When asked how G5 would deal with the Grizzlies, Stephen Curry said: "Whoop that trick!" And a few hours later, the entire FedEx stadium did cheer "Whoop" when the Warriors were lagging behind by more than 40 points.
Draymond Green spoke to the team before the game, telling his team that they intend to end the series today. "Be ready to fight, this game may be ugly."
but obviously knowing this is different from being ready for it.
The content of the Warriors in this game can be simplified to: insufficient concentration and insufficient confrontation. In the first half, they lost 22 ball rights, and the number of fouls was 14-7, and the team fell behind by 27 points. Their shooting percentage is good, but losing most of the balls they should have the advantage in the scramble, and allowing the Grizzlies to easily take action at the basket.
At that time, they needed someone to get angry, tell their teammates that they were not worthy of being a Warrior, tell them that they were not satisfied with the team's performance, tell them that this was not the attitude that professional players should have; and then play one or two rounds that prove that the team is still in the game. This is just the first two quarters, and there is a complete chance to equalize. But this did not happen. They seemed to have decided to give up the game in midfield, so the situation was completely out of control in the second half.
27 points behind is just a result, but what causes all this is timidity, and you will feel that the Warriors players are frightened by the enthusiasm of the Grizzlies to fight.
The Warriors are already 52 points behind with more than 3 minutes left in the third quarter. The Grizzlies once had 31 more offensive goals than the Warriors. After 57, the Warriors were beaten to a 62-18 offensive.
This Warriors is different from the dynasty team back then. Only 5 people in their team have experienced the playoffs, but one is injured and unable to play, one is a diligent blue-collar worker, and one has returned to the court this season. The others were still very young, and at that moment, the group was not ready.
The words of Bobby Portis, who became the winner in another game, can explain all this: "Five years ago I would be ready for the playoffs, but I couldn't prepare for such a moment. Five years ago I was 22 and was still trying to find my place in this league. I was still figuring out how to help a team win and thinking about how to get rotation time."
"At that time, I was working hard, struggling, and never thinking about giving up. Now I'm in a good position, playing for a championship team." I think it will take several difficult battles to make the Warriors realize that they have the ability to compete for the championship. Confidence is not something you can get from media reports and the shouts of home fans everywhere. You can only get the free throws of winning at the countdown, the key defense of the game in the hottest, and the defensive rebounds that the opponent fails to make the final move.
Now, even players like Curry, Thompson and Green are not ready yet. A sharp and profound blow is necessary, and this game that is at most 55 points behind is a good alert. The final loss of 39 points was also the Warriors' biggest loss in the playoffs since Steve Kerr took charge.
If anyone still remembers, the Thunder won 73 points in a single game in the regular season, which was done by the same Grizzlies. "Same" means that there is no Ja Morant.
This season's regular season, when Morant was unable to play, the Grizzlies achieved a record of 20 wins and 5 losses, with a winning rate of up to 80%. The super point guard missed the last game due to a right knee injury, but the team led by 47 minutes until the end. It seems as Taylor Jenkins said, the Grizzlies' lineup is excellent enough to lose their competitiveness if they are missing a player.
But when they beat the Warriors 39 points in the playoffs today, this question actually began to be interesting.
How strong is "Wu Moxiong"? In fact, it is talking about what unsatisfactory side effects Morant has on this team.
It is obvious that the 22-year-old star still has a lot of room to strengthen on the defensive end. He is 191 tall, not too bad for point guards, but weighs 79 kg but has not reached the professional size. Moreover, his defensive key and enthusiasm for investment are not enough by playoff standards.
As the Grizzlies' opponent, other teams in the league can see clearly, which is why the Timberwolves kept asking Morant's opponent to attack him in the first round. Unlike Curry who was constantly on the roster in the 2016 Championship, the Cavaliers deliberately chose Curry to play hard and were more of a waste of time. He was indeed the best challenge point on the Warriors on the defensive end. The effect of attacking Morant was very good, and even Patrick Beverley could play like a star guard (including a classic Too Small gesture).
