Blarg. Dammit so much. Okay, though I doubt he'll rebut me since he didn't last time because he's a big hairy girl and I completely trashed every one of his points in the Grizzlies series (and was proven correct on like 9 of 10).
You'll forgive me if I yawn at the match-up hokum because the Grizzlies were supposed to match-up well with the Spurs, who obliterated them in four. My personal theory on why Heat-Pacers went seven games? It's because Indiana was the second-best team in the Eastern Conference and they had a terrific starting five that played like 30 minutes a night together.
So what if Duncan is a tick worse than Hibbert defending the rim? He showed he's plenty good in that regard the previous series and Splitter is a longer (and better) second banana defensively than David West is. Since when is two not better than one? The Spurs throw 14-feet of big man at you in the paint, and while I'm not a historian by any means, I do seem to recall that working out okay in 1999 and even 2003.
It just continues to blow my mind that people --even some Spurs fans who should know better-- refuse to accept the plain facts in front of them, that this is a terrific defensive basketball team, with an absolutely dominant starting five. Their only weakness is that they don't play as many minutes together as some of the more celebrated starting units across the league, but Ginobili and Diaw aren't huge drop-offs from Green and Splitter. Leonard is just as long as Paul George, Green is more reliable than the combustible Stephenson (and again, has a better backup), and while Parker doesn't have Hill's length, he is smarter at funneling people where he wants them to go.
That's just defense, where until proven otherwise I absolutely refuse to accept that the Spurs will be any worse off than the Pacers were, holding Miami to a mid-90's average and in the low 40's in shooting percentage. The Spurs lead the league in defensive efficiency (95.4) in the postseason. The Pacers finished at 101.6. The Spurs are also second offensively, the Pacers were tenth.
The Spurs just played what was, by most accounts, the best defense in the league and they riddled them full of holes. They found plenty of open shots on the corners, Parker solved every puzzle they threw at him, and Ginobili found plenty of guys for easy layups.
Before addressing the fallacy of your main argument, lets go back to the fiction of the Thunder beating the Spurs with their defense. Pop has stated, ad nauseam, that it was the Spurs defense that let down in that series, not their offense. In games 4-6 they scored 103, 103, and 99 points, and that was without any contributions from Splitter and next to none from Leonard and Green.
Game 3, you throw out. The Spurs had no legs at all, the Thunder were at home and absolutely desperate at 0-2 and a 20-game winning streak had to end eventually. Game 4 was the real anomaly. Ibaka-Perkins-Collison are never going to shoot 22-of-25 again. Ever. Just a freak occurence that came at the worst time. Game 5 they just couldn't get a stop down the stretch as Harden and Durant refused to miss. That game, more than any other, was what Pop showed to the team in training camp and he wasn't pointing out the offensive failings. Game 6 was a refereeing atrocity, as blatantly 8-on-5 as any game in league history.
Ironically, L.J. has pointed out, numerous times, how the Spurs lost because the Thunder shot historically well from long-twos, the least efficient shot in basketball. Whether it was Ibaka, Durant, Harden or even Westbrook they just shot the lights out when it mattered. Now he's changing his tune and saying the offense lost the series. Good lord.
Now, that tangent aside, lets get back to main point, Spurs offense vs. Heat defense. I find it adorable that LJ linked to offensive rebounding and post play as the only way to score on the Heat when the Celtics took Miami (a better Miami, I'd argue, with a better Wade and Bosh) to seven with ZERO offensive rebounding and next to no post game.
How'd they pull off this feat? Well, they had a good defense (check), but also they had a superduperstar point guard (double check) in Rajon Rondo.
I know it seems like eight years ago when the Spurs last played a playoff game, but really the Grizzlies series wasn't that far back. I contend that the specter of a "fearsome defense with athletic lengthy defenders" will be far less of a culture shock for the Spurs than playing a great point guard who can score and pass will be for the Heat, since they haven't faced an animal like that like since March. With all due respect to George Hill, he's no Tony Parker. Tony is faster. Tony can dribble. Tony knows a few tricks. Tony also plays with a few smart guys, too.
