Monday Bolts – 5.19.14
: “Let this injury and all others stand as a reminder of the role that luck — cruel and uncompromising though it may be — plays in winning or losing an NBA title. This is why it’s silly to bag on individual players for a lack of playoff success. So many games and so many series rely on the ball bouncing this way or that, or some tiny, fragile tendon holding up under the thousandth jump of a player’s season. It’s why the idea of fitting any championship with an asterisk is patently ridiculous; every title is asterisked by its very nature, having been decided by countless tiny events that could broken any other way. It’s why, no matter how much we dive into the nuances of the game and its finely tuned strategies, the most powerful force in play is often one beyond anyone’s control.”
Ian Levy of Five Thirty Eight: “Something about the fresh lineup on Thursday spaced the floor for Durant to do his best work of the night, scoring 13 points on just six shots. Neither Collison nor Adams is a particularly dangerous offensive player, but they are both are good offensive rebounders. When they were on the floor together for 494 minutes in the regular season, the Thunder rebounded 33.4 percent of their own misses, compared to 26.5 across the whole season. Collison and Adams can also set screens and roll hard to the basket, allowing the Thunder to spread the defense even without a great perimeter-shooting big guy on the floor.”
The Game of Thrones thing everyone’s passing around.
J.A. Adande of ESPN.com: “Again, the Thunder are modeled after the Spurs. That includes as much duplication of roles as possible. Think of Reggie Jackson backing up Russell Westbrook, or Steven Adams subbing for Perkins. The problem is that Ibaka’s absence takes away some of coach Scott Brooks’ flexibility. He can’t go with the lineup featuring Ibaka as the only true big man that the analytics crowd always clamors for. He also can’t count on switching defensive assignments on Parker to turn around the series as he did when the Thunder overcame a 2-0 deficit to win the Western Conference finals in 2012.”
On the fragility of a championship chase.
Anthony Slater: “Stronger and longer, Jackson has powered through and gone by Spurs backup Patty Mills at will in their matchups. When the floor is filled with bench players, OKC has done a great job of identifying the mismatch, spreading the floor and letting Jackson operate. But even with the other stars in and Mills out of the game, Jackson has remained effective. Against the Spurs, OKC went with a two-point guard lineup a ton, something Brooks is likely to employ plenty in this series.”
Bradford Doolittle of ESPN Insider: “I’ll start with the intangible: How discouraging does it have to be for a championship contender to lose a top-three player during the playoffs two years in a row? If this were Durant, then forget it — it’s a sweep for the Spurs. Another injury to Westbrook wouldn’t spell certain doom, but something close to it. Ibaka? This injury is not good, for sure, being that he was second on OKC in WARP (Westbrook would have been higher if not for his 36 missed games), and 22nd in the league. So that’s taking All-Star value off your roster. The Thunder depth has not impressed me much this season, but now it will really be tested.”
Jenni Carlson on Steven Adams: “Every time he went to the farm, he learned something new. Tending the animals. Working the fields. Fixing the tractors. Managing the finances. Steven loved the different challenges and thought his future would be on a farm. But when Steven was 13 years old, his father died of cancer. Suddenly, Steven had no anchor. His father, the former military man, had been strict. Step out of line, and you met the back of his hand. Without that, Steven was adrift. He started skipping school, then lied to his siblings when they asked about it. He roamed the streets of Rotorua.”