Reply With Quote
I agree. It will cost them some with Harrington getting a few open looks on the arc, but Harrington is 6-8, 245. Dampier can consistently dunk on his ass and he can clean up the glass too. He can cause problems for THEM. The whole rationale of defending the three-point line by playing small didn't bear out -- GS averaged 8-25 for the year, they went 10-30 last night. They're going to chuck up a bunch of threes and hit a third of them no matter who we put on the court, why take our best rebounder out of there? I never thought this series would be easy, I predicted Dallas in 6. But if Avery continues to play small, I doubt we even make it back to Oakland for Game 6.
If we lose three more games because Al Harrington suddenly turns into Steve Kerr, then tip your cap to them and go fishing. But you dance with who brung ya.
For the most part we played Duncan straight up in our series last year and he torched us for 32 and 13. We didn't double team him much, instead we stayed home on the shooters. Sometimes you have to live with what other teams do well and not sacrifice your strengths in an effort to mitigate theirs. If he had started Dampier and we got torched, I could understand taking him out and going small, but we never even tried. Now we're down 0-1 and we still don't have an idea of how effective Dampier can be in this series, and no more margin for error in finding out.
