viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2344393
And as you can see when you click on it, the thread no longer exists.
So I don't know why it's not around anymore. I've contacted the mods, and they have no clue either. My apologies to the five people who might have been looking forward to reading the thread, but I don't have the work that I made there saved up, and I don't feel like going back to that one. If you want a very quick and very brief synopsis... Curry dominated the Celtics because he's a GOAT off the ball player and the Celtics as a whole, despite being filled to the brink with brilliant defensive players, didn't have the length and height to cover enough ground to bother Curry. There's obviously a lot more to it than that, but unfortunately, it's all in that thread that no longer exists. Again, my apologies, but for now, the 2022 Finals Analysis thread will only exist in name. Maybe I'll go back and re-do it depending on how long I do this for. But for now, just like the new year... I'm moving forward, or down in this case.
2021 NBA Finals
Record: 46-26
SRS: 5.57
Off Rank: 6th
Def Rank: 10th
Net Rank: 4th
Nuggets winning in 2023 felt like confirmation. The Warriors winning in 2022 felt like redemption. The Milwaukee Bucks winning in 2021 felt like a long journey... with a happy ending.
I don't think I've anyone on here this yet, but I'm actually a really big fan of Giannis, and the Bucks for that matter. I was really disappointed when we couldn't get a Finals between them and the Lakers in 2020, and was almost just as disappointed that we missed out on it again... until I saw who their opponents were going to be. But more on that later. I didn't want to make many, if any, references to the 2022 Analysis thread outside of the disclaimer above, but I did mention in it that unlike the 2023 Finals where I had little to no interest in that series, I had a lot of interest in the Warriors/Celtics because they were the top defensive teams in the league and I love it when two defensive minded units go at one another. But of the three finals, the 2021 Finals I had the most interest in out of all three... but for very different reasons.
Okay so truth be told (and to jump ahead a bit for the sake of making a point), I had the Bucks winning this series in a sweep. I apologize to any Phoenix Suns fan that might end up reading this someday, but I had no clue how the Suns were supposed to win four games against this team. I thought they matched up HORRIBLY with the Bucks. On top of the fact that the Suns just looked completely outmatched from a physical standpoint, I couldn't help but wonder to myself how the hell they were going to slow down Giannis. Bridges was a terrific defender and Crowder was no slouch himself, but there was no way they were going to be able to stop him from doing whatever he wanted. That left... DeAndre Ayton at center to be the last line of defense in the paint, and that pretty much went about how you expected it to. The Suns may have had the better coaching (seriously guys Monty is not a bad coach, not his fault Detroit's roster is ass), but sometimes, you run into rosters with personal that your team lacks counters to. And it felt like that's what happened here with Phoenix.
I mention this now to make a point that I pretty much felt that this was going to be a very one sided series from the start. I was in utter disbelief when the Suns not only prevented it from being one, but even managed to get a 2-0 lead to start out the series (and TRUST ME, we will talk about that more later). So the question is: why was I so invested in this one even though that very same feeling I had about this series prevented me from caring about 2023?
Well, it's for a few reasons. One, no LeBron or Warriors in the Finals this time. I can't begin to tell you how much of a breath of fresh air it felt like to have two completely different teams who hadn't been to the Finals for a very, very long time (last time Bucks were there was in the 70s and Suns hadn't been there since the 90s) with two star players who had never been there before. I love LeBron but even I was starting to get tired of him being in the Finals all the time... and I don't think I need to explain why I didn't want to keep seeing the Warriors. But the second reason... the star players themselves. I mentioned before that I have always been a Giannis fan but I've also always been a Chris Paul fan. I don't care for his personal antics or anything of the sort, I just loved watching him as a player and felt that he always had bad luck throughout his career. It was nice to see him finally manage an NBA Finals run. Even if I didn't see his team winning it... I just thought it was awesome that he finally made it and I was very curious to see how he played. One way or another, a major star player was getting their first ring. It doesn't get more exciting than that in my opinion.
But it's only natural to look at how these two teams got to where they were, and how they were good enough to make an NBA Finals run in the first place. So let's take a look.
Disclaimer disclaimer: For the sake of making these things neater and giving people a starting point to read on, I've decided to bold certain sections. Going forward, I'll be pointing out when I'm talking about the team that won, the team that challenged, and then the actual series itself.
