With a little bit of help from the basketball bros (so named because their heads are the most basketball-shaped in the whole league), P.J. Tucker and Eric Gordon, the Rockets have now pulled even with the Warriors in this series. Having an MVP on your team is great, and having an all-time great PG on your team is great too, but don’t let anyone tell you you don’t need role-players to succeed as a team. Maybe Golden State can get away with it, but look at this game. Maybe they can’t. Players like Tucker, who can play defense and sometimes hit threes, become more valuable in the playoffs. More valuable, at least, than someone like Gerald Green, who can only do the “sometimes hit threes” part.
Supposedly Tucker is doing a lot of the defending of Kevin Durant this series. You might point at Durant’s 36 point per game average in these four games and claim that Tucker isn’t doing a good enough job. And then I would gleefully yell “Someone isn’t watching the games!!!!!!”, because any fool knows that if someone like Iman Shumpert was defending him instead, Durant would be averaging 50. Tucker’s doing what he can out there, being physical or whatever to make up for being undersized.
By the way, I was told, repeatedly, that the Warriors had a switch they were going to turn on in the playoffs and it was going to be just like before where they basically never lost and romped their way to championships. Coincidentally, I was told the same about the Celtics (minus the romping to championships). I am beginning to think, actually I’ve been thinking this for a long time, that such a thing as a switch that you turn on when the ‘offs come around isn’t something that really exists. Maybe it does. Maybe there are clear examples that I can’t remember now. But I feel like maybe it would just be better to give full effort in the regular season so you don’t have to change anything for the playoffs. And I think that’s what the Warriors did, and they’re scared that it didn’t work as well as before.