GT: Spurs vs. Celtics

[Nolan]

When: 7:30 PM ET, April 4, 2012
Where: TD Garden, Boston, MA



VS



Starting Lineups:

Spurs:
PG - Tony Parker
SG - Daniel Green
SF - Kawhi Leonard
PF - Tim Duncan
C - DeJuan Blair

Celtics:
PG - Rajon Rondo
SG - Avery Bradley
SF - Paul Pierce
PF - Brandon Bass
C - Kevin Garnett

Well we're coming up against a very tough Celtics team thats been playing very well lately tonight and its not going to be an easy game.

Go Spurs!!

[co_laper]

Not expecting a win because it's second game of b2b and it's on an away game againts a rested Celtics team that is currently playing well and is still fighting for playoff positioning. Simply said, this game should mean more to them than to us.

Lots of intriguing matchups.

If Avery Bradley continues to start, I want to see how well he or Rondo guards Tony.

KG vs Duncan.

Bass vs Blair. Both undersized bigs and interesting to see who's playing better.

Ray Allen vs Manu

How well Kawhi guards Pierce

Last and IMO most important is whether our bench shows up. Our bench is our biggest advantage againts the Celtics.

Gonna be an awesome game. Looking forward to it.

[co_laper]

Celtics is an awful rebounding team. This is where Blair and Kawhi has to make their mark. First quarter should be a sign of things to come. If Blair and Kawhi are able to get their hands on offensive rebounds, this could really turn out to be a good night for us.

[ManuGino]

I don't think our starters will play very much tonight... but that's because we'll be blowing them out by halftime.

[SinJackal]

Definitely going to be a tough game since we're @Boston and on a b2b.

I'm also kind of annoyed how most of our "one game matchups" against the best east teams this year have to all be at their home arenas, but whatever. I don't expect the Spurs to ever be given a favorable schedule like the Knicks and Lakers always seem to get.

If the Spurs win tonight, and the Thunder lose to the Miami Heat, we're 1 game out of first! It's funny how quickly stuff like that can change.

Btw. . .we're 25-5 over our last 30. Thunder are 24-10 during the same span. We've been outplaying them for months now.

[SinJackal]

What a terrible third quarter. It isn't just that the Spurs are missing everything, but they're not even trying to get into the paint! They took maybe 3-4 shots in the paint the entire quarter. . .

Only a 9 point quarter. Worst of the season easily. If we continue to play this way, we're just beating outselves. Boston has been mediocre all night and the Spurs are just giving it away with terrible offense. How disappointing.

I hope they stop settling for jumpers the entire 4th like they did in the 3rd.

[SinJackal]

You can always count on players with terrible shot selection like Pierce to blow the game for the opposing team. Glad we got that win. The Spurs played like utter **** in the 2nd half and still took it. Gary Neal was really terrible too. Almost single-handedly let the Celtics come back in the 4th.

I wonder why SA kept jacking up threes in the 2nd half when they clearly weren't making them. 2-17 in the 2nd half. Christ. And like 5 layup attempts tops.

Anyway, I'm glad that's over. Not because it was a close game, but because it means I don't have to listen to the awful Celtics' home announcers again for an entire year. Worst and most annoying announcing team in the NBA by a wide margin. Constantly making excuses, constantly baselessly bashing the opposing team. . .dude claiming Ginobili "can't hang with Pierce" twice when Ginobili nearly blocked him each time the announcer said that, then claiming Leonard can't stay in front of Pierce when Pierce never got past him all night and scored 0 points on him. It's like the guy knows nothing about the opposing team at all and just blindly bashes them. "We can drive on anyone on the floor! Nobody will stop them in the post!", even when they're 0 for their last 10. lol? Insert any annoying soundbite and rinse/repeat for 2 hours straight. Trashy announce team. Specifically their color commentator. Quite possibly the single worst announcer I've heard in any sport. Maybe even in any event.


Anyway. . .1 1/2 games back of first now, and Miami is leading OKC by 2 in the third. Though some of their scrubs keep throwing the ball away on fast breaks when they have easy baskets. Tryin to get on the highlight reel instead of in the win column. Stupid.

[aal04]

28 points in a half.

[SinJackal]

28 points in a half.

And still got the W. Classic.

[co_laper]

Give the Celtics credit. It wasn't that Parker or Manu didn't try to get into the paint, the Celtics defense doesn't allow it. Celtics showed out hard in every pick and roll and forced Parker/Manu to give it up. That always resulted in long two pointers or three pointers. Duncan's not making his jumpers tonight. I thought Bonner got a lot of open shots but missed a lot too. After the first half, it was pretty obvious that the Celtics wasn't going to let guys get into the paint. More importantly, they didn't allow the guards to get into the paint from the middle. That's where Manu and Parker usually gets to the paint and dissecting teams with drives or passing it to the corner threes. I believe if you look at the shotchart, especially in the second half, you don't see many three pointers from the corners, and you won't see us getting to the basket from the middle area. In some ways, I thought it was similar to Memphis' defense in the playoffs. And make no mistake, this game had playoff intensity IMO.

