OT: NBA Western Conference Finals Q4 Open Thread
Rockets missed 27 3s in a row. That has to be a record right?
That's even worse than the Celtics last night wow.
Hard to watch a team choke so completely
Man when the Warriors are in sync, it's a beautiful spectacle.
I want to dislike them. Teams that win all the time are hated, and they should be.
But the way they play...
I mean, c'mon.
YOU JUST CAN'T STOP THIS pic.twitter.com/CeRnoshCJ1
— SB Nation (@SBNation) May 29, 2018
Warriors still making it rain at the moment. 4 minutes left until their next Finals appearance. Ugh.
Unwatchable.
So that's why the NBA's ratings are going sky high.
It wouldn't be an mgoblog NBA thread without somebody feeling the need to:
- Open the thread
- Comment about how the NBA is awful
Better than the NHL handing Vegas a free trip to the championship.
I don't watch many of his games live but yeesh...he has not looked good tonight.
Rockets could have won easily with an average or slighly below average performance.
missed Chris Paul. In both games. Game 6 because nobody could handle the ball with any competence (21 TOs). This one because when they needed some cohesive offense in the 3rd, they didn't have anybody to organize it. They just started jacking up 3s when the run occurred.
but I think the Rockets are the better team with a healthy Chris Paul. If both teams play at their peak, then yes the Warriors have the higher ceiling. But the Rockets showed they can prevent them from doing that enough over 7 games. The series was generally played at the Rockets pace and on their terms (isos) and I believe a healthy Paul gets them the win tonight.
No, he's no Chris Paul but he would have lent a hand in tightening up their defense.
Guy is underrated.
Despite not being able to throw it into the Gulf of Mexico from 3-pt range, they were driving at will and keeping within range. But defensively, I mean, what can you do if Durant just falls away from 20-25 ft or more when he's got a guy all over him and he just keeps nailing it? There's no D for that. Must have been totally demoralizing to play such good defense and have that rain keep falling in the 4th.
occasionally. At the end of the day, the Rockets held them to 101 points. They lost because, despite being one of the most prolific 3 point shooting teams of all time, they set a playoff record for 3 point futitlity. And they didn't have Chris Paul.
https://twitter.com/KevinPauga/status/1001307132363407361
"Cavs-Warriors marks the first time in NBA, NFL, MLB or NHL history that the same championship matchup has happened four straight years (the Giants and Yankees played in 3 straight World Series 1921-23; the Canadiens and Red Wings played 3 straight Stanley Cup Finals 1954-56)"
that this record isn't held by the Yankees and the Dodgers...now that I an looking it up, those two teams never met in the WS even three times in a row
It's amazing how people who either don't like a sport or are just hating on teams or players invent reasons out of whole cloth to validate their opinions.
People pine for the "good ole days" in the 80s, until what happened in the 80s--a team from each conference (both star-loaded superteams btw) being so dominant that they squeezed everyone else out and basically had the Finals to themselves. People hate on Lebron for joining a superteam of his own; then he makes the Finals with a bag of spare parts and people hate on him for not winning as many titles as MJ. They hate on him for not being clutch, but then he's so clutch that he wins the conference and it's back to the Finals being boring again. They hate on an imagined style of basketball that's boring and low-scoring, until scoring goes up, then it's "nobody plays defense," and when the Warriors win they complain that it's boring. They hop into a thread that's obviously about NBA basketball to make sure everyone knows that they think the NBA stinks.
Here's the thing: It's sports. You don't have to like them. You don't have to like basketball, or just the NBA. You don't have to like the teams that are in the Finals; indeed, it is typical and natural for ultra-successful teams to be hated (guess how I feel about Alabama!). The only justification to dislike something in sports is that you just dislike them. It's totally fine.
It is stupid to invent uninformed opinions with little bearing on reality to excuse the fact that one doesn't like a fourth straight Cavs-Warriors Finals when the mere statement "I'm just not interested in it" is a 100% valid opinion. One can recognize that a player or team are good and still say "it just doesn't do it for me," or even "I just plain don't like them because they're good." But people feel the need, perhaps out of simple insecurity, to find some sort of "logical" reason why another league/dominant team/transcendant player would be totes cool but THIS ONE is somehow illegitimate.
There are few things that are more obviously an intellectually vacuous ploy for attention than to hop into a thread that's explicitly about a specific league to say "this league stinks."
Not a good look (and a lot of these conference finals games have been ugly) but that's kind of an issue of randomness gone wrong. I think most Michigan fans recognize that Beilein's offensive philosophy is good even though Michigan couldn't hit shots against Villanova (or anyone else except TAMU and the Moment against Houston).
I don't think the quality of play we saw in either game matched the capabilities of any team. The Cavs and LBJ frankly look like they are just trying to survive. The Celtics didn't match the moment.
We were promised free-flowing, 22nd century offenses in the Western Conference Finals but other than some spurts by either team, we really didn't get that. We got a lot of turnovers and long periods of frankly poor basketball. Some of that is just the end of a long season and some of that is just some better defense (particularly Houston).
I like Curry and I love the way they play.
But this is the reasonable take. No matter how "well" a team plays, if they win everything all the time they're going to be disliked. And, you know what? It's good that way. You should go right on rooting against them.
Not like the Warriors are all golden boys, either. They've got Draymond Green.