In this year's playoffs Grizzlies coaching team allowed Morant to play Patrick Beverly for most of the time, because that was the most defensive pressure point on that round of the series. The result was that Patrick Beverly acted like: "Why can't I get Morant? How can I score if he is not there?"
In 36 minutes of the two in 6 games, 177 rounds occurred. Beverly scored 29 points on 9 of 21 shots. During that time, the Timberwolves scored a total of 175 points and also passed as many as 10 assists.
Another Timberwolves player who benefited from it was Anthony Edwards. The two played in just 8 minutes in 6 games, and he scored 19 points with 7 of 15 shots.
In the regular season of this season, when Morant was on the court, the Grizzlies lost 112.8 points per 100 rounds, and when he was not there, the team lost only 107.2 points per 100 rounds. In the playoffs, he lost 111.1 points per 100 rounds, and he lost 106.5 points.
Another problem with Morant is: he is indeed very efficient on the offensive end, and there is no obvious reduction in efficiency in the playoffs (except in the previous round). But his offense is a bit too single, almost all of which are pick-and-rolls (11.9 per game), plus some singles (3.4 per game), which makes the overall team operation too simple and better predicted.
Without him, the Grizzlies played faster and scored more assists per 100 rounds, which is another side effect of him on the offensive end.
The team performs better instead of the star, which is caused by many reasons, but most people can easily simplify it to be a "cancer" of the star, and he is causing the team to perform worse. This is what Bill Simmons mentioned back then as "Patrick Ewing". It can be simply explained as: "When a star cannot be on the court due to injury, foul or various off-court problems, his team will inexplicably play better." The theory of
(actually it can only be considered intuition) contains a lot of metaphysics, but there are many keen points in it, and you have to admit that some players can be included.
However, whether this should include Morant is up for debate.
When Morant became a member of the Grizzlies, the team got better every year as his stats leap. The team's growth from 34 to 56 is a reflection of Morant's growth from the best rookie to becoming a team guard.
Moreover, it cannot be ignored that during the 2018-19 season, Marc Gasol and Mike Conley, two former veterans, were still playing for the team. They were still in trouble in the 2019-20 season. If Morant had not been able to make the team believe that he could build a team around them in the first year of his entry, the team could quickly strengthen, make the playoffs the next year, and win the second place in the West this year?
's final victory against the Timberwolves in the first round of the playoffs and his epic efficiency in the first three games of the second round (38.3 points, 8.3 assists, 6.7 rebounds and 50.6% shooting percentage), he proved that he could play high-level content in important games and lead the team to a comeback in adversity.He is deeply trusted by his teammates and coaches, and these are all manifestations of his leadership temperament.
, and as a team with poor ability to create offensive opportunities by players, the Grizzlies rely on Morant to cut a lot to tear the defense line (average of 22.2 cuts per game in the playoffs, second in the league).
. In terms of this year's second round of playoffs, Morant's shortcomings have at least never been magnified, because the Warriors are a team that pursues offensive balance. They attach importance to the creation of space, and they are even more important than targeting their opponents' weaknesses. Therefore, with Jordan Poole's shooting percentage against Morant in this round of the series is as high as 77.8% and Curry has 55.6%, the team did not deliberately create opportunities to let their two defenders play on the roster.
In this way, such a disadvantage is actually equivalent to not. In addition, Morant's super high efficiency against the Warriors before injury, at least in this round of the series, this statement cannot be valid.
However, after missing Morant, the Grizzlies' size is better. The team has almost no weaknesses on the defensive end. Moreover, since Jaren Jackson Jr. can pull to the outside and does not need to reserve space for Morant to cut in, they started and further strengthened the height of the inside, allowing the Warriors to reversely increase the proportion of two-pointers in this series, which is a bit painful to play. On the offensive end, their ball rights distribution is more evenly distributed, and their defense pushes faster, which is definitely what the Warriors don't want to see.
