, too, to a lesser extent: The gameplan of forcing Curry into constant motion also works to keep Klay moving, and while he's quite a smart, decent defender for his age, he's not laterally quick enough to be the guy you want slowing down Tony or Kawhi Leonard in the open court. And Klay and Curry have both had periodic foul troubles in their careers, and the Warriors can't afford to work around that impediment.

Pop's found a solid game-plan, and it works for two reasons: a) Damned if they do, and b) damned if they don't. [Ed. Note: Yes indeed, that does encapsulate all present options. Good work Dewey.] If the Warriors decide to completely buy out of this strategy, switch on screens to save energy... the Spurs will exploit them with the matchups (just as effectively as Harrison Barnes has exploited Tony Parker in the strategy of playing Green and Leonard on Curry). If the Warriors simply don't run as fast to conserve energy? Well, that's all the Spurs need to get a completely dominant run in, even if the Warriors are hitting good shots. What's more, the Warriors may conserve energy by not running as hard, but the Spurs really work on offense, and the Spurs conserve energy themselves through the Warriors' decision to conserve. And... if the Warriors do decide to have Stephen Curry chase Tony Parker or Danny Green through every screen? He just gets tuckered out, poor guy. His ankle, already a problem, returns in force, a terror for Warriors fans to behold on every possession. Heck, I just like the game of basketball. Heck: I'm rooting for the other team, and I still worry  about the ankle going out because he steps on Danny Green's foot after the whistle or something.

But, through all my terror about Curry's ankle, through all the paranoia and outbursts of fandom (did you know that seven times out of ten we listen to our music at night guys [Ed. Note: STOP. CEASE. DESIST.]), through all the admiration at Pop's gameplan and at Curry's shooting and at Duncan and Bogut's defense, and Kawhi and Duncan's two-man game... through it all, I still end up coming back to tennis.

 • • •

This is because tennis is one of the most strangely unnatural sports for a human being to play, at least in terms of the motion required. Hands up if you cringed at the weird, long-striding motions of Rose and Westbrook off the dribble even before they got injured. Tennis is like that first-step-then-finish sequence repeated hundreds of times per match (potentially upwards of a thousand, depending on the match-up) and dozens of times per game. And here's the thing: Everyone in tennis understands all of this. Everyone in tennis understands that sometimes your ankle swells up or your toe looks like it's dead tissue or you get a pimple right on the center of your back that never stops itching. Okay, scratch that last one. Anyway, everyone in tennis understands what a grind it is. You'll get concussions in football, you'll get tendinitis in basketball. And you'll get giant-ankle syndrome in tennis. It's not "if", it's "when". And also it's "disgusting".

In this series, going into Game 4, Steph Curry had run about 9.74 miles. It's not at all implausible to suggest he's picked up that rate in the ensuing two games. Call it 18 miles (after Game 5) that the Spurs have forced him to run thus far. You see comparable stats with tennis (which, like basketball, is also played on a ridiculous, grind-it-out schedule that can see a player play two key, high-career-leverage-point matches in about 40 hours, each match lasting about 4-5 hours apiece). Players running several miles per game, and in a period of hours. Players running not in the sense of "Gee, thank you for running that fun little 5k for our charity on soft quarter-mile tracks" types of runs but "every step is the apocalypse and I'm lucky if I get to run back on defense and get five seconds to stop and think". Michael Chang in the 1989 French Open famously shot a bunch of moonshot lobs to give himself rest while he was playing, because he was cramping up. Tennis doesn't stop for you, put it that way. And neither does basketball. Especially if the other team knows you need to rest.

