Post#4997 » by therealbig3 » Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:04 pm
I know this is a little delayed, but I kind of just realized that I think Boston would have actually put up a better fight than Cleveland did. I think one-man teams that don't play defense (like the Cavs) are just naturally going to get decimated by the Warriors. Warriors just have way too many offensive weapons and move the ball so well that they WILL find the weak spot in your defense. And they have plenty of good defenders to essentially just swarm the 1 major offensive threat on the other team.
OTOH, while the Celtics don't have that 1 guy like LeBron James (nobody close in fact), they do have multiple players that are capable on-ball offensive playmakers, and they don't really have weak spots in their defense to exploit. Everyone is a versatile, capable defender (Brown, Horford, and Smart are actually quite a bit better than that), and everyone is generally high IQ on both sides of the ball. Very well disciplined and are able to adjust both in-game and game-to-game, mainly because of the fantastic coaching of Stevens.
I mean, their overall offensive shortcomings would get exposed and they would definitely still lose, but they have the capability for a different guy to play well and carry the team offensively game to game (i.e., it could be Brown in one game, Tatum the next, Rozier the next, Horford the next, etc.), so that it's almost like they have 1 star that's consistently playing well for them...all the while they uglify the game and turn it into a defensive grind fest.
I could have seen the Celtics pull off a game or two from the Warriors in a manner similar to how the Rockets won games 4 and 5...sneak out the win by shutting them down and doing just enough offensively. They obviously don't have the firepower that the Rockets did, so that's it's much more likely that they just don't do enough offensively, but ultimately, I think they match up better with the Warriors than the Cavs did, and we could have had a more competitive Finals if they actually took that game 7 from the Cavs.