‘Every possession matters’: Inside the Warriors run that won Game 4
CLEVELAND — If he ever decides to give up this whole coaching thing, Steve Kerr might have a future as a fortune teller.
“Sometimes it’s literally a handful of possessions that can kind of swing the momentum from one side to the other, and if you’re on the wrong side of that, it can get away from you,” the Golden State Warriors head coach told reporters on Friday night, before the start of Game 4 of the 2016 NBA Finals. “If you really kind of take the bull by the horns and string together a good five, six minutes, then you can be the team to pull away a little bit.”
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Early in the fourth quarter, his Warriors strung together those pivotal possessions, pulling away from the Cleveland Cavaliers and putting them one loss away from a second straight championship-round defeat.
Between the 10:21 mark of the fourth, after this LeBron James tip dunk of a missed layup by Kyrie Irving put Cleveland up 83-81 …
… and 5:56 left in the game, the Warriors ripped off a 12-1 run that turned a two-point deficit into a nine-point advantage, completely tilting the game and sending Golden State on its way to a 108-97 win.
“They started making shots and then they started getting stops,” said James, who finished with 25 points, 13 rebounds, nine assists, three blocks, two steals and seven turnovers. “They did it on both sides of the floor.”
There were other reasons why the Warriors won, of course. But that four-minute, 25-second stretch looms as large as any of them as the Cavaliers try to regroup facing a 3-1 deficit from which only 10 teams in NBA history have come back (including these Warriors, just last round) and that no team in 32 tries has ever surmounted in the Finals.
As he suggested Thursday he would, Kerr once again elected to begin both the first and third quarters with his traditional lineup, featuring Andrew Bogut at center. But the coach was also quicker to downsize than he’d been in Cleveland’s Game 3 win, and did so more frequently, playing his proper pivots — Bogut, Anderson Varejao, Festus Ezeli and Marreese Speights — just 15 1/2 total minutes.
Kerr even gave a surprising 7 1/2 minutes to little-used sophomore James Michael McAdoo, whom he deemed a better fit against Cleveland’s flavor of small-ball with Richard Jefferson starting for Kevin Love due to his speed and quickness. The move worked — Golden State outscored the Cavs by three points in McAdoo’s minutes, and the 6-foot-9 North Carolina product was on the floor as a small-ball five when the Warriors opened the floodgates.
It began, appropriately enough, with a 3-pointer by Harrison Barnes. One of the few Warriors to play well in Game 3 and a big reason for Golden State’s better start to Game 4, Barnes took advantage of LeBron overhelping toward Irving as he checked Shaun Livingston to rise up with a catch-and-shoot triple to answer James’ throwdown.
It continued with a sensational defensive effort by Andre Iguodala, the MVP of the 2015 Finals and this series’ leader in plus-minus through four games. First, he stifled a James drive by forcing him baseline into McAdoo’s help. Then, he raced outside to chase a back-in-the-lineup Love off the 3-point line with a perfect closeout, snuffed out his drive, and swiped down to strip the ball from LeBron in precisely the kind of masterful multiple-effort play that has made him one of the best defenders in the league for the better part of the last dozen years:
After a James miss on a late-shot-clock 3-pointer over a good contest by Barnes, and an offensive rebound scuttled by a bad turnover from erratic Cleveland swingman Iman Shumpert, Iguodala pushed the ball up the court. Seeing no Cavalier ready to stop the ball in transition with Irving tracking Livingston and LeBron again a step or two too far off his mark, he dribbled right into a rhythm jumper from the foul line, giving Golden State an 86-83 lead and forcing Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue to take a timeout to try to stop the bleeding. It didn’t work.
Tristan Thompson, who dominated the offensive glass in the first quarter before going largely silent, earned free throws on Cleveland’s trip after the timeout but missed them both, contributing to an ongoing theme for the Cavs, who went just 15-for-26 from the line in Game 4. Livingston, the hero of Game 1, got himself matched up with the smaller Irving and comfortably fired right over the top of him for a bucket that pushed the lead to five.
At the next whistle, Curry checked in for Livingston. As he has throughout the series, Irving resolved himself to attack the MVP, isolating before hoisting a pull-up 3 that, like James’ over Barnes two minutes earlier, clanged clear. On the ensuing trip, Draymond Green battled on the offensive glass to tip Klay Thompson’s miss to Curry, who laid it in to extend the lead.
Cleveland kept pressing. Love rushed a corner 3, Irving drove into the chest of Klay Thompson before throwing up a wild lefty runner, and neither found paydirt. The Warriors kept applying pressure, contesting everything, conceding nothing, and ultimately breaking the Cavs with an Iguodala rebound of a Curry miss and a kickout to Barnes for a bookend 3 that made it 93-84 Warriors with 5:56 left, utterly deflating Quicken Loans Arena and the team that calls it home.