Given that everyone knows about the foundational question of needing rest (and everyone knows that everyone knows that, etc.), energy forms a crucial part of strategy -- both in basketball and in tennis. In tennis you run players ragged in almost the same way the Spurs are running the Warriors' guards. The Warriors "are in their peak in the flow" as Hubie put it (God, what a sentence, right?) and sometimes I think that's because the other team isn't forcing Curry into a nightmare situation of having to run four awkward, bumpy, knee-knocked miles just to keep his team in the game. Defense is easier when you're jogging back in a straight line, and offense is easier (and for Curry, more efficient) when you don't have to run off a defender to get an open look. Rafa Nadal, Andy Murray, and Novak Djokovic are three of the world's top four players, and each of them, for all their grace and proprioception? They are not in their peak in the flow. They are more like the Spurs or Grizzlies: Yes, they make wonderful returns, but their essence is to make reasonably brilliant plays and to wear the other player out with matchless energy. They send their player left and right and left and right, a bit faster now, come on now, like a gym class from hell. [Ed. Note: It's part of why my ill-fated love for John Isner is doomed from the start -- the man is simply never going to be able to grind it out against those elite players enough times in a single season to win a slam. Still love you, John Isner.]

Roger Federer is the only glaring exception, because he doesn't strictly have the grindhouse in his wheelhouse. He doesn't grind out 5-hour victories against the other three; he's too old for that. No; he conserves his energy with his literally-the-greatest-of-all-time vision and athletic grace, and when he picks his spots, he runs like a deer and takes what he needs. And as his energy wanes, Federer will probably be able to carry it out still longer. But if his opponents can force him to run, he's vulnerable. He still routinely utterly dominates sets against the best in the world, and even pulled out an unthinkable 4-set domination against Andy Murray. But if you're one of the other top players and you test his energy enough, and he's had to play two five-setters in 48 hours, he'll even start to make mistakes. Well, okay, it will still be the second-best tennis ever played, but still, it's a huge and glaring dropoff. There's just about nothing stranger than Fed making an unforced error that isn't a next-level athletic vision unfulfilled or a set he's resting on; no, an unforced error that's just a sheer, dumb mistake that any of us could have made. And suddenly Nadal or Murray or Djokovic looks like the smart one, because now he's right at Federer's level skill-wise - or even above Federer - and Roger's foe also has all the energy on his side. Even Federer plays with energy, in the sense that if he can get his opponent running without doing much running himself, that's a good sign that he's winning. And some of the most shocking plays are when a player like Andy Murray (noted for his conditioning and endurance) takes the bait, goes left and right for two straight minutes on a volley while his opponent just stands there... and then he wins the rally, and his opponent looks almost more exhausted, realizing that he's going to have to run all day just to have a hope of penetrating that first line.

I can't bring this to a literary close. All I can say is that's what it evokes in me when I see what the Spurs are doing to Stephen Curry, trying to frustrate him and run him out of the gym. And as Game 6 (and the possibility of elimination) approaches, this young, next-level athlete has more than a little bit of a spark in him, a coach that recognizes and cultivates him, and a team around him that can support this... And if he ever wants to take the bait, run out of the gym, and still succeed, well, that's somewhere that next-level athletes can get to, and as far as next-level athletes go, it's hard to bet against Stephen Curry. It might not happen this year, though.

 • • •

Yeah, the Warriors lost, but in this series and the previous one they've established themselves in the "if healthy, then contenders" tail of the NBA. And Steph Curry has established himself as a Nash-like player with his both his shooting and his passing. Aaron and I were talking about it, and you know, Steph and Klay's limiting factor right now as players is their mediocre rates of conversion at the rim. If they can do that; that is to say, if they can learn to score and draw a bit more contact in the lane with their existing skillsets? They will be excellent and the Warriors' team will follow. Harrison Barnes, gruesome fall aside, has looked great in this series. Ezeli's a nice piece. The health issues of Bogut and Lee should make for an interesting story to watch for. Overall, with such a brilliant coaching job by Mark Jackson (some quibbles aside), it has to be disappointing for such a talented, coherent team to go down like this. But it's worth noting that a few factors went the Spurs way in the way of injury and foul trouble that allowed the Spurs to make these gameplans work. The Warriors can't be disheartened by such an impressive season, and as time goes on they will only inch closer to their terrifying primes. It's never happy to lose a series, but the Warriors have done well for themselves and hopefully gained the respect of a large contingent of fans over the course of their special season. They'll be back.

