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Excellent IR. The Spurs were clearly the second best team going into this series, yet every costly disadvantage has been of their own making.
The Spurs entered Game 4 needing a win against the Mavericks to tie their first round series. Despite a heroic effort by Tony Parker, the Spurs came up short and Dallas was able to put San Antonio on the brink of elimination.
For the Spurs, the loss isn't too difficult to diagnose. Michael Finley, Matt Bonner, Drew Gooden, Kurt Thomas, Roger Mason, Jr. and Ime Udoka combined to go 2-for-21 from the field. On the boards, the Spurs got demolished 49-35, while giving up 14 offensive rebounds. Even though they held the Mavs to 38.4% shooting, the role players coming up empty, the lack of rebounding and sending Dallas to the line 39 times all combined to be more than enough to lose a playoff game.
The Mavs deserve a large amount of credit. They withstood sub par games from Dirk Nowitzki (4-for-9) and Jason Terry (3-for-17) by getting a great performance by Josh Howard and very good outings from Jason Kidd, Erick Dampier and Ryan Hollins. Dallas has earned their 3-1 advantage in the series. Their role players have massively outplayed the Spurs' role players and they've had a response for each San Antonio run in their three wins.
Overall, the Spurs don't have much of a choice. Game 5 is win or go home. If the Spurs can get Game 5, they can put the pressure on the Mavs to close it out at home. However, so far, the Mavs haven't seemed to mind pressure in this series.
-Tim Duncan's statistics look good -- 25 points, ten rebounds and seven assists. But I didn't think he played very well at all. Most notably, his defensive rebounding was very poor. He single-handedly gave up gave up numerous second looks for the Mavs by not being able to pull down the defensive board. His 25 points were better than the four he scored in Game 3 but he never managed to demand double-team coverage. The Mavs will gladly live with Duncan going for 25 against one defender. His assists number looks promising but he also mixed in a good amount of passes that were totally off the mark. Duncan wasn't horrible but I definitely think it was a sub par performance. I can't fault the effort, though.
-Tony Parker was outstanding. His 31-point first half was legendary and he gave a good push in the second half to give the Spurs a shot. The most amazing stat of the game is that Parker had a plus/minus of +7 and literally everyone else on the team had a negative plus/minus. The Mavs threw at least a half dozen different looks at Parker and he continually was able to cause havoc. With no player outside of Duncan doing much of anything, the Mavs were both sending tons of help at him and also cutting off his passing angles. It was basically a five-on-one defensive scheme and Parker found ways to do more than his part. There's not much he can do when the Spurs get outscored by 16 points in the 6 minutes and 48 seconds he rested.
-Michael Finley. God bless you, son, God bless you. Finley played poorly on both ends of the court yet he still ended up playing 36 minutes. On defense, Howard continuously made Finley look silly. It just got embarrassing after a while. On offense, Finley made a three-pointer early but then did almost nothing else the rest of the way. Down the stretch, he missed a number of shots that could have given San Antonio a chance. Finley compounded his struggled by doing nothing on the boards. All in all, it was a very bad effort from the one offensive role player on the team who doesn't have any excuse to struggle on this stage.
-Starting for the first time since November, I thought Bruce Bowen did good work. His D on J.J. Barea wasn't always great but he had a few fantastic sequences. Bowen's help defense was also very good, as was his rebounding. Offensively, Bowen was one of the few players on the team who obviously wasn't intimidated by the cir stances. If this is Bowen's last season as a Spur, he has nothing to be ashamed about concerning his effort in this series. He's gone from bit player to integral cog in record time.
-Most Spurs fans knew there was a definite chance that Matt Bonner would choke during these playoffs. And that chance has become a reality. Bonner was scared to shoot a few times and his hesitation was very costly. When he did shoot, Bonner shot blanks. He went 1-for-9 in Dallas and 0-for-7 on three-pointers. To make matters worse, Bonner pulled down one rebound this game. One. Defensively, Bonner actually played relatively well in terms of his position defense and his rotating, but that doesn't matter at all if the rest of his game is garbage.
-Ime Udoka was active in his 19 minutes. He seemed to always been in the middle of the action. Unfortunately, most of his work was negative in nature. He missed all of his shots and his offensive ineptness got so blatant that the Mavs literally stopped defending him. Udoka also made a number of questionable offensive decisions. On defense, he was good during some possessions but he had untimely fouls that negated most of his positives.
-Roger Mason, Jr. came off the bench due to Bowen's promotion and he was very bad. His time at point guard was a tragedy. He played the position as poorly as you'll see it played during the NBA playoffs. Even when he switched over to shooting guard, Mason's confidence and rhythm looked like it was totally destroyed. Going scoreless, playing poor defense and posting a team-worst plus/minus of -13 now forces Spurs fans to wonder if Mason is a long-term fit on this team or whether he's too flawed to be a part of the solution.