The Milwaukee Bucks
Sometimes players get lucky. Sometimes they end up with the exact teammate or coach that they need to take their career to the next level (looking at you Jordan). Sometimes they just end up in the right situation without even intending for it to be their next big break (looking at you Kareem). Sometimes they just end up saying screw this and start all over with teammates they choose (looking at you LeBron). I mention these three because these are the popular selections nowadays for the three greatest players of all time. Some take one out and put in someone else, but I don't think you're ever going to see an all time list that doesn't have one of them in the top three. But they, just like everyone else, needed great teammates. And boy oh boy, did Giannis need great teammates.
The story of the development of Giannis and Middleton into the number one and two options on a championship winning team will always make me smile. I actually didn't even realize this until now, but apparently Khris Middleton was one of the lowest ranked players in NBA 2K14, with an overall rating of 60 for his rookie season. 60. Just think about for a moment. And this was the guy who went on to become an NBA Champion and second option for said team. And it isn't like he was some lower tier second option. He was a pretty damn good one. 24 PPG from your second option is pretty damn good for an NBA Finals. But there's more to his game than that. He's a really good playmaker, and is capable of holding his own defensively.
He's also, for some reason, REALLY good against the Boston Celtics. Toronto pissed its pants whenever they realized they were playing LeBron James. New York Knicks fans still have nightmares about Reggie Miller. But if you're a Boston Celtics fan and you saw your team was facing the Bucks, forget about it, you were screwed.
There's also, of course... the rest of the supporting cast.
Brook Lopez, despite not being the defensive monster that season that he was last year, was still a really great center to have playing alongside Giannis. He may not have been DPOY worthy but... he was still pretty damn good at that end. But his three point shooting and his insane length is what really made him such a perfect center to pair with Giannis. Jrue Holiday in 2021, at least in my opinion, was the best defensive PG in the league. Having him with someone like Giannis was just unfair. Bobby Portis was such an excellent sixth man and his style of play summed up what made the Bucks so great.
But the thing that really put them over the top, at least for me, was when they brought in PJ Tucker. I was 100% confident at this point that no one was going to beat the Bucks that year once I found out Tucker was heading to the Bucks. And once he got there, the Bucks suddenly became not only one of the best teams in the league, but one of the best teams period. After acquiring Tucker, the Bucks finished out the regular season 16-4. That says a lot about how much of a difference Tucker made.
There are others to the team but for now, I want to focus on these main guys. Giannis, Middleton, Holiday, Tucker, Lopez, and Portis. Milwaukee had good depth, and they had some really nice pieces off the bench and Divinczeno, at least I thought, played his role as the starting two guard extremely well. But those six are who I will mainly focus on for now.
But time for the challengers...
The Phoenix Suns
So if you read through the Bucks portion of this... you probably thought to yourself "he must not have really thought all that highly of the Suns", but to be honest, I actually really liked this Suns team and thought they were a legit title contender. But their situation is a little different from how things started out compared to the Bucks.
We all know the story. Suns drafted guys like Booker and Ayton (whom many felt was the wrong choice, myself included). They don't really get anywhere with them. Chris Paul gets brought over to the team and suddenly, it feels like EVERYTHING changed. But that would be discrediting some of the other things that happened with this Suns team that helped take them to the next step.
First, Jae Crowder also joined the team this season. And while this isn't necessarily the kind of guy you'd think of when you say "oh yeah, that's a game changer right there", Jae Crowder actually came with some legitimate value. First off, his three point shooting, defense, and overall playoff experience (having gone to the finals the previous year with Miami, and has played in the playoffs every season apart from his rookie year) was going to be valuable for pretty much any team that he went to. But for another thing, it provided Phoenix with some much needed versatility. And at PF, I thought that was a great place for someone like him despite the weakness it brought... more on that later. DeAndre Ayton may have gone through a bit of a regression at this point, and his troubles within the team may have become well documented after the season, but he was still a valuable offensive big who could also bang with other centers in the league to at least help you gain rebounding advantages... apart from the weakness he brought, more on that later. Guys like Cam Johnson were also showing great potential as players and he proved to be a valuable piece for them off the bench.
But a lot of people forget about this one... this is the year that Mikal Bridges broke out as an elite 3/D player who was extremely durable and was the Suns fourth leading scorer with incredible shooting percentages. His shooting splits were 54/42/83. Holy ****.