Heart breaker, heart breaker
You stole the love right out of my heart
Heart breaker, heart breaker
I wanna tear your world apart

-- The Rolling Stones, Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)

The NBA playoffs can be a harsh mistress -- you get a lot of intense games, but you also get a lot of heartbreakers. You know the type. Those deflating games where a team is, retrospectively, on the absolute verge of victory. A high-leverage game that could've gone either way. The winning team gets to experience the rushing elation of a minor theft -- the losing team takes a bitter pill. This year's playoffs have an air of inevitability around them, and that's cast a minor pall on the proceedings. And that's a bit of a shame, because we're having a remarkably close and snippy season. Heartbreaking loss after heartbreaking loss -- gutty win after gutty win. All over the place! Gut punches abound.

All that said, there's a tendency for analysts and bloggers to take on vacuous airs when the subject of a heartbreaker loss comes to play. "This team has no chance of winning the series," they say -- "how could they, after a gut punch like that?" Smart analysts galore cast aspersions to the mental toughness of the team and conflate heightened probabilities with statistical certainty. So, on the inadvertent request of Dr. Jeremy Abramson, I decided to take a bit of time to clear a few things up. For today's playoff question, I'm examining a subject near and dear to the hearts of NBA fans everywhere -- how does a heartbreaker loss affect a series, really?

• • •

DEFINING A HEARTBREAKER, and THE THREE BIG QUESTIONS

This was a bit tough, but I think I finally came to a reasonable conclusion. For my definition of a heartbreaker loss, I'm going with a road game lost by 1-2 points in regulation or any game lost in overtime. The logic here is simple. If the game was lost by 1-2 points in regulation, one single shot -- a three pointer -- could've won them the game. A single additional shot. They were on the road, which means they were a single shot from silencing a hostile crowd. If the game went into overtime, the same is true -- one more shot, one more free throw, one more anything and the game was theirs.

The logic behind excluding three point contests is simple. In a three point game, the best you could reasonably do with a single shot is force overtime. And if you played regulation evenly, overtime is more than likely going to be a 50-50 coin flip either way -- hard to really call that a heartbreaker so much as a bad break. So there you have it. It's a 1-2 point margin or an overtime game. For my data, I used information from Basketball Reference (where else?) and compiled a score of information by hand for all heartbreaker losses from 1993 to 2013. It was something of a massive slog, but I'll share my final dataset with anyone who asks -- let me know if you'd like to look at it.

Now that we've defined our "heartbreaker" losses, let's examine some big-picture questions.

• HOW COMMON ARE THEY?
  

Not as common as you might think, actually. They've been exceedingly prevalent over the past two years, but that's something of a statistical outlier -- this is the first two year period with more than 20 playoff heartbreakers in the last 20 years. Here's a graph to illustrate the point.

The red bar indicates this year, when we (clearly) have a strong chance at accruing a few more of these types of games before the playoffs conclude. In general, heartbreakers are relatively rare events. They don't happen particularly often, and when they do happen, they tend to have a few games clumped together into a relatively small group of hard-fought series -- for instance, this year's 10 heartbreakers are clumped into seven of the series we've played out so far. In 2006, five of the 14 heartbreakers were concentrated in two of that year's most contested series -- DAL/MIA and DAL/SAS. Et cetera, et cetera.

• DOES THE HEARTBROKEN TEAM ALWAYS LOSE?

No! Not at all, actually. There's a relatively persistent trope that's been running around for a while that a team can't possibly come back from a road heartbreaker. Especially if they're the road team in the series -- if they lack home court advantage, they couldn't possibly win a series where they let a game get away on the road, right? Sort of, but not quite. Here are the raw series win/loss numbers when a team suffers a playoff heartbreaker.

TEAMS THAT HAVE HOME COURT ADVANTAGE: If the team with home court advantage suffers a road heartbreaker, it's hardly much of an ill omen for their chances at all. In the 20 year period surveyed, homecourt teams that suffered road heartbreakers went 37-22 in the series they suffered the heartbreaker in. That's a reasonably good winning percentage (63%), but it's not 100% robust -- for instance, in five cases, the heartbreaker actually ended up being the deciding lever in a series where the homecourt-blessed team outscored the visitors handily over every other game of the series.