-George Hill joined Duncan, Parker and Bowen as players who actually helped out. The rookie guard played the final 14 and a half minutes of the game and played better than could have been fairly expected. He hit both of his three-pointers -- the second one was with 2:31 to go in the game cut the deficit to three points. Defensively, Hill was tremendous. He defended Terry and held him to 0-for-5 shooting during his time on the court. That's especially impressive because Terry is the Mavs' go-to player in fourth quarters. I only had one question after watching Hill play and succeed in the biggest game of the season: what the has Pop been thinking? There's absolutely no excuse for taking Hill out of the rotation for the last three months.
-Kurt Thomas continues his disappointing playoff showing. He's just not doing anything well enough to warrant more playing time. He was a beast at times this season but he's fallen on his face in the postseason. While the Mavs are a bad matchup for Thomas' skillset, that's not a good enough excuse for his flaccid postseason play.
-Drew Gooden authored his second consecutive disappointing outing. I can't fault his effort but the results weren't very good at all. His lack of basketball IQ is painfully obvious at this point, which isn't helped by his newness to the system. Gooden's four fouls in eight minutes helped allow the Mavs to live at the charity stripe. Hopefully Gooden will play better in front of the home fans in Game 5.
-In this game, Pop coached a decent enough game. Putting Bowen into the starting lineup was the right move. Letting Hill play down the stretch was the right move. He might have leaned on small ball too much but with all the bigs outside of Duncan struggling, he wasn't left with much of an option. He played Finley too much, but that's a broken record that won't be fixed until Finley retires. Pop's biggest mistakes (trying to force Bowen into retirement, giving up on Hill, relying too much on Finley, investing too much in Bonner) have roots that were planted long before this game.
A 3-1 hole is not a fun place to reside. Thankfully the Spurs are the type of veteran outfit that can actually climb out of this hole. There's gotta be more fight in this team.
Believe.
Excellent IR. The Spurs were clearly the second best team going into this series, yet every costly disadvantage has been of their own making.
All good points.
what costed us the game:
- REBOUNDING: + 14 for the mavs.
- role players offensive outing: 2-21
- Tim not benefiting of Dampier 5 fouls and a rookie defending him: he should have either destroyed his man on one on one or asked an automatic double team.
what was average:
-defense was not the problem since the mavs shot 38 %. but they mised a lot of open look/easy layup. so, we couldn't even say our defense was good.
- FT shooting: we should be a least a 75-80 % team in closed game: that's 4-5 points lost here, mainly with Tim being cold all the game at the line and tony missing two huge ones in the 4th.
what was good:
-Tony
-Tim wasn't the dominant Tim we would need to win this serie. and i'm afraid he won't be. but he was decent and gave us a 25-10 games at more than 50 %. not enough but still reassuring after his awful G3.
- Bruce and Hill.
Conclusion: Role players suck, Tim isn't dominant, we're outrebounded badly (see Tim not being dominant and having no help at all), defense is only decent: Tony isn't enough.
Last edited by kace; 04-26-2009 at 06:40 AM.
I love Pop.... but god dammit!
He unnecesarilly screwed this team up. And after seeing what happened with Hill in the last few months I cant help to wonder about Beno Udrih once again.
So Pop has basically killed Mason's game by forcing him to play a position that he's bad at. When Mason fails at this (as any reasonable person would expect him to), Pop benches him for his poor play and leaves him off the court when we'd actually need him (say, for clutch 3 pointers at the end of tight ballgames). Instead, we're forced to watch Matt Bonner, a guy who has made maybe 1 pressure shot in his entire pro career, jack up a bunch of badly missed 3's in said tight ballgame.
Good stuff.
you wonder about Beno ? See what he's doing now. Beno sucked and is still sucking without Pop.
Hill is a rookie and Pop doesn't ing trust rookies. unfortunately.
Duncan would have got a tripple double last night if those role players had reserved any energy in sucking. Even so, the spurs still held the gap below 10 points, particularly Tony Longoria did a wonderful job last night. Although the spurs lost the game last night, Tony Longoria still deserved a big round of applause.
Thanks to timvp for the awesome initial reaction, or game thoughts.
But look how Hill responded when he finally got minutes. He's a stronger player mentally.
Fortunately for me, I'm on a desert island since 6 days, I've only found an internet access today.
I'll be back tomorrow
Well, hard to disagree with any of your thoughts on this one timvp.
What stroke me the most was Georgie performance. A LOT of people here could have foretold what he could bring the team, yet it took pop three and a half game to acknowledge it.
Some veteran on this team should be ashamed to be outperformed THAT badly by a rookie. In the three next games the role players better play like their paychecks are on the line.
ugh bonner ....
Great recap! As usual thanks for your efforts Timvp.
As I watched the game two things were painfully obvious to me: 1) that our role players were losing the game for us and it got to a point where Tony and Timmy were the only viable options to score. It's just unbelievalbe that our core role players would go 2 for 21 in a playoff game. And 2) our lack of rebounding will be the death of this team. Once again we got pounded on the boards which leads to too many second chance opportunities. That was my fear coming into this series - lack of boards and the Mavs getting those second chance opportunities.
