By: Paul McGuire
The Golden State Warriors are a historically good team.
It is more than their 67 regular season wins. It is how they consistently blew out opponents throughout this season and finished with among the highest point margins in NBA history.
I think that there are at best ten teams in the entire history of the NBA that would be favored to beat the Warriors in a series, and realistically more like five. And when you restrict it to teams in this century, it would only be the 2001 Lakers.
The Houston Rockets are not one of the best teams in NBA history. So, after two games where they hung in there, they got destroyed by Golden State's passing display on the offensive end and their stifling defense on the other end.
Oh, and Stephen Curry is broken.
The thing about the Warriors, Curry, and Thompson is that some of you may have heard of the concept called "gravity" in basketball.
Basically, elite players attract a lot of presence and players to them. The defense warps to them to make sure that they do not go off, which allows other players to take advantage to score. We see this with Harden - whenever he has the ball, there are one or two players behind his defender hedging over to prevent him from scoring. While we would love to see Harden say "let's do this", take on all two or three guys, and score anyways, Harden normally makes the right move and instead drops the ball off to the open man.
Of course, this actually requires that said open man can hit the open shot. This has not happened for much of the season and it did not happen tonight. Josh Smith was Houston's best three-point shooter, going 3-5. No one else hit more than one, which lets Golden State pack the paint and prevent Harden and Howard from getting inside. The fact that Terrence Jones has been problematic in this series did not help the interior war either.
But I digress. What makes a shooter like Curry so unique is that unlike Harden, who warps a defense when he has the ball, Curry warps a basketball defense all the time. His mere presence and the threat of his shot is so dangerous that opposing defenses will do whatever it takes to prevent him from being wide open. Throughout Game 3, Houston switched on basically every possession. We saw Josh Smith stuck on Stephen Curry a lot throughout this game. Curry would then blow by Smith for the interior score or the pass to the open man.
Curry is not the only shooter who warps defense by his presence. Kyle Korver is a great example, and I do not think it is a coincidence that Atlanta went on that huge regular season run when he was on fire and has now looked mediocre since he has cooled off. So is Klay Thompson as well.
But Curry is great because he can pass as well as hit that blasted three-pointer. Golden State didn't beat Houston because Curry scored 40 points. This game was over at the end of the first half, and Curry had "just" 18 points at that point. Golden State beat Houston because they kept getting the open man because Houston's defenses were so worried about Curry...and Curry hit the three pointers anyways. The result was this blowout tonight.
I'm not particularly frustrated with this loss in and of itself. I stated at the beginning of the playoffs that my goal was "Western Conference Finals and pray someone else knocks out the Warriors, because we aren't going to." The first has been accomplished. The second did not. The reality is that Golden State is a very impressive team, that seems to boast no weaknesses whatsoever. They've taken advantages of Houston's to get this 3-0 lead.
The frustrating thing is I have no clue how anyone's going to beat the Warriors over the next few years. Sure, they'll be hefting a big luxury tax bill next season. But after that season? David Lee's salary comes off the books, and who knows what the 2016 cap is going to look like. I can't believe that the NBA could very well create a situation where "every team has $20 million in cap room" for the anti-competitive aspects that it could create. But really, what does the NBA lose if one of the best teams in the league creates a super-duper team by adding another elite free agent like Durant? It's not like it did not enjoy the Heatles.
Worrying about that frustrates me more than this game did. If you've followed the Rockets this season, Houston lost for all the reasons that have plagued the team throughout this season - inconsistent bench, lack of shooting, turnovers and the like. The only thing that matters is figuring out how to move beyond this loss - and how the heck Houston is going to beat this Warriors team going forward.
