With five minutes left in the third quarter of game-4, few would probably have bet not only on winning that Golden State Warriors game, but on 3-2 in the series. After convincingly winning Game-3, the Boston Celtics seemed to have found a way to overwhelm the Warriors from an athletic rather than technical or tactical point of view, stifling all their offensive options and completely knocking Draymond Green out of the loop. an ectoplasmic presence in the field. Even if the lead was only six lengths after a triple from Derrick White’s corner, the inertia of the series now seemed to be directed into the hands of the Celtics, who needed not to make mistakes in attack to continue to be able to deploy their defense in half. field and extinguish any ambitions of the opponents in the bud.
What happened next is a known story: Steph Curry scored 19 points in the last 17 minutes of the game by beating practically all the Celtics alone (who accumulated 26), scoring a triple more incredible than the other to respond blow for blow to every lunge attempt by the hosts, bringing out a performance that already occupies one of the highest places of his incredible career. But his monstrous performance to regain the home factor would have been of no use if the Warriors hadn’t found a couple of key Klay Thompson baskets in the fourth period and, above all, if Andrew Wiggins hadn’t pulled off the two best performances of his career. in the most important moment of his life.
The Wiggins we’ve always been waiting for
Not even three years have passed since that time on these same pages we were ready to brand Wiggins’ career as finished as much as that of Jabari Parker, his counterpart to number 2 of that 2014 draft in which the Canadian was called with the first overall pick. To think that he is now a vital member of a team to only one win from the NBA title is madness, yet it is reality. It is from all the playoffs that Wiggins plays with an unpredictable consistency of performance: only twice has he scored less than 10 points (one of which was the game-5 against Memphis that Golden State “gave up” practically immediately) and on six occasions has surpassed the double-digit bounce, the aspect of the game in which the most is making a difference for the Warriors.
At 27 years of age Wiggins found himself an elite offensive rebounder: in these playoffs he more than doubled his career averages at attacking rebound and has garnered a crucial amount of second possession for the Warriors since the series against Memphis, taking advantage of his athletic means to punish the attentions that the defenses have to reserve to Curry, Thompson and Jordan Poole, constantly seeming the freshest player on the field, as if the fatigue that is instead clouding the sight of the other players on the field cannot belong to him.
Just when you think you’ve saved yourself and taken away a winning possession from Golden State’s attack, Wiggins pops out of nowhere and even with a little malice takes the ball to deposit two easy points. These two offensive rebounds in the fourth period of game-4 were fundamental to recover the home factor.
All of Wiggins’ baskets bring with them a certain demoralizing factor for the opposing teams. As if it wasn’t enough to have to try to chase Curry, Thompson and Poole behind all the whirlwind of feints, blocks, delivered passes and dribble shots that they are capable of, this athlete also arrives who against a deployed defense has never really been able to. to create an efficient shot, but which, against a defense already in motion or against the worst perimeter defender on the field, is able to score with above average percentages, arriving as and when he wants in his favorite places on the pitch. And it is easy to brand those baskets as “Oh well, he scored, good him, but at least the Splash Brothers didn’t shoot, let’s think about attacking”, but added up at the end of the game they dig that groove that makes the difference between victory and defeat and you they make people say: “And now how do we stop this too?”.
His game-5 baskets all come by taking advantage of the prairies made available by the presence in the first place of Steph Curry, who signed his best game in the series in terms of assists, closing with 8 (including three for Wiggins). The confidence with which he attacks Derrick White from the dribble, then, is the result of the carte blanche that coach Kerr left him, reaping the fruits of the mental work done to put him as comfortable as possible.
At work in attack and rebound Wiggins obviously also added defense. Even on an evening in which Jayson Tatum made more basket than usual, closing with 10/20, by far his best game of the series, the Canadian did not feel demoralized and ended up forcing him to more and more articulated shots to overcome his arms outstretched. In this series, the Boston star has only scored 12 of the 48 two-point shots attempted outside the restricted area, and this is largely due to Wiggins.
In the moment of maximum effort of the Celtics, who had managed to get back in front in the score, Wiggins exploits the advantage of energy he has against Tatum to force very complicated shots that even get to dirty. Note on the last possession, in which he leaves Tatum in delivery to Draymond Green after having accompanied him in the area, the clarity and physical effort he makes to cut out Robert Williams III.
Wiggins is managing to have a gigantic impact on both sides of the field even in a series in which he is not shooting well from three points (7/28 so far of which 0/6 tonight), managing to compensate with as many as 26 baskets made in the painted , where he manages to provide a verticality that the two “real” longs Green and Looney cannot provide. In a series in which Golden State is still scoring only 93.4 points out of 100 possessions in the midfield, his athleticism, his physicality and his athletic freshness have carved a furrow from which the Celtics have not yet managed to re-emerge, especially for their offensive problems.