And damn, I really like Avery Bradley. Look at that kid guard Parker tonight. He was all over Parker. Both teams did a great job defensively. Duncan was defended well. Pierce was defended well. Ray Allen was defended well. Manu was defended well. The win was about the bench. Our bench showed up big time.

[co_laper]

Few things I hate right now.

Gary Neal likes to pass after he leaves his feet. I get that he hasn't had a lot of his passes stolen so far and generally been successful as a backup PG, but againts teams with better defense such as the Celtics tonight, it showed. This has been going on a lot and I don't think it's going to change.

I honestly cringe everytime Bonner tried to drive after a shot fake. For one, he's standing too straight up when he's dribbling it, and then he's too slow to get to the rim. I get that Bonner is trying to add something to his game, but all he needs to do shot fake, take one step with a left hand dribble, and shoot. There's no need to take 2-3 dribbles and then do a floater. He's not that bad at it, but more often than not, it's not going in. Especially when after he takes 2-3 dribbles and he's not open, he does the Gary Neal thing, which is jumps, and tried to pass. No. That's not how you do it. Stick with being a shooter, but no need to turn yourself into a slasher. Guy got to know his limitation. One dribble pull up jumper is more than enough and you stick with what you do best, which is shoot.

[ManuGino]

Few things I hate right now.

Gary Neal likes to pass after he leaves his feet. I get that he hasn't had a lot of his passes stolen so far and generally been successful as a backup PG, but againts teams with better defense such as the Celtics tonight, it showed. This has been going on a lot and I don't think it's going to change.

I honestly cringe everytime Bonner tried to drive after a shot fake. For one, he's standing too straight up when he's dribbling it, and then he's too slow to get to the rim. I get that Bonner is trying to add something to his game, but all he needs to do shot fake, take one step with a left hand dribble, and shoot. There's no need to take 2-3 dribbles and then do a floater. He's not that bad at it, but more often than not, it's not going in. Especially when after he takes 2-3 dribbles and he's not open, he does the Gary Neal thing, which is jumps, and tried to pass. No. That's not how you do it. Stick with being a shooter, but no need to turn yourself into a slasher. Guy got to know his limitation. One dribble pull up jumper is more than enough and you stick with what you do best, which is shoot.

Couldn't agree more about Bonner. He did hit that shot when nothing else was going in though. We really need to go back to the drawing board after this one. We can't afford to get shutdown like this in the playoffs. Good thing all the defensive teams are in the East.

[ManuGino]

You can always count on players with terrible shot selection like Pierce to blow the game for the opposing team. Glad we got that win. The Spurs played like utter **** in the 2nd half and still took it. Gary Neal was really terrible too. Almost single-handedly let the Celtics come back in the 4th.

I wonder why SA kept jacking up threes in the 2nd half when they clearly weren't making them. 2-17 in the 2nd half. Christ. And like 5 layup attempts tops.

Anyway, I'm glad that's over. Not because it was a close game, but because it means I don't have to listen to the awful Celtics' home announcers again for an entire year. Worst and most annoying announcing team in the NBA by a wide margin. Constantly making excuses, constantly baselessly bashing the opposing team. . .dude claiming Ginobili "can't hang with Pierce" twice when Ginobili nearly blocked him each time the announcer said that, then claiming Leonard can't stay in front of Pierce when Pierce never got past him all night and scored 0 points on him. It's like the guy knows nothing about the opposing team at all and just blindly bashes them. "We can drive on anyone on the floor! Nobody will stop them in the post!", even when they're 0 for their last 10. lol? Insert any annoying soundbite and rinse/repeat for 2 hours straight. Trashy announce team. Specifically their color commentator. Quite possibly the single worst announcer I've heard in any sport. Maybe even in any event.


Anyway. . .1 1/2 games back of first now, and Miami is leading OKC by 2 in the third. Though some of their scrubs keep throwing the ball away on fast breaks when they have easy baskets. Tryin to get on the highlight reel instead of in the win column. Stupid.

I kept switching back to the Miami/OKC game because of these announcers. Absolutely horrendous. At one point we had Kawhi/Jax playing at the forward spots, and the announcer kept talking about how our slow power forwards couldn't defend Paul Pierce, because he was playing the 4. Dude, didn't even look at who we were playing. I doubt they even knew any of our players past the big 3

[LyMinh]

Sean Elliott can out-homer any announcer in the leauge.

[Donald Kaufman]

Save for Heinsohn, I agree.

[SinJackal]

Spurs are officially 1 game back of first now. If we tie OKC, we get the #1 seed since beat them 2/3 this year.

