They may not be facing full-blown crises, but the respective top seeds in the NBA play-offs are entitled to worry a bit.
The Golden State Warriors, best in the West, and the Atlanta Hawks, tops in the East, face 2-1 deficits in their best-of-seven second-round NBA play-off series after their losses on Saturday night.
As ESPN’s Marc Stein phrased it on Twitter, “Smash 2, Splash 1”, referring to the physical style of the Memphis Grizzlies versus Golden State’s sweet-shooting “Splash Brothers” duo of Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson.
Similarly, Atlanta’s collection of shooters are running into trouble with Washington’s active wing defenders.
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The Warriors shot 39.8 per cent from three-point range this season, best in the league. They were followed by the Hawks at 38.0
The Wizards (34.9 per cent opponents three-percentage, 16th) and Grizzlies (35.1, 18th) were merely middle-of-the-pack in guarding the three.
So what has gone wrong for Golden State and Atlanta? How have the prolific, motion-based offences that ranked second (Warriors, 109.7 points per 100 possessions) and sixth (Hawks, 106.2) been so ineffective at the worst possible time?
The conventional wisdom is that shooting-based offences are the most susceptible to dysfunction once the play-offs arrive. Unfortunately for the Hawks and Warriors, that has been the case so far.
Golden State were 13-for-28 from three in Game 1, their only win so far. They have followed that with back-to-back 6-for-26 performances.
It is not even necessarily a case of the Grizzlies playing unbreakable defence on the perimeter, though Tony Allen and Mike Conley are the kind of mobile, smart guards who can impede the Curry-Thompson three-point barrage.
There have been plenty of plays hounded into a turnover around the perimeter, as evidenced by Golden State’s minus-10 turnover differential the past two games.
But there have also been plays like Curry’s near the end of the third quarter on Saturday night, when he pulled up and let loose, the kind of quick-trigger shot that looks (and is) insanely difficult but that the MVP has hit with a swish all season.
It flew far and wide left, hitting nothing but air.
So what happens to an offence that counts on prolific shooting all season when it suddenly goes cold at the wrong time? The team that employs that offence suddenly finds itself scrambling.
Maybe pace-and-space, the style the Warriors and Hawks borrowed from the San Antonio Spurs and used to elite regular-season results, is more susceptible to aggressive one-series defence in the play-offs.
Maybe it is easier within the confines of the play-offs to focus specifically against the elaborate motion offences that wear out opponents during the regular-season grind.
Maybe it is simply a matter of being more actuely subjected to the whims of Lady Luck, and a stretch of one-too-many cold shooting nights that can be hidden by the length of 82 games earlier in the year are magnified by the brevity of seven-game play-off series.
It is too early to draw anything definitive from three games. But it is also not too early for Golden State and Atlanta to start sweating.
jraymond@thenational.ae
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