2019 N.B.A. Finals Preview
This N.B.A. season has been treated as a foregone conclusion, but Golden State will not want to get too comfortable against Kawhi Leonard and his loaded Toronto Raptors.
How to Watch
Game 1: Thursday, 9 p.m.
The games will air on ABC and will be streamed on Watch ESPN.
The Matchup
The
Warriors, for better or worse, have always fed on doubt. No matter how
invincible they have seemed, they have managed to find slights to
inspire them — often going to somewhat comical lengths to do so.
The
last time they faced significant doubt — and even then, it was hardly
from a majority of pundits — was before the 2015 finals when, as a group
of upstarts, the Warriors had to prove their mettle against LeBron
James’s Cleveland Cavaliers. But over the last four seasons, as they
made the shift from powerhouse to dynasty, they have used injuries,
inexplicably sloppy performances and some apparent figments of Draymond Green’s imagination as ways to make winning feel less inevitable and more like a chance to prove “everyone” wrong.
Even last year, as they pulled off one of the most dominant sweeps in finals history, they seemed to be powered by a reserve of doubt created by the team barely having survived a clash with the Houston Rockets in the Western Conference finals.
As Golden State
comes out of a nine-day break, looking to win its third consecutive
championship and a fourth in five years, the doubt created by injuries
to Kevin Durant and DeMarcus Cousins — doubt that helped inspire some of
the best basketball of Green’s career — has faded away. In what should
be ringing the “lack of doubt” alarm in Green’s head, the players and
coaches have spent the last few days being asked about the possibility
that Stephen Curry will finally win a finals M.V.P. Award.
Shaun
Livingston and Curry both answered questions about the award on Monday,
playing down the importance of Curry becoming the M.V.P., while neither
pushed back against assumptions that the Raptors have only a slight
chance of winning the series.
Steve Kerr, for his part, seemed to understand that the line of questioning could be counterproductive for his squad. “We’re trying to win” the series, the coach said when asked two consecutive questions about the award. “So we’re not talking about any awards, we just want to win four games.”
This Raptors
team, after all, is far more complete than any of the James-led teams
that faced off with the Warriors in their previous four trips to the
finals.
After five years of watching his team dominate in the regular season only to fall apart in the playoffs, Masai Ujiri,
the Raptors’ president, blew things up, trading DeMar DeRozan to San
Antonio for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. The move did not pay tangible
dividends in the regular season — the Raptors played slightly worse
over the 82-game grind than they had the season before — but the killer
instinct they had previously lacked became a defining characteristic of
the team once the playoffs began.
You
saw it in each series, as the Raptors systematically eliminated
Orlando, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, playing suffocating defense as
Leonard led the way on both ends of the court.
Leonard,
who has a finals M.V.P. Award on his shelf from his days in San
Antonio, has already justified the cost of trading away DeRozan, a
franchise icon. Even if Leonard signs elsewhere as a free agent this
summer, he has taken Toronto farther than it has ever been before.
His buzzer-beater to end the second-round series against the 76ers was the most important shot in franchise history, and Leonard followed it up by averaging 29.8 points and 9.5 rebounds a game against the top-seeded Bucks in the Eastern Conference finals, thoroughly outplaying Giannis Antetokounmpo, the presumptive winner of the league’s Most Valuable Player Award.
And Leonard is hardly alone. Pascal Siakam, who has the makings of a
superstar, is a worthy sidekick on offense and defense. Marc Gasol, a
rugged veteran acquired during the season when Ujiri sensed yet again
that his franchise needed a shake-up, could be a problem for the
undersize Warriors. And Kyle Lowry, once a centerpiece of the franchise
along with DeRozan, has looked like his old self in spurts, even if he
has had more mediocre playoff games than great ones.
Fred VanVleet probably can’t keep up the 82.4 percent he shot from 3-point range in the final three games of the series against the Bucks, but he will still provide a scoring threat from the bench that has to be accounted for.
The Raptors have
more length than the Warriors and, at least until further notice,
better health. They have home court advantage — a luxury Golden State
had in each of the previous four finals — and, with help from their
raucous fans, could win Games 1 and 2 before Durant’s anticipated return.
If
Green and Curry can pick up where they left off in the Portland series,
Durant’s return might be a formality. In the last six games, Curry has
quieted talk about his “disappearing” in the playoffs by averaging 34
points, 7.3 rebounds and 6.3 assists. In those same six games, Green, in
the best shape of his career thanks to some late-season weight loss,
has nearly averaged a triple-double, with 13.4 points, 11.5 rebounds and
8.8 assists, while also playing elite defense at multiple positions.
The Warriors’ ability to go galactic, and the likelihood that Thompson has a few big scoring nights in him as well, could make quick work of Toronto.
But Curry’s game is mercurial enough to make one wonder if he is due for a rough stretch, and Green is volatile enough that the task of tangling with Leonard and Gasol could put him in consistent foul trouble — or worse if he were to get three more technical foul points, earning a one-game suspension.
If both of those things happen, the Warriors have to hope they can count on Durant, currently reduced to being an extremely tall fan,
to fly in for the rescue, putting the team on his back and securing the
three-peat. The only problem, of course, is that Durant’s return has
been a moving target. Pinning too much hope on a player who has been out
since May 8 seems unwise.
As it
stands, these two teams are more evenly matched than the average fan
might assume, though a combination of top-shelf talent and finals
experience should give Golden State a slight advantage. However, if
Green is looking for some motivational doubt, there is no need to
manufacture it this time around. The Warriors, the first team to play in
a fifth consecutive finals since the Celtics appeared in their 10th
straight in 1966, are nowhere near a sure thing.
You must be logged in to post a comment.