Warriors-Spurs: 5 things to watch in Saturday night’s main event
With all due respect to March Madness and the rest of the NBA’s slate, the most hotly anticipated basketball game of the weekend will take place in Texas on Saturday night, when the Golden State Warriors roll into AT&T Center to take on the San Antonio Spurs. Gregg Popovich’s club at 58-10 after a 118-110 Thursday win over the Portland Trail Blazers — a team with a free-flowing offense led by the bombs-away backcourt of Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum that can pose similar offensive problems to the havoc the Dubs raise behind Splash Brothers Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson — that improved San Antonio’s home record to a perfect 34-0, the second-best home start to a season in NBA history.
And yet, they still find themselves 3 1/2 games back in the race for the top spot out West behind the 61-6 Warriors. Golden State owns a stellar 29-6 record away from Oracle Arena, but might be beginning to tire a bit from the dual burdens of chasing history and defending a title, and who will be on the second game of a road back-to-back after Friday’s matchup with the Dallas Mavericks.
[Follow Dunks Don’t Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball]
No teams with records this good have ever faced off this late in the season; according to the NBA, the highest combined winning percentage for opponents at least 65 games into a campaign is .816 (120-27), when the 65-8 Chicago Bulls took on the 55-19 Orlando Magic on April 7, 1996. (The Bulls won.) As of Friday afternoon, the Warriors and Spurs are 119-16, a combined .881 winning percentage that blows the ’96 matchup away. Sure, the season’s first matchup between these two teams didn’t work out as many fans (especially those in San Antonio) had hoped, but what is life if not a series of opportunities to become excited and enraptured by the prospect of a brighter tomorrow? In that spirit, we now consider a handful of things worth keeping an eye on when you tune into the Game of the Millennium of the Moment.
1. What difference will Tim Duncan make? The Spurs’ 34-0 home mark this season and unblemished 43-game AT&T Center run stretching back to last year aren’t the only streaks up for grabs on Saturday. San Antonio has beaten Golden State in Texas 32 straight times in the regular season; the Warriors’ last road win over San Antonio came on Feb. 14, 1997. Now, class: can anyone tell me what changed for the Spurs after the 1996-97 season (and hasn’t changed since)?
That’s right: the Warriors haven’t won in San Antonio since Duncan’s draft changed the course of the Spurs franchise. In a season full of record-breaking performances, you’d imagine Golden State wouldn’t mind getting that monkey off its back, too.
Duncan, of course, missed the Warriors 120-90 blowout victory at Oracle with right knee soreness. It’s impossible to say with certainty how much the 39-year-old pivot would have impacted the proceedings, but it’s possible that an experienced calming presence would have helped settle down a Spurs team that committed 13 turnovers leading to 17 Warriors points. It’s also possible that having Duncan — still among the NBA’s best defensive centers, with opponents shooting 45.7 percent at the rim when he’s directly defending (a top-10 mark) and Spurs opponents both taking a lower percentage of their shots in the paint and seeing their field-goal percentages in the lane drop by 6 percent when Duncan’s in the game — would have helped limit a Golden State attack that went 16-for-24 in the paint in the first half, propelling Steve Kerr’s club to a 15-point halftime lead before the game really got out of hand in the third quarter.
With Duncan there to both anchor the back line and help San Antonio more smoothly enter its offensive flow, maybe the pace of the game slows a bit and the Spurs are able to parry more of the Warriors’ thrusts without finding themselves forced into a track meet. Now, we’ll get our first look at how Duncan’s role in the strategic reorientation of San Antonio’s approach toward playing bigger more often actually pans out against the Warriors’ frenetic attack.
During Duncan’s eight-game absence to rest his ailing knee, San Antonio’s vaunted defense allowed 104.1 points per 100 possessions, a mark that would rank 18th among the NBA’s 30 teams in defensive efficiency over the course of the full season. (Take out the Warriors game as an outlier, and they still gave up 102.9 points-per-100, which would be a middling 13th.) Since Duncan’s return, the Spurs have resumed choking opponents out, giving up just 97.4-per-100 (second-best in the NBA behind the rampaging Atlanta Hawks) and have allowed the league’s third-lowest opponents’ field-goal percentage (behind Atlanta and the Indiana Pacers). Putting the Warriors’ league-leading offense to sleep will prove a much tougher task, of course, but with Duncan available and coming off a strong performance (11 points on 5-for-6 shooting, seven rebounds, two blocks in just 21 minutes) against the Blazers, San Antonio should be better equipped to make a go of it than they were in January.