I'd argue that the 2013 Spurs, much like the 2012 Spurs, are a superior squad to the 2012 Celtics. Parker is better than Rondo, with many more clubs in his bag. Duncan is better than Garnett. Splitter is better than Bass. I suppose they were a match-up case too?
Maybe the Heat just play close series against good teams? Could that be it? Maybe the Finals last season would've been close if Harden didn't miss a million open shots and Scott Brooks didn't play his worst player like 30 minutes a night? Just throwing it out there.
I'm not freaking out about the notion of Parker being trapped. The Spurs bigs screen too creatively for him to be limited consistently. The offense doesn't have him dribbling around for 23 seconds looking to make something happen, a sitting duck for traps. They run him off the ball around screens to mix it up. And even if he doesn't have the ball, I'll take the Spurs 4-on-3 every time. What makes their offense so great is that virtually everyone can pass, not just the point guard, and everyone is unselfish and bent about looking for the best possible shot (except for Gary Neal).
If the Heat defense are the sentinels, than the Spurs offense is Neo. It's that simple. If you watched Game 7 against the Pacers, you saw these rare sequences where every now and then Indy strung six, seven passes together and got a wide open three. Maybe you missed it because these looks were bookended by turnovers or stupid contested shots. Well the Spurs are smart enough and disciplined enough to get the very best of what the Pacers got, not as the exception but rather the norm. The Spurs will not lack for open shots against the Heat. Whether they knock them down or not will tell the tale.
One, I'm not so sure Battier will even be in the rotation for the Heat. He could be cooked. Two, even if he is, I think Splitter would have an advantage over him because nobody buys Battier's flops anymore. And I definitely like Splitter down low against Miller. That's laughable. Mainly though looking at Splitter from the sole prism of back-to-the-basket post game is faulty. His meat-and-potatoes is being the roll man and against those above-mentioned 4-on-3 situations, that's where he'd clean up. Splitter scores at a pretty good percentage when he's guarded by nobody, and nobody was his most common defender vs. the Grizzlies.
Defensively if Splitter can't hang with the Heat's small lineups, I'm still more than happy to go to war with Duncan-Leonard-Green-Ginobili-Parker vs. Bosh-James-x-Wade-Chalmers. I'm not saying we have a clear edge in this scenario, but if these quintets face each other I think the Spurs can hold their own, with a couple of defensive pigeons in Miami's fivesome, just as there were with Memphis'.
Yes, the Heat were so good during the regular season that they finished 1.3 points worse in scoring margin than the Thunder and were basically the same in that stat as the Spurs before San Antonio took April off. Miami won a lot of close games against a lot of crap Eastern teams, going to the mattresses twice against Orlando, against Sacramento, against the Cavs B team, trailing by 20+ against the Celtics and Knicks, so on. , their 27-game win streak was snapped by a worse Chicago lineup than the starless Spurs defeated.
I'm not saying the Heat aren't good, but they are overrated, and if they've been coasting during the playoffs, then I fail to see when during the regular season they weren't coasting. I think Dwyane Wade is legitimately limited, that Bosh is basically Andrea Bargnani at this point (with better defense), and they have the same high-variance role player problems from game to game that every contender deals with. This notion that Wade and Bosh consciously or unconsciously gave less than their best for three rounds of playoffs and forced LeBron to do everything because they're lazy jerks is ridiculous. They gave what they had. It could just be that those guys peaked too early, which numerous Spurs teams have done these past six years. Furthermore, I don't think it's exactly the smartest strategy, to wear down your best player to the point of near exhaustion, just because you can. It would've been smarter to just win each series in four games and get the maximum amount of rest, if it was that easy, no?
You wanna see coasting? Go see the Spurs in April. Go see teams tanking for lottery balls. Maybe I'm naive, but I think playoff teams play hard.
In the playoffs the Spurs are shooting .362 from deep, the Heat are shooting .356. The Spurs are allowing .336, the Heat are allowing .325. Man, I hope the Spurs will be able to overcome that .005 net difference.