TEAMS THAT DON'T HAVE HOME COURT ADVANTAGE: If the team without home court advantage suffers a road heartbreaker, their chances are certainly slimmer... but they definitely aren't extinguished. It's not a death knell, even if things look rough. Teams that start the series on the road are 18-53 in series where they suffer a road heartbreaker, a 25% winning percentage. There's certainly some truth to the idea that a HCA-lacking team that loses a road heartbreaker has missed their best chance at winning the series. But there's also truth to the idea that the road heartbreaker tells more about how evenly matched the series is than it does about the team's chances to win the series. In four of those series losses, the heartbroken team actually managed to outscore the homecourt team over the other non-heartbreak games of the series.

Overall, teams that suffer heartbreakers are 55-75 in their heartbreaker series over the 20 year span examined.

• HOW OFTEN ARE HEARTBREAKERS THE DECIDING GAME?

This was an interesting sub-question I had when I finally got my data together. Out of all these series, how often did the heartbreak loss represent the deciding game of the series? That is to say -- how often would a flip in the heartbreaker have flipped the results of the series? The number was a bit surprising, at least to me. In 24 out of the 130 cases in this dataset, the heartbreaker game represented a game that could've flipped the series. That is to say that the entire series could've been flipped with just a single additional shot or -- in many cases -- a single free throw. Of course, once you looked at the point differential, one starts to wonder why the number wasn't higher. Even though teams that suffer heartbreaker losses were 55-75 in the heartbreaker series, they posted a positive point differential (0.35 PPG) among their series when taken as a whole. That's extremely, extremely close. Closer than I'd expect, especially looking at the numbers regarding road team series losses and the scant number of teams who lost the series but won the point differential outside of that game. To summarize the contents of the last few paragraphs, a short table:

Series Win and Series Loss are pretty self-explanatory. "Flip" implies that the series would've flipped if they'd won their heartbreaker. DIFF/GM gives the point differential for the team, and CHAMP indicates whether the team with the heartbreaker loss won that year's championship. That's right -- 10 of the games in this dataset involved teams that would-be champions losing a road heartbreaker during their run. That's eight of the last twenty champions, listed below:

• 2012: MIA @ BOS, G4 -- Miami loses 93-91 -- in OT -- to give Boston a 2-2 series tie.

• 2011: DAL @ POR, G4 -- Dallas loses 84-82 to give Portland a 2-2 series tie. (The "Brandon Roy" game.)

• 2009: LAL @ UTA, G3 -- Los Angeles loses 88-86. They ended up winning the series 4-1.

• 2005: SAS @ SEA, G3 -- San Antonio loses 92-91, missing one free throw in the final minute that could've tied it and shanking four separate shots -- many wide open. They'd close the series in 6.

• 2003: SAS @ NJN, G4 -- San Antonio loses 77-76, in the finals. The Spurs dominated the Nets for most of the series, but they gave Game 4 away -- they went cold for 2:37 to end the game, scoring nothing from Manu Ginobili's two free throws to Duncan's flush with 6 to play. In the meanwhile, the Spurs missed a bunch of wide-open shots and nearly won the game anyway. They'd win the series in 6 for their second championship.

• 2003: SAS @ PHO, G4 -- San Antonio loses 86-84 to tie the series at two apiece. The Suns actually upset the Spurs in Game one, but the Spurs nearly won the next four games to take the series. Instead, it took six games, with a successful razor-thin road win in game 6 to close it out.

• 2002: LAL @ SAC, G5 -- Los Angeles loses 92-91. It would be their last loss of the season. Welp.

• 1998: CHI @ IND, G4 -- Chicago lost 96-94 to the Reggie Pacers. This series was kind of funny -- Indiana won their three games by a combined total of 7 points, while the Bulls won their four by a total of 36. And, obviously, they won the title.

• 1998: CHI @ IND, G3 -- Chicago lost 107-105. Same series as above.