Being down 3-1 isn't an impossible task to overcome but if the Spurs don't fix the above 2 items then it wont happen. My heart still believes but my mind is wondering if they can refocus and pull this one out. They have a tall order in front of them.
Last edited by NFGIII; 04-26-2009 at 05:00 PM.
well, at one point, even Tim was outperformed by Hollins. A superstar slowed down by an insolent rookie.
that's kinda the story of this serie right now: the mavs have some no-name or second class players who came out with some fire. we didn't.
There's got to be....
Not to take anything away from Parker's magnificent effort, but we've all seen games where a superstar has a great scoring game--but the team loses because the other players stand around.
In this case, it was so apparent that the rest of the players simply weren't iinto the game. How many times were Bonner, Findley, Mason, Udoka, guilty of having an open shot and passing it up. They were tenative at best, gutless at worst. And passing up the open 3s didn't help cause they were 2 of 21 over all.
Not ready for prime time players.
Dont get me wrong... I am almost a Beno hater! He dissapointed me in the NBA and in NT.
But still, what is happening to Hill makes me rethink some of my hating for Beno when he was on the Spurs (last 2 years)
With Manu out and TD at 50%, the Spurs chances were not too good to begin with, but with the addition of Pop's bungles this year, the team is on the brink. This team is at mid-season form at best, much less playoff ready.
I agree I seriously doubt we can do anymore this year, though a win in game 5 would be nice. The Mavs have gotten better over the season, even the little dwarf is playing pretty good. The loss of Manu hurt but we have to face it that some of our guys just need to go now. Here's my list:
Keep:
Duncan
Parker
Manu (if he can heal up over the summer)
Mason (not doing much now but I think he's worth keeping)
Hill
Gooden and Udoka (both maybes in my book)
Everyone else goes. If Ian Mahimi cant show up over the summer, can him. Retire Bowen's number next year and keep him on as an assistant if he's interested. Many thanks to Oberto, Finley and Vaughan for a good effort over the years (but adios). KT just got old too quick.
Ever since Hill was drafted by the Spurs, and all the articles came out about his mental toughness, desire and heart you knew the guy was special. His college coach confirmed Hill's toughness. The way he conducted himself when he played several games with Tony out was pretty admirable.
We kept winning most games with Hill despite the Spurs' injuries. Pop screwed up when he saw Mason hit some winning shots and thought, Mason could do anything, including run the point. Big ing mistake. Hill became a benchwarmer and Pop wasted the rest of the season trying to force Mason into a PG that he will never be at the expense of Hill. Pop put too much faith in Mason and not enough in Hill.
Hill is much more mentally tough than many players on the team. The guy deserves some more serious minutes from Pop. The bench players and our 2 starters sucked so bad last night they made me want to
their sorry asses. , they should be docked pay for their abysmal performance.
Good recap, timvp. As everyone pointed out, the role players are losing this series. I don't agree with the theory that Pop ruined Mason. Mason is an NBA player and should play well no matter what position he is called to run. Pop experimented and it failed, but Mason should be able to cope better. Hill is a good example of a person ready to contribute no matter what position. Its a shame that the team probably won't see the second round so that Hill could get more experience. He is going to be very handy next year.
Starting Bowen was great to see, but a bit too late in the series. He did his usual great job on defense and continues to perform when necessary on offense. Hopefully, Pop will finish the series starting Bowen.
Ime was average. Pretty good energy, did a good job of bothering Dirk, but stunk it up on offense. I really hoped that Mason and Udoka would be assassins in this series, but their sphincters tighten up everytime they take a shot.
The rest of the team was crap in Dallas.
Hope for the future? For the next games, lets hope we see more Bowen in the starting lineup. Let Bonner use his energy coming off the bench and start Kurt or Gooden next to Tim, if only for the rebounding. Use Hill as backup or continue to use him in the 4th quarter on Terry. Then...what can you do? The bench is looking awfully weak now.
Lets hope the home cooking will allow one more game to put some kind of pressure on Dallas.
Go Spurs.
Matt Bonner for the GOOSE EGG!!!
Wow, how insightful. Thank you for taking the time to dig deep and bring us all that absolute gem of a basketball take.
Game 5: Win or STAY HOME.
It's two different game plans at work and Dallas is winning hands down.
The Spurs are happy with taking Dirk and Terry out of the equation and letting everyone else beat them. Those guys are getting open looks consistently and have brought more hunger and energy. They believe and when they smell blood they go for the kill. It's given them confidence to be left open time after time and they're feeding off of it. Props to them for stepping up.
The Mavs are probably laughing in the locker room when they see Duncan and Parker do all the scoring. Oh they talk about wanting to stop Parker but they could care less if he scores 60 if it means no one else is doing any damage and they still lose. They have to be thrilled watching our two weapons do all the damage while all the role players get an open look or two or just stand around and watch the Parker-Duncan show. It's a shame they're not doing more defensively, or getting on the boards, and bringing some energy of their own, even though they're not involved offensively.
Yup...this is why the Spurs are struggling in this series...that, and Pop is on crack.
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