Series Preview: Western Semifinals, SAS vs LAC

by Aaron McGuire

This preview will be segmented into three parts — first the overall statistical comparison, three matchups the series may ride on, and closing thoughts (along with my pick, as well as the picks of all our writers). Should be a good time. Let’s get to it.

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Extremely convoluted table, here. This summarizes the statistical performance of four separate teams, assessed on a per-possession basis through the four factors statistics. A primer on the stats: POSS is the number of possessions, Off/Def Eff is the offensive and defensive efficiency of the team, EFG% is the effective field goal percentage of the team (a derivative of FG% incorporating the added value of threes), TOR is the turnover rate of a team (lower is better!), ORR is the offensive rebound rate of a team, and FTR is the free throw rate of a team. For the four teams, I’ve chosen to show three variations on the San Antonio statistics (the whole-season stats, the last-third stats, and the vs LAC stats) as well as the statistics for the Los Angeles Clippers (which is placed with a red background to differentiate it). To provide an easier-to-digest way to analyze this monstrous table, here are two graphs. We’ll start by looking at San Antonio, from a high level view.

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First, the Spurs offense against the Clipper defense.

A few items of note. The offensive attack the Spurs relied on was primarily rooted in shooting the ball really, really well. The Clippers hardly had a fantastic defense, finishing 10th in the league in EFG% allowed. Despite that, each incarnation of the Spurs absolutely blew the average shooting percentage of a Clipper opponent out of the water, and this led to the Spurs’ incredible offensive numbers against the Clippers in the regular season — their mark of 114 points per 100 possessions is absolutely incredible, and if the Spurs maintain that clip in this series, the Clippers may be done for. In the regular season, the Clippers were generally very good at cutting off the opposing attack by forcing turnovers, ranking 9th in the league at forcing opposing turnovers. Unfortunately for the Clippers, the Spurs happen to be the 3rd best team in the league at taking care of the ball. In a contest between the Clippers’ excellent turnover production and the Spurs’ excellent ball control, the Clippers lost out — in 3 games this season, they forced turnovers on 5% fewer possessions than their season average. On the other hand, the Clippers ended up with a notable upper hand in their defensive rebounding — Blake, DeAndre, and Evans absolutely shut down the offensive boards for the Spurs, forcing the Spurs well below their season average. The Clippers also were able to avoid fouling as much as they do against the average team against the Spurs, with San Antonio shooting almost 7% fewer free throws per minute than the average Clipper opponent. Keeping the Spurs away from free points will be a major key to the Clippers’ chances of staying competitive in this series. Now, let’s look at the Clipper offense versus the San Antonio defense.

This is where Spurs fans may be entitled to concern. While the Spurs were hardly a wonderful defensive team in the early going this season, the Clippers consistently picked apart the Spurs defense like few other teams did this season. They were overall relatively competitive in their three game gauntlet against the Silver and Black this year, losing by only 3 points on a fluke overtime-forcing miscue by Chris Paul in Los Angeles and serving the Spurs one of their five home losses on the year in a rout right before Jackson arrived. These numbers would tend to show why. The Spurs hardly held the Clippers to anything, as they allowed the Clips to shoot less than 1% under their season average. That would be fine, if the Spurs were forcing turnovers or keeping the Clippers off the line — unfortunately, they weren’t. The Clippers foul rate against the Spurs in this season’s three game series would have rated out as the #1 rate in the league, a smidgen ahead of the Oklahoma City Thunder. The only thing the Spurs did notably well against the Clippers on the defensive end was eliminate second shot opportunities, taking the Clippers from their 4th-in-the-league offensive rebounding rate to a more paletable number that (over a full season) would rank decidedly middle-of-the-pack.

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Having looked at the macro-matchup from a high level, we turn to three key player matchups.

MATCHUP #1: EVERYONE BUT DUNCAN vs BLAKE GRIFFIN

All things considered, I’d assess this to be the most important matchup of the series. This isn’t because I’m any fan of Griffin, mind you — I outlined before the season that offhandedly outlined why I don’t particularly like him, and followed that up with a midseason post affirming my preseason suspicions. Blake is a preening half-star, an Amar’e-style big man whose defensive contributions are often less than zero. He’s not at all a good defender, he’s an outright terrible one. And he spends far too many possessions isolating in the midrange despite his dominant at-rim power game that he can employ on virtually every big man in the league. A player like Blake should not be shooting almost 5 shots a game outside of 10 feet. He simply shouldn’t. It’s insane that he does, and a mark of a player that isn’t paying attention to how he can really take his game to the next level.

