The Boston Celtics sent a strong message while winning Game 1 of the NBA’s Eastern Conference Finals. They throttled LeBron James and his jumbled supporting cast.
A day later, the Golden State Warriors staged quite the road show while outgunning the Rockets 119-106 in Houston to get the Western Conference Finals rolling.
It appears we could headed toward a Celtics-Warriors showdown for the NBA Championship.
Who expected that from the Celtics? They continue to amaze thanks to the tactical wizardry of coach Brad Stevens, who has worked around the loss of would-be stars Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving to season-ending injuries.
Meanwhile the Warriors roll on with their tenacious defense, selfless ball movement and efficient supporting cast.
“You’re not going to just come in and knock them out,” Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said during his postgame news conference. “I mean, there’s just too many times we had mental lapses. We either didn’t switch properly or we didn’t switch hard enough. We turned the ball over little too much. Every time we missed a layup, which we missed a lot of layups, they ran out.
“They’re really devastating. We’ve got to make layups, don’t turn it over and do a little bit better job of mentally just staying up on people.”
STEVENS IS A GENIUS
Toronto Raptors coach Dwane Casey got fired because he failed to devise strategies to contain James and spot-up shooters Kevin Love and Kyle Korver earlier in the NBA playoffs.
Stevens appears unlikely to suffer to same fate, although he quickly backpedaled away from media praise.
“It’s silly,” Stevens told reporters. “The praise is uncomfortable, and it’s just something that these guys should be getting it all. We all have a role to play, and we all need to play that role as well as we can.”
The Celtics rolled to a 108-83 victory over the Cavaliers in Game 1 of their series, limiting James, Love and Korver to 12-for-36 shooting combined. James scored just 15 points, missed all five shots from three-point range and turned the ball over seven times with Marcus Morris drawing the primary defensive assignment.
”I’ve been down before in the postseason, but for me there’s never any level of concern – no matter how bad I played tonight, with seven turnovers, how inefficient I was shooting the ball,” James told reporters said. ”We have another opportunity to be better as a ball club coming in Tuesday night, and we’ll see what happens.”
While the Cavaliers promise big pushback for Game 2, they are facing a Celtics squad with greater self-belief than before.
”The last couple of playoffs, and our meeting at the end of year, they blew us out of the water,” Boston guard Marcus Smart told reporters. ”We’ve got a different team, just like they do, and a lot of younger guys. So for them to see that, and have that feeling like we did tonight, is huge.”
WARRIORS APPEAR UNSTOPPABLE
With guard Stephen Curry back in the lineup, the Warriors look like their old NBA title-winning selves. They are especially effective while using their smaller, more versatile “Hamptons 5” lineup of Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green and Andre Iguodala.
That is the group that pushed the Warriors to a 13-point lead in the third quarter, creating the margin the Rockets could not overcome on their home court. Durant poured in 37 points and buried one timely shot after another.
“I was just trying to be aggressive when I had the ball and be forceful when I had the ball,” Durant told reporters. “I was able to knock down a few.”
While the Rockets did a nice job defending the three-point line — Curry made just 1 of 5 from beyond the arc in Game 1 — they paid dearly for their refusal to double-team Durant.
“We like to keep the ball moving but Kevin is the ultimate luxury because a play can break down and you just throw him the ball,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said in his postseason news conference. “He can get you a bucket as well as anybody on Earth.”
On offense, Houston ran one isolation play after another. James Harden and Chris Paul combined for 64 points, but the Rockets offense often bogged down due to the lack of ball movement and secondary scoring.
“We’re all in this together,” Harden told reporters afterward. “It doesn’t matter who has a bad game or who is missing shots . . . Keep shooting your shot and being aggressive. We got this far doing that and having that mindset. So we’re just going to continue it.”