2. How much will the Warriors miss Andre Iguodala? The reigning NBA Finals MVP continues to work his way back from a sprained left ankle, meaning for the second straight Warriors-Spurs game, we won’t get to see the full-strength tactical battle that could very well determine this year’s NBA championship: how the big and bad Spurs handle the Warriors’ vaunted “Lineup of Death,” the small-ball unit in which Draymond Green shifts from power forward to center, Harrison Barnes moves from small forward to power forward and Iguodala comes off the bench to play the three alongside Thompson and Curry.
That unit has been the most destructive force in the NBA this season, outscoring opponents by a whopping 50.3 points per 100 possessions. The Warriors didn’t need to break it out against the Spurs back in January — when Iguodala chipped in five points, five rebounds and five assists in 23 minutes off the bench — and won’t be able to do so against them on Saturday. Beyond removing that haymaker lineup from the Warriors’ arsenal, though, Iguodala’s absence affects Golden State in other, subtler ways, according to Kerr.
“It’s a big deal. It’s a really big deal,” Kerr said last week, according to Rusty Simmons of the San Francisco Chronicle. “Andre is so important to everything we do — not only just in terms of schematically, but also in terms of emotionally. He settles us down. He’s one of our two captains. He’s one of our guys who just always knows what’s happening on the floor.”
With Iguodala unavailable, Kerr has leaned more on the veteran tandem of swingman Brandon Rush and especially backup point guard Shaun Livingston to fill Iguodala’s roles as a perimeter defender, spot-up shooter, supplementary ball-handler, secondary playmaker and floor general. (Seriously: Iguodala does a lot.) That hasn’t been much of a problem against the also-ran likes of the Phoenix Suns, New Orleans Pelicans and New York Knicks, but against a Spurs team that’s adept at making offenses play left-handed and that now boasts one of the game’s most complete offensive wing weapons in rising star Leonard, Golden State could sorely miss Iguodala’s capacity to make life difficult on opposing perimeter scorers while also keeping opposing defenses honest with his long-range shooting, ability to drive and kick, and penchant for picking out the right pass at the most advantageous time. (With Leonard on deck, this would be a good time for the 6-foot-8 Barnes — averaging just 7.8 points in 32.4 minutes per game over his last 10 outings while shooting just 36.7 percent from the floor and only 9.1 percent from 3 — to get off the schneid and make his presence felt.)
3. What roles might Kevin Martin and Andre Miller play? While the Warriors’ roster has remained the same since the last time these two teams squared off — save for the injuries to Iguodala and backup center Festus Ezeli — the Spurs recently made a couple of bench-bolstering additions, signing bought-out guards Miller and Martin to add some veteran scoring and playmaking punch to what’s already arguably the game’s best second unit. Neither has played an exceptionally large role for San Antonio yet, with Miller (who will turn 40 on Saturday) averaging just under seven minutes per game in eight appearances with one start and Martin logging just 11.3 minutes per game in four games with the Spurs. But Spurs general manager R.C. Buford didn’t sign the former Minnesota Timberwolves just for fun; they’re in Texas to work, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see Pop give the vets a spin against the Warriors to see how they might look against the champs in different matchups.
In January, the Spurs — the second most accurate 3-point shooting team in the league, behind only (of course) the Warriors, but one of its least 3-dependent squads, ranking 26th among 30 teams in long-ball attempts per game — generated just 14 deep tries and drained only five. Perhaps Pop takes a look at whether the 6-foot-7 Martin, who’s just 1-for-5 from deep as a Spur but shot 36.9 percent in Minnesota and is a 38.5 percent career deep shooter, can use his versatility from beyond the arc and his talent for getting to the charity stripe (the 33-year-old still boasts a top-15 free-throw rate among wing players) to find new avenues of puncturing the Warriors defense.
While Miller’s never been a speed demon and his best defensive days are behind him, maybe Pop sees his size and strength at the point, and his talent for controlling pace, as a potential counter on the ball when Golden State goes to Livingston and his famously excellent post-up game off the bench. Or maybe — and I know this sounds crazy — the three-time Coach of the Year has something in store that I haven’t yet thought up. If he does, it’ll be interesting to see whether he gives it a test drive on Saturday, or prefers to keep it close to the vest as a change-of-pace for either the next two Warriors-Spurs games in the final days of the season or for a potential postseason matchup.
4. Can Leonard and LaMarcus Aldridge stay hot against the Warriors’ defense? Perhaps the biggest takeaway from January’s game was the Aldridge — the Spurs’ signature offseason acquisition, the sweet-shooting and high-scoring All-Star big man expected to be the linchpin of San Antonio’s move back to Twin Towers looks and an offensive reorientation — didn’t seem ready for prime time, or for the hounding pressure applied by Green.