• 1995: HOU @ UTA, G1 -- Houston lost 100-102, in the opening game of their postseason. They'd win 3 of their next 4 against Utah (including a 140-126 annihilation in game 2) to take the series, and would eventually sweep the finals.

• • •

Overall, the presiding narrative -- the idea that a road heartbreaker is an omen of utter doom -- isn't exactly right. Close, but not quite there. Road teams posting a 25% winning percentage in the aftermath of a road heartbreaker is hardly as bad as it looks on its face, given that you're talking about lesser teams who are essentially giving their opponents a one game handicap. The fact that it's that high is more a testament to what the heartbreaker means to the road-starting team on a macro level -- it means that the gap between the two is hardly insurmountable, and whether the series is long or not, they have a chance to push them. As you can see with this year's mercurial Warriors squad.

And the heartbreaker isn't just suffered by the downtrodden -- eight of the last twenty champions suffered one such heartbreaker loss on their march to the title. Will that continue this year? Certainly possible -- five of the remaining eight playoff teams (Golden State, San Antonio, Memphis, Oklahoma City, and New York) have already suffered heartbreakers, and there are still ample games remaining for the final three holdouts (Miami, Chicago, and Indiana) to join the party. We'll see. If you have any questions regarding this analysis, feel free to comment on this post -- I'll be responding to comments for most of the day.

Stay frosty, folks.

The Spurs are in trouble.

It's self-evident at this point, but it must be said regardless. The San Antonio Spurs went 35-6 at home in the regular season this year. They nevertheless lost game two of their best-of-seven series against the Golden State Warriors. What's worse is that the Spurs lost the game in embarrassing, befuddling fashion. They missed open shots. They couldn't stop Klay Thompson. Their decision-making down the stretch was a bit confusing, and they stopped playing their brand of basketball despite experiencing naught more than a modicum of defensive resistance to it. They lost faith in their own system and started isolating in an attempt to win the game. That's not how San Antonio plays basketball. Not when they win, anyway.

Worse yet, that was at home -- we haven't even seen what the Oracle is going to look like for Golden State's home games. Which, after last night, are all they need to win if they want to win this series. If the Warriors hold serve at home, the Spurs are done. Which is a rather terrifying thought for any self-respecting Spurs fan, given the furor of their bay area crowd and the tendency for San Antonio's role players to fade a bit in road game situations. Regardless. After two games, we don't really have the slightest clue what's going on in this series. But I'm going to try as hard as I can to explain it anyway.

• • •

FIRST: WHO ARE THESE TEAMS, ON A FLIGHTY METAPHORICAL LEVEL?

The Warriors are easy to place, at least for me. They're the gambler's wayward son.

Look at it this way. There's this town bum -- he's a poor drunkard, long ago wealthy but on something akin to a 17-year cold streak. His once-considerable fortune has been squandered and he lives on the streets, cobbling together pennies to gamble at a local casino every week or so. Loses it all, of course -- that's just his way. He represents the prior-to-2013 Warriors -- the post-TMC crew that's been so unlucky and unfortunate as to boggle the mind and distress the soul. He has a child, a son barely born at the time of his tremendous fortune. As his luck dwindled, his wife left him. Took the kid, too.

Enter 2013 -- the son returns. He lets his father sleep in the hotel, and upon his father's prodding, he decides to enter the casino. Thing is? He's never played a lick of cards before. The kid is a golden boy, a bright kid who nevertheless had never gambled before in his life. He only has a vague recollection of what each poker hand means, and he hasn't yet figured out that a flush is better than a straight, and he's still confused that he lost that hand where he had a two-pair and his friend had 3-of-a-kind. Nevertheless, the kid is crushing it. He's winning hands he shouldn't have played and showing absolutely no fear at the table. Which makes sense, because he isn't sure what he has to fear. Or what anything means at all. The chips keep piling up for him, and the house wonders if he's cheating. But the kid isn't. He's just on all the rolls his father always dreamed of, and given that it's his first time gambling, he has no reason to be tight or concerned -- he doesn't have any human conception of "normal." He's just playing a game he scarcely understands, and playing it incomprehensibly well.

