The Change of Balance in Star-Driven San Antonio
SAN ANTONIO — Danny Green dribbled down the left side of the floor with 2:28 remaining in the second quarter, sizing up the Clippers’ transition defense as Kawhi Leonard ran the opposite wing.
“I was gonna shoot it,” Green said of the play, before J.J. Redick stepped up to contest a potential launch from the 3-point line.
Good thing he didn’t.
Green reacted with a two-handed flip toward the basket, over Redick’s head and past a trailing Blake Griffin that appeared as if it might sail toward the end of the Spurs’ bench. San Antonio’s shooting guard said his thought process was twofold: Either he’d look bad and earn a spot on the bench next to an angry Gregg Popovich, or Leonard was going to catch it.
Kawhi caught it, and suddenly it felt as if a bomb had gone off inside the AT&T Center.
The reigning Finals MVP took flight, grabbed the ball out of the air with one giant mitt cocked back five feet from the basket, and tomahawked the ball through the hoop. A dead ball occurred soon thereafter, and the jumbotron above replayed the damage. The crowd in attendance reacted in unison, with an audible BOOM as each replay of the Leonard throw-down was looped.
Leonard’s alley-oop slam put the Spurs up 41-33, but it was only the beginning of the onslaught, and a career night for the newly minted Defensive Player of the Year.
San Antonio would outscore Los Angeles — the NBA’s most efficient offensive team during the regular season — 48-22 over the next 21 minutes, eventually pushing its lead to a staggering 37 points halfway through the fourth on its way to a 100-73 Game 2 win and a 2-1 lead in the opening-round series. It was the Clippers’ lowest point total of the season, and the franchise’s lowest playoff point total ever. Leonard, on the other hand, finished with a career high 32 points to leave yet another indelible mark on his postseason résumé.
“I just think it was one of those nights — it happens in the NBA,” Gregg Popovich said at the podium after the game. “We had a great shooting night, we had a lot of energy and we shot well. They had a difficult night shooting and it’s a bad combination, so they get a loss.
“We’ve been in the same situation before where we couldn’t throw it in the ocean and the other team shoots well so the loss is big. We’re not that good and they’re not what you saw tonight, without a doubt,” he continued. ” We just had one heck of a night.”
Calling it “one of those nights” is an appropriate way to describe what happened, but it was spectacular nonetheless. The Spurs looked like the playoff monsters that ripped through the 2014 Finals, suffocating a great offensive team with smothering defense, and landing haymaker after haymaker from all over the court on the other end.
The Clippers looked tired, a step slow on their rotations, and frankly, overwhelmed. The Spurs were making them pay for all of it.
“I don’t know about effort and execution, I just know we got our butts kicked. They played terrific basketball and we didn’t,” Doc Rivers said. “We have had a couple times this year … where we lose our spirit because we can’t make shots. That is what I thought happened as the game went on — every time we missed a shot we played less defense.”
At the end of the evening, the final box score led you to believe the Spurs were back for good — the same old group with the same wild style that kills you with long-range sniper fire, back-cutters slicing through exposed weak points, a deep and spread-out attack, and the brilliance of their Hall-of-Famers.
But it wasn’t the same. A look at the point totals told a different story, a new story. Leonard’s 32 points led the team, and only two other Spurs finished in double figures: Green — who freaking hounded Chris Paul on the defensive end — had 11, and Boris Diaw posted 15 on the night. Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker had 12 combined.
Nothing felt top-heavy, though. Nothing felt forced, or desperate, or questionable. Leonard began to do whatever he liked, and the Clippers found themselves unable to provide any adequate response. For the Spurs, anything extra was gravy, because they had the best player on the floor.
San Antonio has moved away from post-up situations involving Kawhi, nearly eliminating Rivers’ ability to summon double-teams that disorganize his thought process. Instead, he’s primarily beating people off the dribble going outside-in, and he’s filling it up.
Leonard will pull-up, catch and shoot, or drive to the basket, and he’s become an efficient threat in all three facets.
“What didn’t he do (Friday)?” Matt Barnes, Leonard’s primary defender, asked in the Clippers’ locker room. “He guarded all of our best players, he made all of his shots. He had a great game tonight. He led their team and he killed us, and I have to do a better job on him.”
There was a discussion that arose among media members close to the both of the teams: If the Clippers called the Spurs tomorrow and offered Griffin for Leonard, what would San Antonio do? My answer, and the answer of others covering this team, was a very quick no.
We’ve arrived at the point where Leonard has become one of the NBA’s most valuable players in an age where perimeter athletes rule the landscape. He can defend all of them, and he can go for 32 points on 13-of-18 shooting. Make no mistake, Blake is a top-10 player, but Kawhi is an extreme rarity.
The quiet 23-year old leaves crowds frenzied, but shows little emotion in doing so. On Friday prior to the game, he was presented with the Defensive Player of the Year trophy by Tim Duncan, who tried to gauge what the young phenom was thinking during the heaping of public attention.
“Can anybody tell? I don’t know. I gave him the trophy, walked off and he was behind me,” Tim Duncan said. “He’s still maturing and I think obviously he is honored by it. He puts the effort in.
“I don’t know if he came out here tonight to say he is more than just a defender — he put on a show.”
I asked Green if he’d ever gotten a chance to see the replay of his lob to Leonard. He said he hadn’t, but the bench noticed the reactions from the crowd. BOOM, he remembered hearing over and over.
The beauty of the Internet and Twitter is there is no shortage of replays when incredible feats takeover a timeline. I turned my phone toward Green, and pressed play.
“That’s pretty cool,” he said, satisfied with his long-armed teammate on the receiving end of his pass.
More than only that play, though, the game itself was a statement — that the young nucleus of this team has never been better, and that life will be hell for any of the Western Conference’s premier wing tandems.
That the Spurs have only just begun to find their groove.
