Hawks-Wizards and Warriors-Grizzlies: What to watch for in Game 6
We’ve got a pair of potential closeout Game 6s on tap this evening, with the Washington Wizards and Memphis Grizzlies each looking to stave off elimination. Can they follow in the Houston Rockets’ thrilling footsteps by staying alive and forcing Game 7s? Or will the Atlanta Hawks and Golden State Warriors take after the Cleveland Cavaliers and punch their tickets to the conference finals?
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Atlanta Hawks at Washington Wizards, 7 p.m. ET — Hawks lead, 3-2
Can the Wizards exorcise their Game 6 demons? Washington’s been here before, and they didn’t much like the experience.
John Wall, Bradley Beal and company made the 2014 Eastern Conference semifinals by smashing a higher-seeded opponent in the East’s 4-vs.-5 matchup … just like they did this year. They opened up the second round by taking the fight right to, and stealing home-court advantage from, the conference’s scuffling No. 1 seed … just like they did this year. After some reversals of fortune in the subsequent games, they found themselves heading home to Verizon Center for a do-or-die Game 6 … and they knuckled under, with hard-nosed veteran forward David West controlling the action late to lead the Indiana Pacers to a double-digit win that ended the Wizards’ season.
After waltzing through the Toronto Raptors, punching the Hawks in the mouth in Game 1, falling back after losing All-Star point guard Wall to five nondisplaced fractures in his left wrist and hand, getting one Paul Pierce miracle but not a second, and failing to secure the biggest rebound of their season to date, the Wizards are back again, about to fight for their postseason lives in the Phone Booth.
They’ll be fighting not only the Hawks and not only their memories of last year, but also an awful lot of history:
This time, they say, it’ll be different. This time, they say, they’re different.
“We have a different mind-set,” said Wall, who finished with 15 points, seven assists, four rebounds, four steals and two blocks in his Game 5 return after a three-game absence due to his left arm fractures, according to Jorge Castillo of The Washington Post.
That difference grows from increased experience, not only in the person of Pierce — the “protect home court”-preaching vet whose 3-point shooting and late-game gravitas have helped unlock the Wizards’ offense this postseason — but in the fact that so many of their contributors lived through last year’s disappointment.
Wall and Beal are a year older, more established, more comfortable in their skins and better capable of exerting their influence on the opposition, both offensively (Wall leads all playoff performers in assists and points created per game by assist, Beal’s averaging 24.4 points per game against the Hawks and shooting 39.8 percent on more than six 3-point attempts per game this postseason) and defensively (they might be Washington’s best rim protectors).
Nene, Marcin Gortat and Drew Gooden, veterans of multiple postseason wars prior to last year, remember all too well the disappointment of getting outperformed by West and Roy Hibbert, and likely don’t want to suffer the same fate at the hands of Al Horford, Paul Millsap and (of all people!) Mike Muscala for the second straight game. (Could we see the mothballed Kris Humphries and/or Kevin Seraphin get an opportunity in Game 6?) Otto Porter saw all of five minutes of floor time in the Pacers series, but that also meant he saw the horrors unfold from the bench. Now, having played himself into a key role as a perimeter defender, off-ball cutter, spot-up shooter and rebounder, he’s in a position to actually do something about it.
So is Wall, who made it clear early Friday that he’s playing in Game 6, with no additional swelling or discomfort developing after his 37-minute performance in Game 5.
His pace in transition, capacity to control tempo in the pick-and-roll, and ability to create and exploit openings in even tight defenses gives the Wizards at least a puncher’s chance of extending the series, but looseness with the ball on the push can give the opposition new life; Wall committed six of Washington’s 19 Game 5 turnovers, which led to 20 Hawks points. He’s got to once again push the pedal to the metal, but must more skillfully navigate the speed bumps of Atlanta’s on-ball defense and rumble strips of the Hawks’ full-court ball pressure to keep the Washington offense humming and get the Wizards home safe.
With Beal blanketing Kyle Korver and the Wizards’ bigs frequently shutting off the dribble penetration of Atlanta point guards Jeff Teague and Dennis Schröder, tThe Hawks have rarely in this series looked much like the 60-win team that romped through the regular season; even when they have rediscovered that form, it’s tended to be for short stretches (the final few minutes of Game 2, the mid-third-quarter burst in Game 4, the late 14-0 run in Game 5) rather than extended minutes.
