The Thunder had only played four minutes with this lineup in their previous playoff games this season, and they looked bad in that time.
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From the jump, the Thunder were all-out and they never let Golden State settle into any kind of groove. Serge Ibaka leads in blocks with 1.3 per game.
For the Warriors, even when things go well, they don’t.
The Golden State Warriors aren’t used to playing desperate, but Game 4 is a must-win for the reigning National Basketball Association champs.
One team in Tuesday’s NBA Western Conference Finals was knocking down three-pointer after three-pointer. Klay Thompson added 18 points of his own.
“That’s the first time in my life I haven’t responded to critics”, Green said of his disappointing display.
Turnovers, fouls, and rebounding issues plagued the Warriors in similar ways to the third game of the series. But he but didn’t have the impact he had in Game 1 when he had 16 points and 12 rebounds and set the tone with physical play.
Overall this game is going to come down to which small lineup has more success. Tonight, they had an opportunity to keep both trends alive after the Oklahoma City Thunder firebombed them out of Game 3.
Golden State is hopeful to bounce back from its second deficit of the series, while Oklahoma City is trying to take a 3-1 series lead with it back to California.
As has been the trend this series, Thunder destroyed Warriors on the boards (56-41).
Every time it looked like the Warriors might be able to put something together, Westbrook and Durant shattered it. Oklahoma City nearly had multiple regular-season wins against Golden State, and the Warriors escaped with three victories in large part because Curry allowed them to. Don’t be shocked to see him go insane tonight, as he did against the Thunder here on February 27, when he scored 46 points and tied a league record with 12 baskets from beyond the arc. Though he closed the gap to something theoretically manageable (eight points), he just couldn’t get his backcourt mate to join in on the march (Curry was scoreless in the third).
“You see it every day in practice”, Adams said.
“You have to move the ball”, Kerr said.
Game 3 was an aberration.
The Thunder defense was stifling, and it was reflected in Golden State’s offensive output.
Green and Stephen Curry, at their best, approximate the Durant and Westbrook pairing.
The word “desperation” has not been in the Golden State Warriors’ vocabulary all season, but a sense of desperation hangs over the record-setting squad as they head into Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals, trailing 2-1.
In addition to sparking the highest-scoring performance by any team in any National Basketball Association playoff game this year, Westbrook and Durant each added eight rebounds and blocked two shots while Westbrook also contributed 12 assists.
It was stunning to watch one of the best teams in league history get beaten so thoroughly. The quick shots against this team, there’s two problems. “We will bounce back, we’ll play much better in Game 5, and we’ll see where it all goes”. This isn’t because OKC’s small lineup is a mismatch for Golden State’s small lineup.
The Warriors, the team with 73 regular-season wins and the unanimous MVP, spoke afterward of defying the odds. Scheme and tactics only get you so far towards understanding how the Warriors are on the ropes, because when Russell Westbrook is screaming into the lane and dunking in your face whenever he can and Kevin Durant is playing as well off the ball as he ever has while still hitting shots, you can’t really do shit. That would be as close as Golden State would get. The league also knows that if it had suspended Green, it would essentially be handing the series to Oklahoma City.
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If Green had been kicked out of Sunday night’s game, then it might be a different story.
