On Wednesday, the day after the Golden State Warriors beat the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first match in their second-round eliminatory series, Chris Finch, Timberwolves coach, shared some reflections with journalists on the Warriors play style during the post-season. The Warriors, he said, “do a lot of fouling, outfit, push, push and resolution of Rudy”-as in Gobert, the center of Minnesota. The Timberwolves were forced to take matters into their own hands, he added. For example, he cited a time when Brandin Podziemski had caught and faced with Gobert, who is seven feet one, under the basket. Gobert had disentangled himself from Podziemski, who fell on the ground. Gobert had been called for the fault. After Finch made his comments, a journalist relayed them to Podziemski and asked for his catch. Podziemski listened to the journalist’s account with an armed head and a pinch -stricken mouth, his distinctive curls moving on his bang of sweat, his left shadow with a slight bruise. “I mean, these are the playoffs,” said Podziemski. The Warriors series in the first round – a victory for seven games against Houston’s very physical – had been a fight, he continued. The assault of the Rockets “detected us,” he said. In addition, Gobert is one more foot than him, he noted. He shrugged. “What do you want me to do?” The group of journalists laughs.
“Elimonatory basketball” rarely needs an explanation. Everyone knows what it means: the challenges of the games are higher, as is the intensity of the action. The referees become less inclined to whistle and the teams take advantage of it. Games become more physical than they are during the regular season. All of this is familiar now. Despite this, the aggressive game of this post-season has stood out. A certain number of coaches commented on it – not only Finch, which also criticized the number of contacts that the referees allowed in the series of the first Timberwolves round, against the Los Angeles Lakers, but also Kenny Atkinson, the coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers; David Adelman, Denver Nuggets; And Steve Kerr, who leads the Warriors.
“For me, it’s crazy there, what’s going on,” Kerr said on Wednesday. “Everyone is clinging.” It seems that many people. Last season, the referees seemed to pay renewed attention to the degree that the players in attack overturned in contact, trying to draw mistakes; The referees began to call less of these faults, resulting in an increase in contact and a drop in the score. But, this season, the officer seemed to return to his previous form, and the score has checked again – until the after -season, when the referees have, once again, left more contact.
Or at least it’s history. It can be difficult to interpret numbers; The shooting mistakes are down, offensive efficiency has dropped and some games are more like the ball style of the nineteen intimidator than the fluid game than many teams – including, famous, the Golden State Warriors – are generally deployed now. The referees still call a lot of mistakes, but many of them are out of the ball. In addition, some teams have intentionally overturned the weaker free throws, or baking the defenders who are less followers in contact, in order to cause them big problems and force them out of the field. Not all coaches place the officer’s responsibility. “I actually think that they are calling for more faults right now that they did not do it in the regular season,” said Oklahoma City Thunder coach Mark Daigneuult. “They call more ball faults, they call less shots, they call less illegal screens. We follow it carefully. I think the games are a little more physical, but there is probably more real encouragement.”
The Thunder, in this case, was among the most physical and defensive teams during the regular season. They were also the best team in the Western Conference. In the playoffs, however, many teams that kissed a physically physical style were outsider. During the first round of the Eastern Conference, the Orlando Magic, seventh seeded, seemed to have determined that if they could not overcome the Celtics of Boston, second seeded, with a crunchy ball movement or precise jump shots, they may simply be bruising and exhausting them – and that seemed to give them a chance, for a while. The Lakers – Seed subdogs, but with the higher profile and the star pedigree – have a lack of good centers, and therefore, against Minnesota, they played smaller alignments; Short guys tend to get away with more contacts against adults. (As Podziemski said, what else do you expect?) The series between the Warriors and the Rockets was slow, with low score and ugly – that’s exactly the younger and less experienced rockets wanted it. “When people start to complain about calls or tears of physics, you have done your job,” said Rockets coach Ime Udoka. “This is the first step to win the battle. So I said to my team:” When this team begins to cry about it, increasing the intensity, improving aggressiveness and this referee adjusts you. “”
Udoka bet on a psychological reality: the referees were not going to grow everyone out. Conventional wisdom is that players with some faults must reduce their assault, and perhaps even get out of the game, so that they are available for important moments at the end. But there is another way of approaching: the referees do not really want to continue to slow down the game with their whistles, and nobody wants to see the stars being ejected. So, instead, you can remain aggressive and believe that the referees will adjust you. This can be a team -scale strategy, as with the Rockets. But some individual players have always seemed to understand it intuitively. The main one is the defensive star of the Warriors Draymond Green. As noted by the writer NBA Seth Partnow, Green seems to consider the first technical fault he receives in a game as an “invisibility coat”, something that begins to ignore his excessive roughness, because they do not want to give him a second technique, which would lead to an automatic ejection. If anything, Green could become even more physical, knowing that the referees do not want to throw it away.
Players who cannot adapt to this style of after-season have suffered. James Harden, a former MVP who plays for the Clippers of Los Angeles, has the reputation of choking during the match at seven – and he implemented another pathetic performance of the match seven this year, in a defeat against the Nuggets. But, as the basketball writer Tom Haberstroh, Harden’s statistics line in the playoffs, pointed out is largely consistent with his usual game. The difference is that, in the after-season, he always tries to contact his three-point shots, in the hope of a fault called, leading to three free throws. But although it is a winning strategy when these faults are called, it is a bad thing when it is not. In the seven game, this is generally not the case.
Another aspect of this year’s playoffs that received a lot of attention: the outsiders won the first six games played in the second round, which had never happened before in the history of the NBA. Parity seems to be a broader trend: the NBA was a League of Dynasties – Celtics and Lakers within nineteen years, Chicago Bulls in the 90s, Spurs and Warriors more recently. But no team has won a repeated title since 2018, and no reigning champion has exceeded the second round Since the Warriors did in 2019. A number of factors can help explain this: adjust the rules of the project and stronger players’ development systems; Key stars injuries that have made it more difficult to consolidate any advantage; The growing dependence on three -point shooting, which makes it possible that almost no advance is insurmountable – and what even makes large teams vulnerable to the simple fact of being cold. (The Celtics, one of the best teams in the league, have not lost one but two Matches in which they led by twenty points, while pulling a hundred three-point shots, and missing seventy-five.)
But it is also possible that the greatest physics of the game made the court a little more level. Finch is right, insofar as the rise in physicity is risky, even dangerous, for players. But for fans, it is difficult to store completely with Finch and its complaints. After all, these playoffs were remarkably exciting to look at, lots of upheavals and dramatic finishes. And the level of effort that players have shown were amazing. Admittedly, motivation is not measured by faults. But push and jostle resembles a more difficult job than taking a step back and taking a three. And it takes a consequence that you can see, and which can attract you, so that the risk and the sacrifice seem clear. Basketball players are not calculators or statistical machines. They become emotional. They get tired. They repel. ♦