The Boston attack cannot afford certain mistakes
As already pointed out after race-3, the entire ride to the playoffs of the Celtics can be explained by the data of their turnovers: when they have committed 16 or more, they always lost (0-7); when they remained below the 15 o’clock mark, they almost always won (14-2). Game-5 was no exception: Tatum lost a trivial ball in the very first possession of the match and already there you could understand that it would not have been an efficient evening from an offensive point of view, ending in the end with 18 lost balls that earned 22 points. to the Warriors (against the 6 of the Golden State which earned 9 points to the green-and-whites). It is a simplistic reasoning, but it explains the reality of things well: when the Celtics do not play with clarity in the attacking half, they are amply capable of fighting for themselves, also wasting a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity like Steph Curry’s three-point 0/9. at home in the playoffs (it had never happened) within a 9/40 team or Kevon Looney’s three fouls in the first half that left room for Robert Williams to do what he wanted.
But beyond the numbers, it’s also the way the Celtics’ turnovers come that is demoralizing. It is one thing to lose balls trying to be aggressive as they approach the basket, and another thing is to lose them before you have even crossed the three-point line, when you are still performing simple “transmission steps” to enter a pattern. Arriving at Game-5 of the NBA Finals one would expect certain errors to be minimized, instead they continue to be bloody present in the Boston attack.
The last two in particular came for cunning plays by Jordan Poole who managed to go under the skin to the Celtics, who at some point in the recovery began to play more against the referees than against the Warriors. Beyond the goodness or otherwise of certain calls, which matters to the right, the way in which Boston lost composure and clarity in the second half after producing the effort to move forward (finally winning a third quarter in this series) is both understandable. that unjustifiable. The Celtics are veterans of two very hard-fought series up to game-7 against Milwaukee and Miami and for this reason it is understandable that they arrive without mental energy in the fourth periods as happened in the last two races, moreover without being able to count on the bench since Derrick White (horrible on both sides of the pitch), Grant Williams (never really made it into this series) and Payton Pritchard (on the bench throughout the second half) just scored 4 points.
At the same time, however, we are talking about the NBA Finals and certain mistakes, if you want to win the title, are no longer admissible – not only in terms of turnovers, but also in the lucidity in choosing which defender to attack and how to attack him, often wasting many seconds on the stopwatch to go and look for favorable pairing. In particular, Steph Curry’s research on every possession – which had paid large dividends especially in Game-3 – seems to make the attack in Boston lose fluidity with every game that passes, also due to the great work that the two-time MVP is doing in the own half.
Despite being 3-2 down in the series, the Celtics still have every chance to turn the tables: they have Game-6 to play in front of their crowd in three days to force an away Game-7 they’ve already won at previous round overtaking Miami. What is certain, however, is that they cannot manage to win the next two games by continuing to make superficial mistakes like those seen in the last two games, wasting the tactical advantage they had created in the first three and a half games.
In many ways Marcus Smart is the Celtics’ barometer player even more than Tatum and Brown, constantly swinging between being the brightest and least lucid player on the pitch. In these two possessions he is very good at making Nemanja Bjelica pay for the presence on the field, forcing Steve Kerr to timeout to remove him as soon as possible. But then he also contributed to the turnovers festival with 4.
48 minutes from the title
Boston managed not to sink after a 0/12 from three points to start the game (negative record in the history of the Finals, even if a 0/14 from Golden State arrived) but had the demerit of not capitalizing on the 8. / 8 of the central part of the recovery, leaving enough life for the Warriors who remained standing thanks above all to Klay Thompson and Jordan Poole. Golden State’s other two offensive options managed to make up for Curry’s no night by placing a couple of baskets each – including Poole’s incredible buzzer beater on the siren of the third quarter – within the set of 21-6 between the two quarters. Baskets that rekindled the Chase Center and stabilized the Golden State attack, allowing their defense to line up in mid-court and keep the Boston attack on one side, thanks also to the work of an increasingly essential Gary Payton II for the balances of the series.
To use a tennis comparison, the Warriors now have the first match point available to win the fourth title in eight years, even if they have to return the serve on the Celtics racket who will have all the drive of their audience at home to bring the series back. San Francisco. After the change of quintet operated by Steve Kerr in race-4 by inserting Otto Porter in the quintet – a move that allowed more than anything else to manage Kevon Looney’s minutes more easily and better distribute the minutes on the field with Draymond Green -, the options tactics available to the two teams are now over: it is a question of performing with clarity, interpreting the moments of the matches, managing energy and making the fewest possible errors. All aspects in which the Warriors have been the best team on the field in the last two games, giving themselves two chances to return to the top of the NBA.