But... yeah, the biggest reason of them all is without question the arrival of Chris Paul. I've always thought highly of Paul as a player, and I probably always will. It's insane that he's still a valuable player even now despite how much mileage he has in this league and how much his body has been through. I've always thought that Paul was one of the smartest PG's to ever play the game, and that always came a long way in helping him dominate the league for so many years. This isn't the thread to make the case that he's been a very unlucky player, but I will nonetheless throw that out there as a bone just to satisfy my pro-Paul agenda. The Suns as a whole were still a pretty young team, hell Chris Paul was actually their oldest player at 35 (and their second oldest after that was only 31), so having an incredibly savy and still very elite PG running the show was exactly what they needed. And when he arrived, Phoenix was ready to take that next step... and boy did they ever.
But the thing is... I've mentioned the weaknesses. And they...
The Finals
...are pretty much why they lost.
Again, gotta go back to the previous point that I mentioned. I felt this way at the time and I would feel the exact same way now... I have no idea how this Phoenix team as constructed could have ever been able to get four wins over that Milwaukee Bucks team. But that applies to just about any team that had a lot of size. The Lakers are a perfect example of this. Yes I'm really going that route, and yes I'm really going to throw it out there: Phoenix does not go to the Finals in 2021 if it weren't for Anthony Davis' injury. I'm sorry but you just can't convince me that Phoenix was going to get four wins in that series with LA having the kind of size advantage that they did, especially with someone like Davis on the team. Everything changed the moment he went down. You can point out how the previous games went all you want, you're never going to convince me otherwise.
Just like how I don't think anyone was going to convince me that Phoenix wouldn't get spanked in this series. I think I mentioned it above but at first, I thought this series was going to be a sweep in the Bucks favor. So imagine my surprise and shock when the Suns not only won the first game... but they ended up taking the next game as well.
I was actually flabbergasted. I could make sense of how the Cavaliers for example were able to get a 2-1 lead over Golden State in 2015 (and if I ever get that far, trust me, I'll be going into a LOT of detail about that one), but I couldn't for the life of me understand how on earth Phoenix won two games. I was so confident that this would be a sweep that I actually put money on it (never gambling again). The question at this point becomes... how the hell did Phoenix manage to do it?
Well in the first game, this was pretty much the greatness of Chris Paul on display. Yeah Booker and Ayton were able to provide incredible offensive support and Ayton REALLY battled on the boards there (and even surprised many with his defense on Giannis), and both Payne and Johnson provided timely offense to help the Suns starting unit... but this was the Chris Paul show, from beginning to end. One of the reasons why Chris Paul is such an incredible talent and why I praise his IQ is that he is able to find weaknesses in anything, and you may not even have realized said weaknesses existed. In this instance, his poor target was Brook Lopez, who despite having a lot of length and defensive intelligence, did not have enough footspeed or agility to be able to react to Chris Paul in a timely matter. Paul knew this and took full advantage of it. He constantly called for plays to have Lopez iso'd on him, and when he did, Paul worked his magic. Paul loves the mid-range game, and every time he had Lopez out there by himself, he just took him to school, and Lopez just could not react quick enough to do anything to bother him.
In the next game, it was the opposite... well, sort of. Giannis was limited in game 1 but in game 2, that wasn't the case. He was dominant. So it only comes naturally with that... oh, wait. The Bucks still ended up losing.
Okay so fun fact, I actually didn't see this game when it happened. I heard Giannis had himself quite the performance, so... I was completely thrown off when I heard the Bucks still lost the game. And the question is... how?
Well the rest of the Suns dominated. Paul/Booker/Bridges all had excellent games. Crowder actually hit his shots this time. Hell even Ayton, yeah remember him? He at least had a double double. Yeah he looked like a little kid trying to defend Giannis but... double double? Yeah you take that. Phoenix made 20 three pointers on 50% shooting from deep in this game, and despite Giannis' great performance, they still lost by double digits. That's the nature of the NBA Finals, and why it can be so tough to win in the first place. But for me... it just felt like Phoenix was completely in-sync with each other. I mentioned before that I didn't see this game when it first happened, but I did see the famous play where the Suns did a lot of passes in one possession which led to an Ayton and-1. I completely forgot about that play when I was watching this, but when I saw it... it didn't really jump out to me because it felt like Phoenix was picking apart the Bucks defense all night long.