As for the Spurs? They're the sly accountant -- an experienced poker hand who's nevertheless underwater at the table and completely at a loss. The accountant considers himself a good judge of talent, of tells, of hand-quality -- all that said, he has no idea how to handicap this new kid. He's as confident with a junk hand as he is with a good one. He's destroying his betters on hands the betters have never lost with -- Christ, did that kid REALLY just play a 4-of-a-kind to beat my ace-10 full house? Did that seriously just happen? Hell -- the kid had just bust out an old Denver businessman. The businessman had been having the night of his life in the casinos, he was up some ungodly sum before he chose to sit down at the kid's table. The accountant had played with the businessman earlier that night -- he was good. Very good. And when the kid bust the businessman out, the accountant found himself a bit happy -- he knew he'd be at that table later, and the businessman was on such a roll that it was hard to imagine he'd be an easy out.

But he never quite saw that kid coming. Apparently, nobody did.

• • •

SECOND: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE FAVORITES?

The time for illustrative metaphors is over -- the time for a frank examination of what the Spurs are doing wrong and the Warriors are doing right is now. And to these eyes, the problem is pretty simple. The Warriors are making bad shots and the Spurs are missing good shots. I don't mean that to be a backhanded compliment or an insult, either -- the Warriors are such a terrifying team to face for that exact reason. The Spurs defense is built around the concept of making the opposing team's shots as difficult as possible. Try to goad the opposing team into taking the worst shots on the table, then simply hope they miss them. The Warriors are funny, in that they actually can make those shots.

Now, of course, that poses the question -- SHOULD they be taking those shots? No. Obviously not. They try to take easier shots, they screen off Curry and Thompson and they run decent plays to open up their guys. But if faced with a situation where they're being goaded into taking a lot of bad shots, they're not going to simply fall apart like a wobbly Jenga board, like the Lakers or the Nets or the Clippers. They're going to make more of them than the opposing team expects. The key to defending Golden State -- at least when they're as hot as they've been this postseason -- doesn't really exist. As long as they're in even a semblance of rhythm, the shot is at least remotely malleable to their will. You simply need to hope that Curry and Thompson stop making terrible shots, like pull-up threes over a stout defender or off-balance one-legged three pointers with a hand in their face. And they might, sure. But they aren't incapable of making those shots like a Steve Blake or a Gerald Wallace. In fact, nobody on the Warriors is strictly incapable of making shots -- there's nobody to funnel the ball to, no offensive sieve to try and redirect their action to. You just need to make their shots more difficult and hope they stop making them. Against the Nuggets, they didn't. Against the Spurs, with the shots even harder than they were in the Denver series, they still aren't.

As for the Spurs offense, this is an important point -- the Spurs are missing a lot of wide-open shots. I counted eight wide-open threes that the Spurs completely clanked last night, including five totally open corner threes from Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. Both of them usually make that shot. Missing that many wide open threes is absurd, and a relatively unexpected wrinkle going into this series. Additionally, the Spurs were missing a lot of open at-rim layups -- Duncan missed a particularly glaring one where he sealed off Bogut and had several seconds of prep time early in the game. Parker missed a point blank nearly-uncontested layup in the last two minutes. So did Danny Green. Andrew Bogut is a wonderful defensive presence and he affected many shots. But the Spurs weren't even making the shots they created when they ran their offense, which may partly explain why most of the Spurs started going away from their offense and isolating. Especially Manu and Gary Neal, who both played like putzes for most of last night's contest. Just befuddling. If the Spurs continue to miss that many open shots over the remainder of the series, they'll lose handily.

• • •

THIRD: HOW DO YOU ADJUST?

There are two adjustments I think each team needs to make if they intend to win this series.

If you're San Antonio, you need to...

