Game 2 of the NBA Finals takes place in Toronto in the early hours of Monday morning (1am) live on Sky Sports Arena
Friday 31 May 2019 22:57, UK
Lest there were still any doubters left before last night's game, there surely will not be now. These Toronto Raptors are good.
Very, very good.
In winning Game 1 of the 2019 NBA Finals over the Golden State Warriors, the Raptors played a high level of basketball for 48 minutes and led the two-time defending champions for what was essentially the entire contest.
The eventual nine-point winning margin does not do justice to the fact that the Warriors were chasing the game from the start. The lead was never enormous, but it was always there, and with every two-basket rally the Warriors would put together, the Raptors would routinely answer right back.
For a team that has never played in the NBA Finals before, and one going up against a hardened battle-tested dynasty, they looked completely unfazed.
Toronto made several strategic decisions, and then executed them well, to match up with Golden State's personnel and shortcomings. They ran on Warriors made baskets, for example. Particularly Pascal Siakam, who hit 14 of his 17 shots, including ten in a row at one point. Defenders closing out on shooters kept running so as to open up more transition opportunities, Marc Gasol was always fed whenever he had the mismatch, and the playing rotation shortened even further. The Raptors did their preparation.
None of those were the thing that won them the game, though. What led to the win, what made Toronto the better team, what saw them never be all-that threatened by the once-infallible Warriors, was the continued dominance of their half-court defense.
"Continued dominance" is used here to refer to the fact that, in reverting the 2-0 deficit they faced in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Milwaukee Bucks and winning the next four games, Toronto played supreme defense. They found a formula to make a historically good regular season offensive unit bow to their every whim, and executed it excellently. Essentially, they were able to take Milwaukee's best player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and prevent him doing what he does best - running with the ball against their unset defense.
Knowing that Antetokounmpo is dominant in transition yet less so in the half court is not hard to know. None of it is hard to know. What is hard is being able to prevent the world's best basketball players from doing what they do best. That is what Toronto did against Milwaukee, and it is also what they did in Game 1 against Golden State last night.
Doing so involves an intricate act, made up of communication, commitment, rotations and game-planning. The communication aspect was particularly impressive - considering the sheer volume of the crowd - and the amount of tracking that needs to be done to monitor the permanent motion of Stephen Curry.
It is easy enough to know who shoots well and who doesn't - Curry and Klay Thompson will shoot, Jordan Bell won't, etc. - but it is much harder to track their movements in a live game, in a loud arena, through screens on and off the ball that are deliberately designed to throw the defense off the scent.
Toronto nevertheless executed the task with aplomb. They knew how to avoid unfavourable switches, who would drive the gaps, who would pull up, and who (Draymond Green) would try to dribble-hand-off everything. They knew to stay home on Klay Thompson at all times, even when he seemed to be completely uninvolved in the play, and while everyone knows that, not everyone has a Danny Green-type that can actually do it.
They pressed very high on Curry handling up top, and very much focused on his off-ball movement. In doing so, they completely disrupted the Warriors' half-court offense.
If anything, the Warriors were lucky it was as close as it was. So disjointed was their half-court offense for such long periods of time that to score 109 points is flattering - a number of lucky opportunities born out of broken plays, in which they got back deflections or had blocked shots go back to their team or things such as that, made for quite a large percentage of the few open looks they got all game. That plus transition.
Curry got no space all night. He was stifled and disrupted from the second he crossed the half-court line, always under pressure, defended very physically by both wings and bigs when handling the ball, and tracked mercilessly when off of it. Curry's excellent movement was helpful in winning back a lot of the broken plays, yet it is not a formula to be relied upon. Curry played very well to overcome this and score 34 points anyway, yet his immense workload and the sheer difficulty he faced in doing everything did not bode well for the remainder of the series.
If the Warriors looked as though they were not running much offense, this is because the Raptors took it away from them. Unless Klay could sneak open just for a second, or came to get the ball via a hand-off, the only pressure release passes available on the perimeter were to non-shooters who did not want to shoot. If a man was open, it was invariably because Toronto allowed it.
Rewatch the game and count the number of times you ever see the Raptors rotate onto the wrong guy, sag off a shooter, push up needlessly on a driver, et cetera. Doesn't happen. They knew their personnel to perfection.
As always, the best defense is a good offense, and Toronto aided their ability to play choking half-court defense by scoring so freely in the first place. In particular, Siakam was just endless in transition, just like Antetokounmpo had been. The key phrase there is "had been". Toronto was able to nullify the threat of the Bucks' likely MVP by strategising against his specific threat, matching up and adjusting, rather than sticking to inflexible core principles. Golden State now must adopt a formula much like Toronto did versus the Bucks.
Flexibility in match-ups, however, does not mean it is possible to completely change philosophy, or that it should be attempted. After the Raptors fell behind 2-0 to the Bucks, we opined about whether the way the Bucks were constructed, and the parallels between them and the LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers teams, meant trying to contain them would at best be a Sisyphean task.
The same concern now applies, but in reverse. In being a pass-heavy, turnover-prone team, the Warriors might face huge problems with a space-denying opponent such as Toronto, particularly with the lack of reliable scoring options on hand to shoot their way out of it. Toronto made the Splash Brothers have to dribble or hand off on every catch, denying them any kind space, and without the personnel around them to space things out, they inadvertently played into Toronto's hands.
Golden State's league-changing game was built on a foundation of ball movement, something the Raptors have become masters at restricting.
By virtue of finishing the regular season with the superior record, the Raptors will have home court advantage in this series. To repeat as champions, then, Golden State will need to win at least one game in Toronto's arena.
Winning on the road in that sheer wall of noise will not be easy. Indeed, in their five-year run, it is perhaps the toughest task the Warriors have ever had to face. They need Kevin Durant back, and fast.
Game 2 takes place in Toronto in the early hours of Monday morning (1am) live on Sky Sports Arena