If you're expecting me to do a breakdown of each individual game, that's not what I wanted to do with these analysis threads. Sometimes I might do that depending on specific circumstances (for example, I definitely plan on talking a lot about game 5 of the 2016 Finals, assuming I get there), but for the most part, I don't plan on doing that here. The reason I gave a brief rundown of the first two games is I wanted to highlight what the Suns did. I could have gone a lot more in-depth, as there's a lot of details that I just didn't mention. But the sake of time and the point I'm trying to make, I'm choosing to keep this brief.
With that said, Phoenix would not win a game for the rest of the series. Only once in the next four games did they manage to score more than the magical 118 that they had in the first two games they won, and Milwaukee would end up winning the series. What changed?
I think for one thing, Milwaukee did a much better job of limiting Phoenix's three point shooting opportunities. The thing that really jumped out to me watching game 3 for example is that Phoenix had a much more difficult time being able to run their offensive sets that allowed them to hurt the Bucks defense in the first place. It wasn't smooth sailing like it was last game. The Bucks made things far more difficult for Phoenix. Guys like Holiday were able to step up. And Ayton had foul trouble, which left Phoenix wide open for the much bigger Bucks team to really dominate. Another thing that stood out to me was how Phoenix ran its offense. After game 3, the fluid ball movement and Paul expertly controlling the offense wasn't there nearly as frequently. Instead, they rode Booker hard in games four and five. It worked, to an extent, but I do have one major issue with doing this, and I think it's an aspect of this series that doesn't get discussed enough.
When you are basing your offense on ball movement, you tire out the defense. The way they see it, they are either going to chase their man or let the open shot or easy basket occur. Most of the time, you don't win in either scenario. But I think what Phoenix did by relying more heavily on Booker let the Bucks off the hook. Phoenix was still able to generate offense when Booker was hitting his shots, but this allowed Milwaukee to exert less energy on defense and put more into the other end of the floor. As a result, the Bucks felt much more energized on offense. The more physical and bully-style of play that I expected to see from them was on display a lot more in these games.
And that right there is why I expected the Bucks to win this series pretty easily. Once the Bucks figured this out and made their adjustments, Phoenix pretty much had no choice but to ride Booker. And honestly... that might have been what the Bucks wanted all along.
But for the most part... even though I was right about the result, I was wrong about Phoenix. And this series was something that made me change my views on the sport of basketball.
Sometimes things happen in this sport that make you think... differently. Think back to what Stephen Curry becoming a four time NBA Champion did for people who thought you couldn't win with your point guard as your best scorer. I can remember a time when people thought you couldn't win with Dirk as your best player. But just like all things in life, sometimes things happen for a reason. And we have to understand why they do at their core. But what we also have to understand is why teams are so good in the first place. They don't get there by accident, sometimes they do things that make them stand out and allow them to play at such a high level in the first place. Yes, I felt Milwaukee was clearly the better team, but if this series proves anything, it's that simply wasn't the case. Phoenix was very clearly on their level, and playing more to their strengths might have won them this series. Do I think they overperformed? Well yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't sustainable.
But in the end, the series ended with the result that I expected. Phoenix was a great team but they did have weaknesses. They didn't have the personal to stop Giannis from doing pretty much whatever he wanted. Once Milwaukee made adjustments to the Suns offense, they had to change how they ran theirs. And this created unintended consequences. The adjustments Phoenix made just weren't enough to overcome what the Bucks were dishing out. Phoenix was a great team, but they just couldn't overcome Milwaukee.
I'm happy that Giannis has this in his career. Sure he may have dodged facing Embiid. Sure the Nets were a Durant's foot being a few inches farther out from winning that series, but the fact remains that the Bucks are the ones who hoisted up that 2021 Championship. As I said at the beginning, this was the end of a long and at times miserable journey for Giannis. And I'm glad he got to experience this. And while I originally didn't think the Suns would be able to give them the kind of challenge you'd expect from an NBA Finals opponent, I was proven wrong and they put up one hell of a fight. With Lillard now a Buck, only time will tell whether or not Giannis is able to experience this moment again. All we can do is move forward and find out. I on the other hand will be moving backwards, and going to the infamous bubble championship of 2020.
See you guys there, and hopefully this time, my thread doesn't disappear.
"And that's it. It's over. The Bucks have done it. The long wait has ended, after half a century, the Milwaukee Bucks are NBA Champions once again!"