• STOP PLAYING GARY NEAL. This isn't meant to be impugning Gary's spirit. And he's provided a decent shot or two over the course of the series. But my GOD, man -- this is not the series for Gary. When he's on the court facing off against Klay Thompson or Stephen Curry, he's giving them open looks. The Warriors aren't always capitalizing, but that's really not something the Spurs can bet on going forward. If the Warriors stop making impossibly well-contested shots, they'll probably try taking a few slightly more open ones. Combine that with the fact that Neal is bogging down San Antonio's offense (I counted two separate fourth quarter  possessions in Game #2 where Neal dribbled, isolated, and refused to pass the ball out to Parker, Duncan, or any other player on the Spurs despite having a game within 8 points and a chance to make some ground. He doesn't run the offense. He needs to get off the floor.)

• MODIFIED SMALLBALL -- CALL IT... QUICKBALL? This may seem to run counter to adjustment #1, since Pop tends to put Gary out in those sort of 3-guard lineups with Manu and Tony. But I think Nando De Colo or Tracy McGrady are both going to be superior to Gary defensively given their size and their improved passing abilities, and that's worth something. The Spurs have come back in both games when they've played small and started loosening up. By trying out more Kawhi-at-the-four lineups with Duncan at center and three guards darting from lane to lane, the Spurs can speed up their offense and leave the Warriors fewer opportunities to switch the Spurs into a bad assignment where a plodding big man can't get back to the three point line. The quicker the lineup, the better this works. With their general shot release as quick as it is, the Spurs need to play lineups that can recover fast enough. So far, smallball works best for this. Call it quickball.

If you're Golden State, you need to...

• RUN YOUR OFFENSE THE ENTIRE GAME. At the moment, the most disturbing thing for the Spurs has to be that the Warriors have essentially seen fit to let the Spurs back into both the games we've played so far in the series. If the Warriors simply ran their fast paced, fluid offense over the full 48 minutes, the Spurs probably lose both these games by double digits. At home. To a six-seed. Welp. When up by a large lead, the Warriors have an odd tendency to start running the clock with about 12 minutes left in the game. That's now how they play, and it leads to a god-awful out-of-rhythm shot just about every time. If they actually ran their offense in the fourth quarter, they put both of these games away far earlier.

• CONTEST SAN ANTONIO'S OPEN SHOTS. You know how I mentioned that the Spurs missed a ton of open shots? Well, the fact that they got those shots is something of a problem -- the Spurs are a top-10 offense that's punched below its weight this season, with the present ceiling of "best in the league" as they demonstrated last season. If that offense comes to play when the series moves to Oakland, every open shot they give up is going to hurt. A lot. Jackson and the Warriors need to look at the tape and figure out how exactly their defense keeps breaking down and cut that out. They've gotten lucky with the Spurs missing so many shots. It may happen again that the Spurs simply miss open shots, but it's much more likely that the Warriors make their adjustments and eliminate the open shots in the first place.

And if you're a fan of either team? Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

(If your power doesn't go out.)

Hey, folks. Aaron McGuire here. Are you having a good morning? If you're a fan of the San Antonio Spurs, you might be. Of course, there are several serious analytic reasons for last night's game to worry Spurs fans. The Warriors brazenly outplayed the Spurs over the first 44 minutes of the game, and it took a sudden miracle confluence of San Antonio's elite defense of this season, elite offense of last season, and some completely incredible Warriors follies to lose the game. This isn't going to be a series the Warriors are simply content with lying down and losing. The Spurs are going to have to wrest every win out of Golden State's cold, dead hands to get to the conference finals. Because a team this good and a team this hot simply isn't going to bow out quietly.

All that said, I find myself uniquely unqualified to write about this game. Why? Because my power went out with 1:18 remaining in regulation. What's more, IT DIDN'T COME BACK UNTIL HALF AN HOUR AFTER THE GAME HAD FINISHED. For a Spurs devotee watching his first Spurs game in HD (...no, I had never seen a Spurs game in HD before tonight), that was a unique experience. It was a unique experience that will merit several furious calls to my power company and the possible purchase of a backup generator. But that's besides the point. Given that my phone had only 2% battery life at the time my power went out (and boy, did I time that BEAUTIFULLY!), I had to do some crazy stuff to finish watching the game. I felt this made a reasonably compelling post. Here's what happened. Continue reading →