BDL’s 2015-16 NBA Playoff Previews: Spurs vs. Thunder
How They Got Here
• San Antonio: Kelly Dwyer gave you the Spurs’ story heading into the postseason — offense reorganized around Kawhi Leonard and LaMarcus Aldridge, far and away the league’s best defense, the persistent presence of future Hall of Famers Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker, etc. They kept rolling in Round 1, manhandling the short-handed Memphis Grizzlies in a four-game sweep with an average margin of victory of 22 points.
Despite that inevitable outcome, though, San Antonio didn’t always look quite as dominant as expected. The Spurs dished assists less frequently and turned the ball over more frequently than they did during the regular season; grabbed a lower share of available rebounds on both ends; and allowed more points off turnovers, on second-chance opportunities and on the fast break. Leonard looked tremendous, averaging 21.5 points and nearly six combined blocks/steals per game, and Aldridge was typically tough to stop, but by and large, the Spurs looked more “significantly better than Memphis” than “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
Maybe that was just the natural response to an obvious tune-up. They’re about to jump up several notches in degree of difficulty, though; much more will be required to take out the Thunder.
• Oklahoma City: Eric Freeman guided you through the Thunder’s path to the playoffs — Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook remain lethal; the Thunder’s secondary pieces all boast features and bugs that can leave the team looking like world-beaters one night and also-rans the next; the first year under Billy Donovan often resembled the Scott Brooks era; troubling late-game execution leading to a league-high 14 blown fourth-quarter leads; etc. The story remained largely the same in a gentleman’s sweep of the Dallas Mavericks that, at times, featured some ungentlemanly behavior.
Blowouts in Games 1 and 3 showcased the all-consuming firepower Oklahoma City brandishes when KD and Russ are locked and loaded. A Game 2 loss showed how vulnerable the Thunder can be when Durant and Westbrook fall flat. Series-closing wins in Games 4 and 5 highlighted just how dominant a playmaker Westbrook has become, and how difficult a matchup he promises to be for any opponent — even a 67-win team with the NBA’s No. 1 defense led by the back-to-back Defensive Player of the Year.
Head to Head: The Spurs and Thunder split their season series, 2-2.
The Thunder opened the season by knocking off San Antonio, 112-106, despite a somewhat rusty return for Durant behind the kind of monster Westbrook performance (33 points on 12-for-23 shooting, 10 assists) that led KD to declare early this season that, while he still felt like he was the best basketball player in the world, he also felt like Russ was the best basketball player on his team. (Don’t think too hard about that; you’ll wind up with a headache.)
OKC also got a glass-eating performance from maxed-out sixth man Enes Kanter (15 points on 7-for-11 shooting and 16 rebounds, with six on the offensive boards) to help overcome a “the shape of things to come” offensive outing from Leonard to carry a Spurs starting five that looked like it needed some work to integrate Aldridge.
It would be nearly five months until the Spurs and Thunder squared off again. By that time, Leonard and Aldridge had long since fallen into a half-court rhythm, combining for 50 points and 16 rebounds in a 93-85 win at AT&T Center. Danny Green balanced an awful shooting night by helping limit Westbrook’s effectiveness (just 5-for-16 shooting, nine turnovers), and while Green only made one shot, it was a 3 with 7:19 remaining that put San Antonio ahead for good and prompted one of the year’s best Pop quotes:
Two weeks later, back in Oklahoma, the Thunder answered with authority, pasting the Spurs by 19 … in a win that would look an awful lot more impressive if San Antonio hadn’t been resting Leonard, Aldridge, Parker, Duncan and Ginobili. To hear Durant tell it, a win’s a win …
“Another opportunity for us to keep growing and building our habits,” Durant said. “It wasn’t on us that they didn’t play their starters. We just had to continue to play our game and do what we do.”
… but it didn’t give us much to work with. Ditto for the Spurs’ overtime win at home on the second-to-last night of the season, which featured most of San Antonio’s regulars, but saw OKC sit Durant, Westbrook and Ibaka.
All told, then, we’ve only really had one full-strength meeting between these two titans since November … and even that came with OKC on the second night of a back-to-back on the road after losing at the buzzer. How much we can take from any of this is up for debate.
Likely Starting Lineups: For the Spurs: Leonard, Aldridge and Duncan up front, with Green and Parker in the backcourt, a group featuring a strong defensive interior, the league’s premier pair of perimeter stoppers, and multiple plus passers and shotmakers. What it lacks in flash it makes up for in balance, consistency and beating the brakes off of you. It is San Antonio as hell.
That unit outscored opponents by 8.6 points per 100 possessions over 698 minutes this season, making it one of the league’s most effective big-minute lineups, and hammered Memphis in Round 1, outscoring the Grizz by 22 points in 48 total minutes. It did not, however, fare as well against Oklahoma City this season, getting outscored by two points in 41 minutes over the span of three meetings, with a 3-for-16 mark from 3-point land and just 14 assists against 10 turnovers.