“Andre, when he gets the ball in open lanes, he’s able to play-make and either look for a shot or find guys on the wing,” said Curry, who delivered an MVP-worthy performance with 38 points, including a 7-for-13 mark from 3-point land, to go with six assists, five rebounds, two steals and just three turnovers. “He found, I think, H.B. twice, and just that’s when we get our rhythm.”
It was the kind of rhythm that the Warriors just couldn’t muster in the second half of Game 3. But when they needed it most on Friday, they were able to dig deep and grind out the Eastern Conference champions. This was the Cavaliers’ season, and the Warriors just snatched it from them, holding Cleveland without a field goal on six tries and leaving them looking like they were playing in quicksand.
“We felt like this was our opportunity to either make a step forward or lose a game,” said Barnes, who finished with 14 points (5-for-11 shooting, 4-for-5 from deep) to go with eight rebounds, two assists and a steal. “We were determined to not let that happen. Defensively, I felt like that was one of the better halves we put together.”
They did so, in part, because they seemed to have significantly more in their gas tank than their opponents.
“I thought we got some really good minutes off the bench from McAdoo and Varejao,” Kerr said. “They came in, and it may not seem like much, but just a handful of minutes where you’re scrapping and clawing, that was important.”
On Thursday, Kerr spoke about the Warriors’ season-long approach to rotation management, believing that playing 10 or 11 guys a night, even if some of them only get a couple of minutes, helps keep everybody engaged and protect his stars from overexertion. (“We don’t like to cut our rotation way down and play five guys 40 minutes. It’s just not really who we are.”) He got closer to that on Friday, with Green and Barnes topping the 40-minute mark and Curry, Thompson and Iguodala all approaching it, but he also got his top guns just enough of a breather to make that manageable, and to make the fourth-quarter burst possible.
“In that moment, our endurance and our depth shows, because I think we have fresher legs, and that’s the time when everybody’s locked in,” said Curry.
On the other sideline, for the second straight game, Lue shortened his rotation, leaning hard on seven players — including the just-cleared-for-action Love, who chipped in 11 points and five rebounds in 25 minutes off the bench — in the hope that doubling-down on what had been his most successful combinations would stem the Warriors’ rising tide. It backfired, as Cleveland looked absolutely gassed in the fourth, leading to stagnant one-shot offensive possessions that allowed the Warriors to seize control.
After the game, neither James nor Irving was willing to grant the premise that fatigue played a factor in the late stages of the game.
“No,” said James, who got less than 2 1/2 minutes of rest. “Not at all.”
“No excuses,” added Irving, who logged 43-plus minutes.
Lue, however, entertained the notion, though he was defended the decision to ride fewer players for longer minutes.
“[Fatigue] could have played a part in it,” he said. “But going into the fourth quarter, being down 2-1, we’re down two points. They brought their bench in, so I thought if we could keep our starters in for a few minutes, we could kind of make a run and then get guys out slowly. But they were able to go on the run. So it hurt us. But I went with my best players in the fourth quarter, down 2-1, and it didn’t work.
“When it’s time to win and you’re in the NBA Finals, you’ve got to play as many minutes as you need to,” he continued. “If you’ve got to play 96 minutes, you’ve got to play 96 minutes. We’re trying to win. We’re in the Finals. [LeBron] could have gotten tired and it could have been fatigue, but in the NBA Finals, you’ve got to lay it all on the line. In nine days, you can rest all summer.”
That summer vacation might be closer than nine days off. The scene shifts back to Oakland for Monday’s Game 5, with the Warriors having the chance to eliminate LeBron for the second straight year, this time on their home floor. To do it, they’re going to have to replicate the effort that crushed the Cavs in the second half, because they know Cleveland’s going to be fighting for its postseason life.
“We can’t relax just because we’re going home and we’ve got a two-game cushion,” said Klay Thompson, who added 25 points (7-for-14 shooting, 4-for-9 from 3, 7-for-7 from the line) with four rebounds, one assist, one steal and one block. “That team’s hungry over there, and they’ve got some all-time great players.”
To some degree, though, what the Cavaliers do doesn’t matter; when the Warriors play their game their way, nobody can touch them. It’s been the story of the 2015-16 NBA season, it was the story of the crucial fourth-quarter stretch that drew them within one win of the perfect conclusion to arguably the greatest individual season in NBA history, in a fitting fulfillment of Kerr’s pre-game prophecy.
“Every possession matters,” he said. “And if you can string together a bunch of them, it can change the game.”
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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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