In fact, in terms of modern basketball, the effective shooting rate of the league is increasing every year. This is because the average quality of players is increasing year by year. Therefore, the style of playing in the elbow area three threats and others retreat to the other side has disappeared. Every team must seek the ideal configuration for the overall offensive end of the lineup, which may not necessarily represent the most enjoyable style of playing for the stars, but before 2010, the meaning of the two will not be much different.
Is it better without Morant? They have shown their roster depth and tenacity, proving that they can still handle long seasons and first two rounds of the playoffs without a main player, but if they want to raise the ceiling, they may need the wonderful performances Morant has brought on some nights.
Ewing is just the opposite of him. He is a Hall of Fame center with a strong stability but rarely opens the "Beast Mode", but it also proves the above facts. The "Ewing Mode" is actually a smear on him.
The only playoff absent from Ewing's first decade of his career was due to a ridiculous suspension, Game 6 against the Heat in 1997, and the Knicks lost that game. In the following 1997-98 season, after more than 1,000 games and more than 34,000 minutes of playing, the heavy center's body began to collapse. He missed 56 regular season games that year, and the Knicks scored 28 wins and 28 losses in those games. Then he missed 6 games in the playoffs, and the Knicks still only achieved a record of 3 wins and 3 losses, and stopped in the second round.
1999 they reached the championship game, which was also the year when the supporter of the "Ewing Theory" criticized him the most. Because after this team transformed from an inside-core style to a scattered outside, they magically cut the Heat and Pacers who sent them to fish in the past two years. Moreover, Ewing's performance declined sharply, with only two games in the Eastern Conference Finals, and the team successfully entered the championship game, creating the most crazy Black Eight legend in the history of the league.
But these critics will not mention that Ewing blocked Alonzo Mourning, who was younger than him and in his first-round play, in the critical round of the decisive fifth game. In that game, he scored the most points, rebounds and playtime for the team, and scored 22 points was the highest in the game. That year, the Knicks won 8 wins and 3 losses in 11 games Ewing could play. In the nine games he missed, they only had 4 wins and 5 losses.
In September 2000, the Knicks traded him to the Seattle Supersonics. So they failed to make the playoffs for the first time in a decade. FOX Sports did statistics that year. In the 20 years since the Nick traded Ewing, they lost more games than any team in the league, with a record of 643 wins and 965 losses.Repeat once: at the bottom of the NBA.
. From 1988 to 2000, the Knicks' record was 583 wins and 369 losses, with a winning rate of 612%. Only the Chicago Bulls in the East are teams with better regular season record than they have and more victories in the playoffs.
Ewing is indeed not a center that can dominate the field offensively in the playoffs, which is why the upper limit of the team with him as the core is not high. But no matter what, he is the basic set of the Knicks; in the 1990s, when they were fighting in the interior, they might not have made it to the playoffs for a few years without him. This is unquestionable.
The doubts Morant has been facing are exactly the opposite of Ewing. The Grizzlies don't need him to achieve good results in the regular season. Because the team's size is too ideal, after deducting Morant, they include Bain, Jones, and Melton in the backcourt; Dillon Brooks, Zaire Williams, and Kyle Anderson in the frontcourt; Jackson, Clark, Tillman and Adams in the inside. No matter which team they face, they have advantages in athletic ability, wingspan, and flexibility, which is why they can still play competitively even if they lack the most core players.
So far this round of the series, the Warriors have only 58 minutes ahead, while the Grizzlies have led by 182 minutes, but the Warriors have led by 3-2 in the big score. In terms of pure combat power on paper, the Grizzlies are probably no longer inferior to the Bay Area, and their style of play is even more incompatible, but in terms of experience and the speed of on-the-spot adjustment of the coaching team, they are still slightly inferior. So they even suppressed most of the time, but ended up losing more games.
I think Ewing has used his complete career to automatically disillusion the "Ewing Theory". In theory, as long as a person wants to play seriously, there is no better idea that the team does not have him, unless there is another better player in the team than him.
Considering that Morant's chances of playing in this series are not high, he can only prove it with the future.
