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Although the series between the Los Angeles Clippers and the Golden State Warriors was expected to be the best first round match-up of the Playoffs, the Warriors now seem to be short-handed against a Clippers team which is among the deepest rosters in the league owing to Andrew Bogut’s late regular-season rib injury.
The animosity between these teams, which is quite evident in their regular season encounters, is largely because both teams believe that they are the next up-and-coming young team to rule the West after the dominance that the Los Angeles Lakers and the San Antonio Spurs have had over the last decade.
Having said that, the Warriors will have to be the team in the series to sweat it out more if they want to turn their ambitions of a long post-season into reality. They will have to come out and play a disciplined game of basketball night in and night out to clinch this series, but as seen in Game 2, that is easier said than done.
The Warriors, not allowed to be too flexible with their roster, will need to step up to the stage called the post-season and serve some justice to the amount of talent on their team.
So after looking at the first two games of the series here is what the Warriors need to do to move in to the next round of the Playoffs:
Stay out of foul trouble
The Warriors’ players must stay clear of contact or contest shots with as minimal contact possible simply because they cannot afford any player on whom they depend for offence to be sitting on the bench due to foul trouble.
In Game 1 it was Andre Iguodala who was fouled out in the fourth quarter after sitting a major portion of the third period, and in the second game it was almost the entire starting line-up which had three or four fouls mid-way through the third quarter. Head Coach Mark Jackson must emphasize the importance of staying out of foul trouble before Game 3 on Thursday at the Oracle Arena.
Jermaine O’Neal and Doc Rivers were both given technicals for verbally going at one another while the game was on. O’Neal, a veteran with over 10 years of playtime in the league, must understand his importance with Bogut out as the only big guy on the roster who can defend DeAndre Jordan.
Play disciplined defence
After a frustrating Game 1, Blake Griffin made an impressive return scoring 35 points on an efficient shooting night.
Klay Thompson did an excellent job on Chris Paul in the first game with his bigger size, but he hardly guarded Paul in Game 2 largely due to his foul situation. The Warriors lucked out in Game 1 with the Clippers’ leading offensive powerhouse, Blake Griffin, warming the bench with foul trouble of his own.
Both these players had a free license to go at it in the second game and they did not waste the opportunity as they stepped up their performance. Griffin had 35 points on an incredible efficient shooting night, putting on display his entire improved offensive repertoire.
A point to be noted here is that the Warriors need to be more active on the defensive end of the floor as a team, rotating well, helping one another on penetrations into the lane and contesting the three point shot well with minimal contact. Their offence can and most probably will get better as we go deeper into this series but their defence needs to go up by more than a notch against a Clippers team which is the most efficient on offence in the league.
Be simple and efficient on offence
Stephen Curry has a lot of adjustments to make in his game in order to help the team offensively.
Their offence lives on the team’s efficient shooting from long range led by their starting guard duo of the Splash Brothers – Stephen Curry and lay Thompson – and David Lee’s post play in the paint. But they had no answer to the Clippers’ well-prepared defence that had come into the series with an intent to surprise the Warriors with well-tuned adjustments, negating the latter’s strengths on offence.
In the two games so far in the series neither Curry nor Thompson has been able to penetrate the defence or find his groove while shooting well enough to help the team. Jackson needs to find more ways to not only get his two leading shooters in rhythm but also get the entire team on one page on the offence.
They have to be aggressive in attacking the mismatches on the floor, which when they play the Clippers would be available in plenty and for almost all 48 minutes of the game.
Curry needs to work a lot on his offensive game after a rather quiet two games. On pick and rolls, when the opponent switches the big man on him for a split second, he has been passing the ball to his rolling teammate rather than attacking the double team to get his teammate a better look. The Clippers made it really tough for Curry to even get a clean open look, so ideally he should have altered his game accordingly. But it was only in the third quarter of the second game that we saw him attacking the defence and driving to the basket.
The only way the Warriors are going to beat the Clippers is by sticking to these principles, which shouldn’t be tough; after all, these tactics largely define their general style of play.
