Throughout the NBA play-offs, The National's resident NBA dudes Jonathan Raymond and Kevin Jeffers will be breaking down the key talking points of the night before, plus looking around the scope of the league. Here are our NBA Play-off takeaways.
• Read more: 2016 NBA play-offs: Previews, predictions and what we learnt day-by-day
Wednesday, April 27 scores:
Charlotte Hornets 90, Miami Heat 88 (Hornets lead 3-2)
Portland Trail Blazers 108, Los Angeles Clippers 98 (Trail Blazers lead 3-2)
Golden State Warriors 114, Houston Rockets 81 (Warriors win series 4-1)
Point Draymond
In the space of two games, the Warriors seem to have fashioned their Stephen-Curry-less identity. It flows, unsurprisingly, from Draymond Green.
Game 5 was an emphatic one for Green, belied by a quiet-seeming 15 points, nine rebounds and eight assists. He was the initiator on offence, bringing the ball up the floor, running fast breaks, creating open looks.
The small-power-point-if-need-be-forward-sometimes-centre has always been Golden State’s crucial Swiss Army knife. With Curry out, he is more like a tank his teammates pile into and storm ahead in.
His early action – hitting Klay Thompson for the first of his seven threes, finding Shaun Livingston for an easy bucket down low, setting the screen for Thompson’s second three – set the pace for the rest of the game. Their resulting 33-point decimation of the Houston Rockets was a blue-print for a suddenly very survivable second round.
Back when we had our MVP debate, we noted Green might have had an argument for being second in the race. He had, after all, at least by ESPN's Real Plus-Minus statistic, been the third-best player in the league and second-most productive by their RPM Wins metric.
On Wednesday, with Green orchestrating the attack, feeding an on-fire Thompson, involving Livingston and Brandon Rush and Leandro Barbosa, they looked every bit the same Warriors who won a record 73 games this season. You might have even forgotten Curry was not in this game.
Until you saw his be-suited figure spring out of his seat on the bench, after a Thompson three to put Golden State up 31 in the third quarter, the electricity of the moment coursing through him as he smiled and screamed and hopped around like he was on the receiving end of the most impassioned Sunday sermon ever delivered.
Curry saw what the rest of us were seeing – a Warriors team who were finding a way to still play their game, even without their most important influence.
A Warriors team who can get past the second round. A Warriors team who just maybe, even sans Curry, get to the NBA Finals.
A Warriors team who were not Curry’s Wariors yet still very much looked like Curry’s Warriors. The Draymond Green Warriors.
Mea Culpa
After Game 1 of the Charlotte Hornets-Miami Heat series, I wrote of the Hornets: “If they get hot might be able to steal a game in this series, but they don’t have the length, experience or breadth of skill-sets to really compete with the Heat.”
Whoops!
That was, clearly, very wrong. Even though this has still been a largely even series (Charlotte won the last two games by six combined points), the Hornets have had an edge that in basketball is consistently underrated (including by me): Good players.
Not great players – Kemba Walker is the closest thing they have to one of those, and he’s not quite really at that level. But they have a full complement of good players – a deep collection of flexible, multi-skilled big men and an aggressive, playmaking guard rotation.
The Hornets had nine guys play at least 15 minutes in Game 5, and eight do the same in Game 4 before Nic Batum returned. None of them were bad. None were superstars, not exactly, but none were bad basketball players.
It’s easy to forget, and underestimate, how far that can take a basketball team.
Clippers sinking
It’s depressing to watch, but this just isn’t going to work for the Clips.
With Chris Paul out, Los Angeles’ defence on the wings collapsed and Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum combined for 49 points. With another 21 chipped in by Portland backup guards Allen Crabbe and Gerald Henderson.
With Blake Griffin out, there wasn’t enough juice to replace his offence. Jeff Green had a nice 6-of-10 shooting, 17-point effort, but Paul Pierce was shut out and Wesley Johnson was a non-factor.
Without those two – and this is hardly the most searing insight of the play-offs – the Clippers just do not have enough for this level.
The Trail Blazers are a fluid, fast and cohesive team. Long arms, good ball movement, they shoot well, they run the floor – they are going to be a problem for the Curry-less Warriors.
Los Angeles, meanwhile, are close to arriving at a long, portentous summer.
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