And yet, with Wall still dealing with a busted wing and Gortat and Nene struggling to match the versatility of Horford and Millsap, even an incomplete Hawks performance has them within four quarters of the conference finals. If Mike Budenholzer can manage to get Korver and/or Teague going in Game 5, the Wizards could find themselves facing another summer of lamenting missed opportunities and wishing they’d been able to turn a hostile intruder away from their home.
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Golden State Warriors at Memphis Grizzlies, 9:30 p.m. ET — Warriors lead, 3-2
Can the Grizzlies pitch a perfect game? It’s tough to put the state of affairs any better than Marc Gasol did at Friday’s shootaround:
The Grizzlies did that earlier in the series. In Game 2, the heroic return of point guard Mike Conley from a facial injury that sounds even more horrific than we’d ever imagined propelling Memphis to a masterful two-way performance that made them just the third team this season to beat Golden State at Oracle Arena. In Game 3, they fueled a FedEx Forum frenzy by continuing to harass the Warriors’ sweet-shooting backcourt of MVP Stephen Curry and All-Star Klay Thompson, as well as anyone else in blue and gold, into contested shots on one end and wrestling matches on the other.
The Grizzlies made the Warriors play their way, in the mud, and they did it well enough to make us wonder if Golden State could rise back up to the great heights of their historic regular season. Steve Kerr’s crew answered that question, loudly and affirmatively.
The Warriors blew the doors off the Grizzlies in Games 4 and 5. They made tactical adjustments, chiefly ignoring Tony Allen offensively in favor of allowing an extra defender to fight Gasol and Zach Randolph down low in Game 4. Perhaps more importantly, they made shots, including 14-for-30 mark from 3-point range in Game 5, with Curry and Thompson combining for 39 points as the Grizzlies operated without injured All-Defensive wing Tony Allen.
Allen will play in Game 6, returning to do whatever he can to make life miserable on Curry and Thompson, but he won’t be anywhere near 100 percent on his ailing left hamstring. He’s also still the same nonthreatening shooter whose inability to make perimeter shots emboldened Kerr to nominally assign Andrew Bogut to guard him, in practice allowing his massive center to zone up inside.
And if nobody else is taking or making perimeter shots, either — the Grizz shot just 4-for-15 from deep in Game 5, with shooting guard Courtney Lee taking just three field-goal attempts in 31 minutes — Memphis’s bigs figure to see an awful lot more suffocating defensive looks like this:
As the adrenaline from his Game 2 return has subsided, so has Conley’s offensive effectiveness; he’s averaging just 11.3 points per game on 34.3 percent shooting from the floor and a 30.8 percent mark from 3-point range. And with the Warriors absolutely feasting on his backups, Beno Udrih and Nick Calathes, Memphis absolutely needs yet another superhuman performance from their floor general.
He must probe, and puncture, and pass. He must mirror Curry on the other end. He must team with Gasol to elevate the defense enough to jar the Warriors out of the rhythm they’ve found, and he must find a way to stir within his longtime running buddy the sort of dominant performance that has been all too frustratingly rare from “Big Spain” over the past five months or so.
It is almost cruel to ask so much of Conley, still so recently removed from such a massive and horrific injury, but the Grizzlies need everything he can give. They need everything everyone can give; they need to play like there’s no tomorrow, not just for their season, but for their era as a unit, as Kevin Lipe of the Memphis Flyer writes:
There is no guarantee of next season. Tony Allen was hurt a lot this year. Vince Carter looks washed up. Jeff Green hasn’t panned out as hoped because Jeff Green is Jeff Green and not What People Wish Jeff Green Were. Zach Randolph will be another year older. We have no idea whether Marc Gasol is coming back next year—it seems more likely than not, but no one really knows. This may not be it for this Grizzlies core, but it could be. They have to play like that. Like every possession is a referendum on whether they get to keep doing what they’re doing. Like the whole city is going to be burned to the ground if they don’t win.
They have to empty the tanks in the sort of performance that befits the phrase that described the style that has characterized the most successful and beloved basketball in Memphis’ NBA history, the first half of which will appear on Friday’s signature Growl Towel:
All heart. Grit. Grind Absolutely everything, and nothing less, like the city’s burning, lest they get burned by The City one last time.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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