A brief historical aside: When these two teams met in the Western Conference finals in 2014, Pop responded to the Spurs’ difficulty in getting their offense untracked by replacing Tiago Splitter with floor-spacer Matt Bonner to draw Ibaka away from the rim and open up driving lanes for Parker. It worked really well, as San Antonio blew OKC’s doors off in Game 5 before knocking the Thunder off in Game 6.
The Spurs’ offense is different now, thanks to the ascent of Leonard and the arrival of Aldridge, but should Pop once again find his attack getting strangled by all those long Thunder arms, we could see geometry-changing reserves like Boris Diaw (or perhaps even the mostly-mothballed Bonner) play more significant roles. If Green’s yearlong offensive struggles — 37.6 percent from the field and 33.2 percent from 3 during the regular season, though he did go 6-for-13 from deep against Memphis — make him too much of a liability, Pop could lean harder on the still-dynamic Ginobili and late-season acquisition Kevin Martin for more punch at the two.
For the Thunder: Durant and Ibaka alongside bruising center Steven Adams up front, with Westbrook and defense-first Andre Roberson at the guard spots — a big, long, athletic, active and aggressive fivesome that can run opponents out of the gym.
Only one group to play more than 200 minutes — the Los Angeles Clippers’ healthy starters (pardon us while we curse the basketball gods) — posted a better net rating than OKC’s starters, who torched the opposition by a whopping 17.8 points per 100 possessions. With Durant and Westbrook immolating defenders, Adams setting crunching screens and hitting the offensive glass, Ibaka spacing the floor and protecting the rim, and Roberson around to check top scorers, it’s a lineup that can hold its own against anybody. And yet, as we’ve seen time and again, it’s also one that can face serious problems.
Defenses basically ignore Roberson, a non-shooter who struggles to put the ball on the floor and isn’t a great off-ball cutter. Like Brooks before him, Donovan has auditioned a number of other fifth men — Dion Waiters (who played 800 more minutes than Roberson in eight more appearances), Anthony Morrow, Kyle Singler, trade-deadline addition Randy Foye — with little sustained success. Kanter’s a dynamite third offensive option, but even after a season of improved effort and attentiveness, he remains a defensive liability in the pick-and-roll, limiting his late-game utility.
Ibaka’s a release valve rather than a creator, meaning the Thunder’s attack in critical moments often revolves around several well-scouted actions or isolations in which Durant or Westbrook just try to make something happen. Many Thunder watchers want Donovan to give rookie point guard Cameron Payne a longer look to see if having another playmaker on the floor would alleviate the stagnation; Donovan played Payne with Durant and Westbrook for just 48 minutes during the season, though, so expecting it in the playoffs against San Antonio might be expecting too much.
To be fair, there are worse things than going to two of the best offensive creators in the world and saying, “Create offense.” But it wasn’t as effective as you’d think in critical situations this season, with the Thunder ranking 15th among 30 NBA teams in points scored per possession in “clutch” situations — defined as the score being within five points in the final five minutes — and produced eight points on 3-for-14 shooting in six minutes of “clutch” play against Dallas. (San Antonio’s ranked sixth during the regular season, and scored four points on 1-for-3 shooting in two “clutch” minutes against Memphis.)
Moreover, Oklahoma City’s defense in those situations was exceptionally worrisome, allowing 115.8 points-per-100 in the clutch during the regular season; that was the sixth-worst mark in the league, trailed only by five lottery teams (Phoenix, Philadelphia, Utah, the Lakers and New Orleans). That seems like bad news when you’re facing an opponent with as many smart, disciplined playmakers as San Antonio has, especially in the postseason, when Pop’s staff has so much time to game-plan.
Matchups to Watch:
• Kawhi vs. KD: Take it away, Chris Mannix of The Vertical:
We’ve got the Defensive Player of the Year vs. the league’s third-leading scorer, a matchup in which Durant didn’t necessarily shine during the regular season, shooting just 39.5 percent in 62 minutes over two games with Leonard on the floor this year. (To be fair, a chunk of those minutes came in Durant’s first game back after last year’s season-ending injury, and more came with Kawhi checking Westbrook.)
We’ve got Leonard’s maiden postseason voyage against an opponent that will be game-planning against him as the Spurs’ No. 1 option, presenting an opportunity to exorcise the demons of shooting 29.5 percent over the final three games of San Antonio’s seven-game loss to the Los Angeles Clippers in last year’s opening round.