Ray Allen shot a whopping .350 from three (and a whopping .377 overall) in the Finals. He shot .293 from downtown in 2010 for the Celtics against the Lakers in his Finals appearance before that. He did light it up at a .524 clip in 2008 vs. LA, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the "heat of the Finals lights" don't really affect Allen and he shoots what he shoots and is subject to to whims of the small-sample gods as anyone else.
Yes, Shane Battier shot .577 from three against OKC, but is that any more telling than the .350 he shot from three in seven games vs. Boston the series before that or the .273 he shot in six games vs. the Pacers the series before that? If you want to slice the micro-splits even further, you could conclude that Battier, in Game 4 of the Finals, the most important game of the series since it was the one which tilted the series firmly in Miami's favor, shot only .250 (1-of-4) from downtown. What a choker!
Your goofiest example is Miller, who was 0-of-3 from deep in the first four games of the finals and then 7-of-8 in the last one. If you want to attach meaning to that, then you might as well retire Steve Kerr's jersey at the AT&T center.
Is one game of a sample size that much less significant than five? My guess would be that Allen, Battier, Miller, etc. will all shoot somewhere close to their career norms in the Finals, and if they don't, then it's simple dumb luck and nothing as dumb as being clutch or a choker. It's random variance. Green and Bonner are right there with them in career numbers, with Ginobili and Leonard a notch below.
More significant to me is what form guys are in lately, and I'll take the ones who have good strokes going and have fresher legs.
I suppose this dovetails from LeBron's comment about being "40 or 50 times better" than he was in 2007. Now far be it for me to argue math with a dude who joined the NBA straight out of high school, but as I recall, the 2007 LeBron singlehandedly put the Billups-Hamilton-'Sheed-Prince-Big Ben Pistons away and had a 48 point effort in Game 5 of that series, scoring something like 25 points in a row.
That guy was pretty good, and the Spurs contained him in the Finals.
I wonder if James, perhaps by hypnosis, completely expunged the 2011 Finals from his memory. If he's 50 times the player he was in 2007, how much better is he now than June 2011, eleventy-billion?
James ran completely roughshod over both the Celtics and the Bulls that season and then promptly crapped the bed against Dallas. He was far worse in that series than he was against the Spurs six years ago.
I'm not saying James isn't great, because he is, and that he's not the best player in this series, because he is, but this isn't, pardon the pun, the Spurs' first rodeo and Pop and co. have been pretty good in the past at containing the other team's best guy, and if not stopping him than stopping everyone else.
Look, if Miam's big three all play well, then yes, the Heat will win. If only James plays well though and Bosh & Wade are stuck at their Pacers level, then I like the Spurs very much. If Bosh & Wade are good and we get '11 Mavericks LeBron, then I also like the Spurs very much.
Maybe if both teams were going into the series in completely equal cir stances as far as rest/injuries/play-off stress, then I'd give the Heat the edge based on having the best player and home court advantage.
However, if ever the Spurs were going to pull the upset, the 2013 playoffs have so far unfolded in the perfect scenario. The Spurs have played just 14 postseason games and have been off for nine days. That's nine days for the best coach in the planet and his staff to dissect every bit of Heat film. If those guys have any weaknesses to exploit, I'm betting that Pop has discovered it and drilled his charges on it.
Meanwhile, the Heat have just endured seven grueling games vs. a very physical Pacers team that forced James to use up a bunch of his fuel tank and knocked Wade around quite a bit too. The Spurs have their rotation set and guys know their roles. They've watched so much Heat film by now that they probably could put on a Miami jersey and run any play Spoelstra calls.
The Heat rotation, by contrast, is in total flux. Neither Miller or Battier have any idea where they stand. They've had almost no time to prepare for a Spurs team that is 180 degrees different from the one they've just played. They have almost no frame of reference for them and haven't faced Ginobili in over two years. It'll probably be like Game 3 before they figure out he's left-handed.
Also, DeJuan Blair, Nando de Colo and Tracy McGrady would've been the sixth-seventh-eighth men on the Pacers, and that has to mean something.
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