All that said? Griffin is a player that can absolutely kill you if you don’t cut off his path to the rim. Like Amar’e in his Nash-fueled heyday, Griffin gets buckets on an insane 74% of his attempts at the rim. I’d love to tell you that the Spurs did an excellent job shutting him down, but that wouldn’t be true. Blake shot 24-39 on painted area shots against the Spurs this season. The biggest problem is not (as some might expect) Tim Duncan’s defense — when Duncan and Griffin shared the court, Griffin shot just 10-20 at the rim, indicating that Duncan’s savvy was able to push Griffin out of position and keep him from getting the easy baskets he feasted on in the regular season. Duncan’s poor shooting against Griffin may have been a fluke — to these eyes, the poor shooting from Duncan seemed more rooted in fatigue. (Though I’ll get into a darker possibility in my closing comments.) The real issue when it comes to defending Griffin? Everyone other than Duncan.

With Duncan on the bench, Griffin made 7 of 9 shots at the rim, taking special care to destroy DeJuan Blair — with Blake and Blair sharing the court, Griffin scored on 9 of 15 shots in the restricted area, and an absurd 6 of 7 shots in the painted area. Tiago Splitter did an even worse job in fewer minutes, allowing Blake to go 4-6 from the painted area altogether. In a paragraph sure to set the comments page aflame, it’s worth noting that Matt Bonner did better in the regular season at defending Blake than all but Tim, forcing Griffin into an 8-15 performance from that area. The problem with Bonner isn’t the defense, which he does adequately — it’s the rebounding, which he emphatically doesn’t. With Bonner on the court, Blake averaged a pedestrian 19.3 points on 43% shooting per 36 minutes. Certainly a solid defensive performance, if you ignore the fact that he also averaged 17.6 rebounds per 36 minutes. THAT’S painful. And endemic of the problem facing the Spurs. Other than Duncan, absolutely no one on this roster has shown an aptitude for countering Blake Griffin. At best, Bonner turns him into a 20-18 player who kills us on the glass but doesn’t kill us on the block. For every minute Duncan isn’t on Blake, the Clippers will have a run available to them. Barring a miracle of rotation science from Professor Popovich, the Spurs are going to have far more trouble keeping Blake under wraps than they had in the first round with the Utah rotation.

MATCHUP #2: TONY PARKER vs BLAKE GRIFFIN

This is where the Spurs can — potentially — turn a close series into a blowout. The Clippers are a poor defensive team, but they’re especially poor at helping on penetrating guards, and ESPECIALLY poor at it when Griffin is on the court. To wit? See these numbers. When Blake was on the floor, Tony Parker averaged an insane 25-3-10 per 36 minutes, on 60% shooting that included 9-12 from the painted area, 6-11 from midrange, and two missed threes. The only true blowout the Clippers’ enacted on the Spurs this season came with Parker absent. If Tony Parker can produce consistently dominant play in this series against what may be the absolute weakest penetration defense the Spurs can possibly face in the playoffs, the Spurs will win this series. Rather handily.

MATCHUP #3: THE PAUL FACTOR vs THE GINOBILI FACTOR

Chris Paul — when healthy — is one of the 3 best basketball players on earth. Manu Ginobili — when healthy — is one of the 3 best shooting guards on the planet. The problem for both teams? Neither of these players is 100% healthy right now. Manu spent the first round looking like he needed an IV half the time, and Chris Paul looked like he made his team actively worse in the last two games of the first round. Both of these players are about as far off the reservation as they’ve ever been, entering a playoff series. Neither team knows quite what they’re going to get from their erstwhile star and overall best player. The real question — and the one that can swing a series — is what they can do when they’re hobbled. And in this case, I don’t like saying it, but I do think the Clippers have a pretty strong advantage here. Chris Paul flops like a baby seal when healthy — if you take his health to darker places, do you really think the referees aren’t going to toss him a bone? He’s Chris Paul, playing for a Los Angeles team. Of course he’s going to get the calls. I don’t think it would be altogether unexpected if Paul averages 10 free throw attempts a game in this series. Regardless of how poorly he plays otherwise, if he stays injured, the free throw / foul factor are those that can make blowouts close and close games lean their way. And it’s the advantage the Clippers will — if Vinny Del Negro does anything right — look to use.