We’ve got a version of Durant that seems to be operating with a more jagged (or at least more public) edge these days, squaring off against the league’s least flappable stoic. And while there’ll inevitably be cross-matches and switches, for the most part, we’ll be getting a head-to-head battle of two of the top half-dozen or so players in the world. This should be so, so fun.
• Westbrook vs. Green: Green will start as the primary defender on Westbrook, and while Leonard richly deserves the praise he gets as the NBA’s most daunting defensive weapon, his perimeter partner’s no slouch. Green’s a rangy, agile 6-foot-6 swingman with a 6-foot-10 wingspan, quick feet, active hands and good balance. He’s adept at fighting through screens and exceptional at getting back in transition to scuttle fast breaks, and while his shotmaking has flagged this season, his defensive effort hasn’t.
It’s borderline impossible to stop Russ, an unbelievably explosive athlete who lives to carve paths to the basket and who has become one of the game’s premier table-setters. But if Green can influence Westbrook in more harmful directions — toward jacking the long-range shots he misses 70 percent of the time, toward rushed and out-of-control shots off the bounce, toward higher-risk highlight-reel passes rather than safer options — it could help put OKC’s offense on tilt. When matched up on the other end, if Green can take advantage of Westbrook’s predilection toward gambling and freelancing on D to find some open shots (and, y’know, make them), well, so much the better.
• San Antonio vs. Serge: According to play-by-play logs and on/off-court stats, over the last five years, regular- and postseason combined, the Thunder have outscored San Antonio by 131 points in 827 minutes, (7.6 points per-48) with Ibaka on the floor. There’s noise in that number — not every meeting featured full-strength lineups, Ibaka didn’t always play against the Spurs’ top guns, etc. — but it supports what has long looked true to the naked eye: that Ibaka’s long-limbed, quick-footed ability to hedge against pick-and-rolls on the perimeter, stall dribble penetration, and recover to protect the rim has disrupted the Spurs’ whirring machine of an offense.
But then, this isn’t the same Spurs offense; San Antonio now gets a much more significant share of its buckets from Leonard and Aldridge creating for themselves in the half-court. The need to stay glued to Aldridge one of the league’s very best midrange shooters, could pull Ibaka away from the rim, potentially limiting how effective he can be as a weak-side deterrent. Aldridge is also big enough, strong enough and gifted enough to be able to work against Ibaka in the post. This year’s Ibaka might not have been quite the All-Defensive-Team stopper of years past, but he’s still Oklahoma City’s most important interior defender. Of the Spurs’ more deliberate and grinding attack can mitigate his effectiveness, that’ll be a big win.
• Battle of the boards: The Spurs posted the NBA’s third-best defensive rebounding rate this season and allowed the league’s fewest second-chance points. Fueled largely by the work of Adams and Kanter, the Thunder led the league in offensive rebounding rate and second-chance points. Given the context of the meetings, it’s a good idea to take all the numbers with a grain of salt, but Oklahoma City ate on the offensive glass against the Spurs this season, corralling 34.9 percent of their own misses and turning them into 17 second-chance points per game, with Kanter averaging just under 15 points and 16 boards in 28 minutes per game against San Antonio.
The Spurs have cleared the defensive glass significantly better with Duncan on the floor than off it this season, but the Thunder outscored San Antonio by 9.4 points per 100 possessions in Duncan’s minutes during the regular season. Aldridge is a good rebounder, but could find himself overwhelmed if tasked with keeping Kanter (who will be forced to defend pick-and-rolls whenever he sees the floor, and must punish San Antonio however he can on the other end) or Adams off the boards. Scoring against a set defense as good as the Spurs is hard, so it’s key to get as many cracks at it as possible; creating and capitalizing on the offensive boards could be a huge weapon for an OKC offense that can bog down at times.
How the Spurs Could Win: Leonard outduels Durant on both ends. Green slows Westbrook and knocks down open looks when San Antonio swings the ball. Aldridge draws Ibaka away from the rim, creating more lanes to the basket for Parker and Ginobili, and punishes Serge from the elbows and on the block. The Spurs exploit Kanter’s defensive ineffectiveness enough to dissuade Donovan from leaving him out there, limiting his offensive impact. No supplemental Thunder wing breaks out, and San Antonio’s superior bench talent contributes in a way that OKC’s can’t match.
How the Thunder Could Win: Durant and Westbrook go absolutely ape. Someone — most likely Waiters — gives Donovan enough juice on both ends of the floor to finally fill out that crunch-time five. Kanter pours in buckets whenever he’s in the game. San Antonio’s shooters misfire. OKC’s don’t.
Totally Subjective Entertainment Value Ranking: 10 out of 10. Transcendent talent, compelling personalities, fascinating tactical questions, and two of the four best teams in the NBA entering the Octagon. There’s a good chance we wind up looking back at this as the best series of this postseason. Let’s savor it.
Prediction: Spurs in 7.
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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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