Sporting Green
James Harden’s Rockets emerged as a real threat to Warriors’ burgeoning dynasty, but Curry & Co. still must get past Cavaliers.
As the buzzer sounded and the Warriors clinched their Western Conference title Monday night, James Harden immediately left the court. His Houston teammates showed the proper dignity and respect, honoring the victors with handshakes and hugs, but Harden chose the no-class route and walked back to his locker room, alone.
Along with him, thankfully, went the Rockets’ approach to basketball.
The NBA is a copycat league, quick to imitate the stylings of a champion, and a Houston dethronement of mighty Golden State would have sent shock waves across the landscape. The Rockets will spend the summer agonizing over how close they came. But there’s a bigger picture. The Rockets build their entire strategy about threepoint shots, as if the two-point option doesn’t exist. And they were exposed as frauds.
These will be the only numbers anyone remembers about the Rockets’ season: 27
consecutive missed threepoint tries from the 6:43 mark of the second quarter. Take a moment to digest that: 27! It’s the longest three-point drought in playoff history, and in shooting 7for-44 in the game, they also set a record with 37 misfires.
The overall story of Game 7 was the Warriors’ superiority, no question, and there are multiple layers to this discussion. Golden State played a terrible first half and left itself vulnerable to the upset. The Rockets did a nice job stifling ball movement with aggressive defense. And they didn’t have their spiritual leader, Chris Paul. In the end, though, the Rockets hanged themselves with their flawed strategy. They will be copied by no one.
You can only imagine the anguish felt by Daryl Morey, the Rockets’ general manager, as the bitter truth unfolded. Months ago, he stated quite clearly that his entire focus was taking down the Warriors. His team posted the league’s best regular-season record, and Harden carved out a rock-solid MVP case. After the game, an admirably upbeat head coach Mike D’Antoni said, “We’ll get Daryl obsessed with Golden State all summer, and then we’re gonna try it again.”
As they do, the rest of the NBA will continue to view Golden State not as the evil empire, but a template. So many influential playoff teams — notably Boston, Philadelphia, Indiana, Utah and New Orleans — turned loose an up-tempo attack that relies on ball movement and gladly will feature two-point shooting when the opportunities arrive.
It’s not that head coach Steve Kerr invented something new. The Warriors merely reflect the entire history of winning NBA basketball. Go all the way back to Bill Russell’s Celtics, remembering the Knicks of the early ’70s, Magic Johnson’s Lakers, Larry Bird’s Celtics, the ongoing majesty of San Antonio. This is how you win, using the entire court with players scurrying purposefully without the ball. No team
ever reached the summit with three or four guys standing around as the point guard dribbled his way through deep thought.
Would Paul have made a difference? “If Chris was out there, we’d have been playing on Thursday,” said guard Eric Gordon, referring to the day of Game 1 of the Finals, when the Warriors will host Cleveland. But the feeling was not universal in the Houston locker room. “I won’t even get into that, man,” swingman P.J. Tucker said. “It’s a grown man’s league. It doesn’t matter who plays. Step up.”
(Kerr got wind of Gordon’s sentiment, reportedly shared by D’Antoni, and tersely told the ESPN website the Undefeated, “If we’d had Andre Iguodala, we’d have won in five games.”)
The task now becomes Cleveland, another outlier in the realm of halfcourt strategy. It’s basically built around one man, LeBron James, but nobody’s raising a fuss. James hasn’t had so little support from his teammates since he guided the likes of Larry Hughes, Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Daniel Gibson to the 2007 Finals — and that will be especially true in the coming days if Kevin Love, sidelined with a concussion and the ensuing protocol, is unable to play.
The beauty of LeBron is that he thinks like a point guard. He has been this way since he entered the league straight out of high school, genuinely more delighted over a well-timed pass than his own shot. The Cavaliers have been in such radical transition this season, unloading a pile of players in a trade-deadline shakeup, that James still can’t be certain of his most reliable options. The team’s starting lineup is in a constant state of flux. Just behold his majesty: routinely scoring 40-plus points with double-figure rebounds and assists, carrying a Finals team on his shoulders as no man has done before.
Can a single player pull this off? There are hints of precedent. Allen Iverson didn’t have much help as his 76ers reached the 2001 Finals against the Lakers (quick: name any of his teammates). Rick Barry led a mixed bag of Warriors rookies and veterans to the 1975 world championship, and it couldn’t have happened without him, but head coach Al Attles orchestrated a ball-movement masterpiece with one of the deepest playoff rotations in league history.
Let’s face it, too: There has never been a player quite like LeBron. Forget all the comparisons to Russell, Michael Jordan and the rest. Let the man finish his career before sorting out the best-ever arguments. Just enjoy him while he’s here, stepping onto the Oracle Arena floor Thursday night with devastation on his mind. It’s the fourth round of an ongoing Finals saga, as fresh and intriguing as ever.