Got to beat the champs to be the champs.
Spurs beat the champs. Ergo, champs.
Okay, it is just the regular season on a night after the Storming of the Capitol and in the middle of a pandemic and Bron has an ankle injury and we should calm down.
These things are supposed to be fun, you know, and as I wrote in the first installment of this endeavor denying ourselves enjoyment is silly. There is always something to find, and part of the reason for this newsletter is to highlight more of the possibilities than just scouring advanced stat links.
The numbers simply say “DJM is shooting much better from 3”. It is like simply looking at the results of the schedule. The game, the drama, is where the life is.
He did it with no hesitation against a feared shot-blocker. The Spurs start everyone out on corner threes against no defense — Kawhi went from corner-specialist to wing-extended to top-of-key, to pull-up-whenever. Watching that development is fun.
Murray has been great this season — and consistent! — in part because he has added more elements to his game. You cannot just simply chase him off a corner three and then surround the basket and say “job done”. He has that midrange game, he has a series of moves to set the defense up to get the shot he wants — and even shots he is simply comfortable taking because you do not give him the one he wants.
That is how you go from 3->8->10->16 points-per game. Those other points come from the things that simply weren’t available to you before. The next steps are drawing fouls, earning isolations, and the other things the great players do.
He already does the sprint-outs and gets easy buckets in transition. This is from his rookie year:
The Spurs are getting easy buckets in transition with more than just DJM:
That is essentially the same kind of defense from Vassell that Danny Green was doing back in 2017. That run out by Keldon is the kind of thing that only Murray and Jonathan Simmons were getting. Good stuff.
The Spurs shot well in both of these games and rode out the storm the rest of the way. Whereas we complained about the offense a bit against the Clips, they got better looks vs the Lakers. They just missed. The Lakers, meanwhile, missed a lot of those shots they made the last time these two met in San Antonio.
LaMarcus Aldridge has been fantastic. He did not dominate the matchup with AD but he matched him. The last game, the Spurs were completely owned by the LA bigs. This time, Aldridge was there to bang inside.
Observations:
Aldridge/DeRozan are firing threes like crazy. DeRozan did not get a pump-fake call that he normally gets at the free-throw line and that will either come in the future as he does it more, or that will discourage DeRozan from shooting those threes more often.
Vassell was supremely confident on the “road”. I wonder how that translates when the vaccine and the rest of the season plays out. Lots of attention has been paid to the lack of a home court advantage. Studies in the past indicated it was not really the fans intimidating the players, but them influencing the referees. The players usually were influenced by the effects of travel — and as private planes have been the norm, the difference in road performance shrank.