The 6-foot-11 Aldridge couldn’t post up the 6-foot-7 All-Defensive stalwart, as Green repeatedly used his low center of gravity and strength to push Aldridge off his preferred spot and his 7-foot-1-1/4-inch wingspan to get a hand up and bother Aldridge’s hooks and fadeaways after he’d created space. The former Blazers star managed just five points on 2-for-9 shooting — his lowest-scoring game in nearly two years, and just the 29th time in nearly 700 career games that he’d been held to five or fewer.
While he later swore it had nothing to do with his performance in the Warriors loss, Aldridge deactivated his Twitter and Instagram accounts after the game in an effort “to lock in on my season right now.” Whether or not the social-media blackout has had anything to do with it remains unclear, but Aldridge’s play has taken off over the last eight weeks, as he’s averaged 21.6 points and 7.9 rebounds per game on stellar 55.3 percent shooting since the Warriors loss. As Aldridge has soared, so has Leonard; the first-time All-Star is averaging 23.2 points, 6.6 rebounds, 2.5 assists, 1.6 steals and 1.0 blocks in 33.5 minutes per game since the Golden State game, shooting 52.4 percent from the floor, 44.6 percent from 3-point range and 88.2 percent from the free-throw line.
Moreover, the Spurs have been crushing the competition with Leonard and Aldridge sharing the floor, outscoring opponents by a killer 16.4 points per 100 possessions in 553 Kawhi-LMA minutes over their last 19 appearances. After some early-season growing pains in adjusting to playing together for the first time, they’ve fallen into a rhythm that has elevated the Spurs’ half-court offense to a new level; Popovich told ESPN.com’s Michael Wright that their newfound groove had a lot to do with having to carry the team during Duncan’s eight-game shelving to rest that troublesome knee.
Draymond’s still there, still snarling, still insistent that Aldridge prove he can score. Andrew Bogut’s on the back line, too, and you can bet Kerr’s going to try whatever he can to once again make life difficult for Leonard and shade him into another quiet performance after putting up 16 points on six shots in January. This time around, the Spurs’ two top guns must dictate their own matchups this time and find more success if San Antonio hopes to have a plan of counterattack against the Warriors’ perimeter-oriented onslaught.
5. Can the Spurs disrupt Curry? Ultimately, though, it all comes down to the $64,000 question: can San Antonio find some way to slow down the runaway freight train that is the MVP with a sliver of daylight and a few tenths of a second of an opening to fire?
Curry torched the Spurs for 37 points on 12-for-20 shooting, including a 6-for-9 mark from 3-point land, in less than 29 minutes of floor time back in January. This, of course, is just what he does now — no player has more 30-, 40- or 50-point games this season than Curry, and no player in Basketball-Reference.com’s database, which goes back to 1983, has had more 30-points-in-fewer-than-30-minutes performances in a single campaign than the six Curry has authored this season.
He cooked Tony Parker at the start of the game, then roasted Patty Mills when he came in off the bench. He punished Aldridge when he teased out a switch on the pick-and-roll, and taunted the Spurs by pulling up behind screens from the deep end of the pool when he had enough space not to have to worry about driving. He fought through the physicality of bigger wing Jonathon Simmons, and when the moment everyone had been waiting for came — when Leonard, the Defensive Player of the Year, took the assignment — Steph promptly fitted him for clown shoes:
During Thursday’s win over the Blazers, San Antonio seemed to be making a concerted effort of taking away the way-downtown airspace of Lillard — a high-volume and very accurate deep pull-up shooter widely recognized as the closest thing to Steph that ain’t Steph, even if Dame himself doesn’t much care for that distinction — and mostly did so successfully, holding Lillard to 23 points on 7-for-19 shooting and a 3-for-7 mark from long range. You’d imagine Pop would be ecstatic if the Spurs can hold Curry — the NBA’s leading scorer at 30.5 points per game and its third-most accurate 3-point shooter at 46.2 percent — to those marks on Saturday, and you’d imagine that Leonard would give him the best chance of doing it.
Then again, Pop’s been reluctant to go to that matchup from Jump Street in the past, preferring to start Leonard and Danny Green out on Thompson and Barnes and see if Parker — who has battled for large stretches of the last few seasons, but who has looked good since the All-Star break and is coming off a big night (18 points, a season-high 16 assists, two steals) against the Blazers — can hold up enough to allow the Spurs’ stellar team defense to try to carry the day. We ought to know pretty soon after Saturday night’s tip-off whether that’ll be a feasible plan of attack for San Antonio, because one thing’s for sure: Steph doesn’t waste much time looking to lay waste to the opposition these days.
More NBA coverage:
– – – – – – –
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!
Stay connected with Ball Don’t Lie on Twitter @YahooBDL, “Like” BDL on Facebook and follow Dunks Don’t Lie on Tumblr for year-round NBA talk, jokes and more.
