Watch Game 1 of the NBA Finals live on Sky Sports Arena in the early hours of Frday morning (2am)
Thursday 30 May 2019 16:14, UK
The Golden State Warriors and Toronto Raptors are set to collide in the NBA Finals. Mark Deeks examines three match-ups key to deciding the outcome of the best-of-seven series.
Where once there were 30, there are now only two.
The Golden State Warriors and Toronto Raptors will battle it out in the 2019 NBA Finals. The two-time defending champion Warriors are in their fifth consecutive Finals appearance, while the Raptors are at the season's final stage for the first time in the 24-year history of their franchise.
The experience of being there before, plus the wealth of talent they have, the comparative ease with which they won the Western Conference Finals and the extended rest that came with that, all count in the Warriors' favour, and they enter the series as the prohibitive favourites at the bookies accordingly.
Yet in their four consecutive wins over the regular season-best Milwaukee Bucks in the Eastern Conference Finals, Toronto played some imperious half-court defense that the Bucks could find no answer for.
Defense, as they say, wins championships, and the defending of specific match-ups is the key to any series. The Raptors proved this by identifying and nullifying the battles in the Bucks' series that gave them the small advantages they needed to win.
Both teams will know that strategic decisions in how to guard specific opponents and their implementation will be the key to winning the series and thus the NBA title.
Here are three key match-ups to focus on in particular.
By any measure, be it in the playoffs alone or the season overall, Golden State have not been the juggernaut defensively this season that they have been during the rest of their five-year run. They are still good, certainly. But they are not as driven, as deep or as co-ordinated as they have been in years past, and have had to win their playoff series thus far through heavy scoring.
Luckily, their starting backcourt duo of Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson have not lost the ability to do that. After a slowish start to the playoffs, Curry is pouring in the production on a par with any other post-season run of his career (27.2 points, 6.3 rebounds, 5.4 assists per game), while Thompson has been there with him, contributing 19.1 points per game on his own.
Toronto were able to overcome Milwaukee with a halfcourt defense so disciplined and sharp in its rotations and help that the Bucks were never able to readily create open looks for their offensive weapons.
As destructive as Milwaukee as a team (and Giannis Antetokounmpo as an individual) were in the transition game, using the Greek Freak's long strike and relentless dunking power to open up every area of the court against a scrambling defense, they could not do the same in the halfcourt. If Giannis could not get beyond the first line of the defense consistently with the ball in his hands, no one could, and since no one could, Milwaukee ran out of options.
Defending Golden State's backcourt, however, is very different to defending Golden State's. The notoriously static Eric Bledsoe, who further struggles to shoot jump shots off the dribble, is hereby replaced by the endless off-ball movement of Curry, who also can hit anything from anywhere as the league's truly transcendent shooting talent.
Alongside that, Thompson's ability to shoot in an instant without needing a dribble differs from Khris Middleton's more deliberate, herky-jerky style, requiring a different level of stay-home coverage. Danny Green can track shooters through screens about as well as anyone, yet the halfcourt movement and decoy threats this duo bring are vastly unlike the attack that the Bucks had.
Milwaukee's guards were not quick or accurate enough in their shooting to take advantage of the slithers of space that Toronto would give up before closing them down. The Splash Brothers, though, absolutely are. The same formula will not work as well, and so Toronto will need to adjust.
So good are the Raptors' starting forwards Kawhi Leonard and Pascal Siakam that they are now in need of a catchy Splash Brothers-like nickname of their own.
Leonard is playing like a hybrid of Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan. He is unstoppable offensively, combining a series of clear-outs for mid-range jumpers (which would be antithetical to the idea of good offense if he didn't hit so damn many of them) with big play after big play, as well as being the defensive secret that stymied Giannis.
Leonard has been truly magnificent in these playoffs, the best player in them, and while the pairing of Thompson and Iguodala are theoretically good man-to-man defensive options for checking him, any other Warrior switching onto him is immediately in peril.
For Siakam, a player at the end of an excellent break-out season, he needs to run the Warriors off the park. A spotty Eastern Conference Finals was a challenging test for one so relatively inexperienced, yet some timely plays saw him be a part of the formula that turned around and closed out the series.
Siakam's best assets are his speed and handle in transition, plus his ability to defend in space and recover in a way that the slower Ibaka and Gasol cannot do.
When the Warriors used the Hampton Five line-up with Draymond Green at center, it will be Siakam's job to hang with him there, and to run it back at him. And if the strategy for defending Curry's handling up top is to blitz, switch or double him any time he calls for a screen from one of his frontcourt team-mates, then the mobility he offers will be integral to the success of that.
As good as they are, both these teams at this point in the season are shallow.
The Raptors gutted their depth in their trades for both Leonard and Marc Gasol, and while this was entirely worth it, it has left them running short rotations. Two big performances from reserve point guard Fred VanVleet in Games 5 and 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals were enormous turning points in the outcome of the series, yet in the playoffs up until that point he had been egregiously poor, missing almost every shot he took while also pounding the ball into the deck so much that his palms were turning orange. He has somehow been huge and unreliable at the same time.
Meanwhile, although Norman Powell seems to have no concept of the idea of postseason jitters, and Serge Ibaka fills the third big man spot with important contributions on all areas of the court, they are it. That is about all they have, and the trio represent the only three players to get any minutes of note off the bench.
When combined with the fact that Green is having an ill-timed postseason slump, the Raptors are short of help, particularly at forward, where OG Anunoby remains out (but has been upgraded to questionable ahead of Game 1). Foul trouble to either of the aforementioned Leonard and Siakam pairing, then, presents a massive problem for them.
The Warriors are also struggling to find consistent bench contributions, particularly offensively. Their reputation through this run of being spectacularly dynamic offensively and capable of game-changing bursts of scoring without a moment's notice is entirely founded, yet this does not mean they have a lot of reliable scoring options down the roster. Indeed, they have few.
Draymond Green stepping up the intensity in the postseason has given the team a much-needed extra scorer, and Andre Iguodala's timely off-ball contributions help. Yet the rest of the line-up struggles to contribute offensively.
Kevon Looney is in to clean up, not create, and attempts little to nothing from outside of three feet. Andrew Bogut's offense deserted him some years ago. Quinn Cook can score, but is unplayable due to his defensive limitations. Jonas Jerebko is it seems not trusted any longer. And Jordan Bell cannot consistently hit anything that isn't a dunk.
The return of DeMarcus Cousins, should it come, will help in this department. Cousins is hard to integrate defensively, and the floor-stretching role a reinvigorated Gasol played in the latter stages of the Bucks series would be a problem for him to guard. Yet Cousins would be a problem for the Raptors in return, especially if he can get their aforementioned shallow frontcourt into foul trouble.
The real injury return of note, though, will be that of Kevin Durant. Said return will not happen in Game 1, but when it does, the Warriors get arguably the game's most talented player back. In theory, Kawhi Leonard will be the perfect one on one matchup for him, just as he was with Giannis previously.
But in practice, the Warriors' duo of he and Curry might be too much for even this Raptors defense to contain.
Game 1 of the NBA Finals takes place in Toronto in the early hours of Friday morning (2am) live on Sky Sports Arena.