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I waffled on my pick for quite some time. Originally, believe it or not, it was Spurs in 7. I realize that this could be portrayed as a lack of confidence in the Spurs — I wouldn’t quite call it that, myself. I think the Spurs are the best team in the playoffs this year, and I think that — all things equal — they can beat any team in the NBA in a 7 game series right now. They’re playing incredibly well right now. They sport the best defense in the western conference, the best offense of any team still playing for keeps, and they’re rested. So, you might ask, why would I have this series as anything other than a gentleman’s sweep? Three core reasons.

• Chris Paul. Even if you assume he’s in a state of disrepair for games 1 and 2 (an assumption I’m not 100% on board with), the Chris Paul of today is in a better place to slice the Spurs to pieces than the Chris Paul of 2008 — his step-back jumper is better than ever, and if you think back, the main strategy Pop used to contain him in 2008 was to limit his repertoire to his step-back and not much else. If Pop does that again, the Spurs are in trouble. And in a close game, there’s not a single player in the league other than a healthy Manu I’d rather have in my corner than a seething Chris Paul. And don’t lie to yourself. That man is ALWAYS seething.

• Reggie Evans is the dirtiest player in the league, and although it may be blasphemy to say so, I’m worried about Duncan. If there’s any cadre of players in the league that I wouldn’t trust in a 7 game series, I’d take Andrew Bynum’s feckless rage over the calculated antics of Evans, Paul, and Butler over the course of a series. Evans virtually never gets called for takedowns, punches, and the strikings of a generally lower-tier big man’s ruthless impotent rage. He’s not as big as Bynum, but he hits just about as hard. And Paul (for all his positives) absolutely loves the special kind of flop where you flail your arms into your defender’s face and “hope” they don’t get the “incidental” contact. I’m worried about what Evans does to Duncan’s knees, and what Paul does to Manu’s nose, and what the rest of the Clippers’ do on the dead-ball fouls and out-of-line contact that rarely gets called for that Clipper team.

• The Clippers showed in the Memphis series that they can play a physical, knock-down style of ball. In last year’s attempt to conquer that style, various members of the Spurs did a poor job reacting to that — Tony Parker stopped producing, Duncan’s shot left him, and the bench laid down. This Clippers team is in no way as good a defensive team as that Memphis team, but keeping with point two, it’s certainly possible they choose to play dirty defense instead of good defense. And in the end, it’s certainly possible that has the same effect, and shuts down the Spurs offense. Thus turning what should be a hilariously easy series to the Spurs into a battle.

In the end, I cut down my prediction to Spurs in 6. Because despite all this, the Spurs are the better team. We’ve been playing incredible defense as of late, and our offense has been even better. Telling Gregg Popovich to outsmart Vinny Del Negro is like using your Buick as a flyswatter. And even though Blake Griffin performed well against our bench big men and the Clippers have Chris Paul, the Spurs have an unpredictable team concept and are without question a better team than the team that went 2-1 against the Clippers earlier in the year, with our only loss coming without Tony Parker. In the statistical sense, the best bet for this series (accounting for a banged up Paul and a busted up Griffin) would be a five game Spurs win. I’ll give them another game, because while I’m not altogether afraid of the Clippers, I’m afraid of Reggie Evans and I think Chris Paul’s twenty six thousand free throw attempts per game will probably swing a game or two. But even though I get ill tidings from this series, I can’t possibly pick the Clippers for more. Spurs in 6.

(And between you and me? I really hope I’m overestimating the buggers. I do not like the Clippers, sam I am.)

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	Tim Varner_	Graydon Gordian_	Andrew McNeill_	Jesse Blanchard_	David Menendez Aran_	Aaron McGuire_	Chris Blackmon
SAS vs LAC	SAS in 4	SAS in 5	SAS in 6	SAS in 5	SAS in 5	SAS in 6	SAS in 4
OKC vs LAL	OKC in 6	OKC in 6	OKC in 6	OKC in 5	OKC in 6	OKC in 5	OKC in 6