Also, here are some interesting advanced stats from Hollinger about SA:

http://espn.go.com/nba/hollinger/playoffodds

Right now we have the highest odds of any team to get to the Finals at 37%.

Second highest championshop odds at 19.6%, just under OKC's 19.8% odds (likely they're higher only because they beat Miami and a shorthanded Chicago recently, and teams being shorthanded isn't factored into the equation)

And we're favored to get the #1 seed too at 56.1% to OKC's 43.9%.

Interesting stats. So 37% chance at title (basically about 3/8 if you want it in fraction form), 56% chance at #1 seed, and 20% chance at title. It's just "right now" odds, not end of season odds, yeah. . .but I like those chances!

I also find it interesting that he has SA, OKC, and Miami finishing with the exact same record, and Chicago one game ahead of all 3. I don't expect HCA in the finals because the east play weaker teams more often so will have a slightly inflated record, but if we can get to the Finals, I don't think it matters much since we'd get 3 of the first 5 home games there anyway. I just like to force OKC to play LA in round 2. That'd be hilarious to watch. We're prolly gonna have to play Clippers or Grizzlies in the 2nd round anyway though, so it's not easy either way, but I'd just like to see OKC struggle against LA and see if they can earn there way to the WCF this time, rather than get to go against the 8 seed in the 2nd round again.


co_laper, I agree about Neal. Late in the game he almost seemed to single-handedly allow the Celtics to get close. He blew two defensive plays in a row, and three offensive possessions in a row. Got blown by once on D', didn't contest on the next possesion, and on 3 of our possessions, he: 1: threw the ball lazily to Rondo and got picked off which led to another easy basket (so you can call that 3 straight bad D' plays since he allowed them to score off that), 2: Threw another interception to a Celtic (Bradley I think it was, maybe Rondo), which led to more points on another defensive play he didn't try on. And 3: Jacked up a contested leaning three pointer with 16 seconds left on the shot clock. WTF?" All those screw ups led to a 6-0 run, and it was almost 100% Gary Neal's fault. Literally 2 TOs and a horrible shot taken, + 3 bad defensive plays.

So Neal literally wasted 3 of our possessions and got scored on 3x. All in a row. We went from up 7 to only up 1 and ended up in a slugfest to finish the game. Still won though, but with little thanks to him. I really hope TP isn't going to miss more than the next game, because Neal is NOT a good PG at all. We're doomed if Parker's gone. We literally cannot get anywhere without our big 3 still.

I'd also like to see Manu start to get more minutes. . .hopefully he gets into better shape soon. Our starting lineup is pretty offensively challenged, and usually struggles to do anything until we start subbing guys out. I don't wanna put too much blame on them, but Blair can't do much w/o getting assisted, and Green/Leonard are obviously limited there too. It's hard to play all 3 of them at once when Timmy's older now and can't carry us anymore.

Jackson really needs to step it up too. He hasn't been performing as some people here kept advertising him to. He's officially less productive on offense than RJ was here. I said we needed to wait about 10 games before we'd know, and now we do. Just like I said: Worse offensively, little better defensively. 'Eh. Still time for him to do better though.

Sean Elliott can out-homer any announcer in the leauge.

Yet, Sean Elliot is intelligent and knows the game and all it's players. Which is why he's bearable. It's one thing if a guy's a homer, it's another when he's a homer and a total idiot with no basketball knowledge who just keeps talking bs to have something to say. That's the difference between the two. You just hate homers, which is fine. I don't mind them. What I don't like is total idiots who keep lying and making crap up. He's a professional, he should at least be forced to learn about the opposing team before the games so he doesn't keep saying blatantly wrong information.

The fat old guy Boston announcer clearly has a very limited knowledge of what's going on in the NBA, and not only obviously had no clue who Kawhi Leonard was. He also seemed to forget that Paul Pierce is almost 35 and isn't going to drive past a 20 year old who's more athletic and fast than Pierce ever was. Pierce hasn't driven past a quick SF in years without a screen helping him.

Pierce couldn't even get past 36 y/o Duncan at the end of the game and was forced to jack up a highly contested rainbow fadeaway for a brick that wasn't even close, which is exactly why Boston lost. Pierce can't drive on anyone. "GINOBLI CAN'T HANG WITH PIERCE!", while Ginobili's hand is about 1 inch from the ball while contesting on a shot that missed badly. Dude's both stupid and apparently has extremely blurred vision, because he wasn't even calling what was happening on the floor. I'm sure it might sound exciting on the radio, but when you are watching the game and what he's saying isn't even what's happening on the floor because he's trying to LITERALLY blind homer for his team .. .dude, that's just. . .no.

[Donald Kaufman]

Nice essay. I was having trouble sleeping until now.

[Ballings7]

Bonner does shoot that floater too much... he should just take a two pointer or look to pass....