Sports Nut

Game 6 Was Weird. Game 7 Is Going to Be Glorious.

A conversation with ESPN’s Ethan Sherwood Strauss about the NBA Finals.

Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors reacts to a foul call during the fourth quarter as LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers looks on in Game 6 of the 2016 NBA Finals on Thursday in Cleveland.
Stephen Curry reacts to a foul call as LeBron James looks on during Game 6 of the 2016 NBA Finals on Thursday in Cleveland.

Jason Miller/Getty Images

In a special episode of Slate’s sports podcast Hang Up and Listen, I talked to ESPN’s Golden State Warriors beat writer Ethan Sherwood Strauss about the bizarre happenings in Game 6 of the NBA Finals and what might happen in Game 7. You can listen to our conversation by clicking on the player below and read a transcript of the podcast, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Josh Levin: The very simplistic sports narrative is that the Warriors had this series all sewn up before Draymond Green punched LeBron James in the nuts at the end of Game 4, and then things turned sideways—both for LeBron and for the Warriors. Do you feel like that’s what happened in the last couple of games or is there something more complicated going on?

Ethan Sherwood Strauss: That certainly is the turning point, and what will haunt them should they ultimately lose this series. I do wonder, when you say “punched him in the dick,” I wonder if we’re going to lose the context of Draymond being a habitual line-stepper. Because in a vacuum, it doesn’t really look like a dick punch. It sort of looks more like a pawing. I feel like our children and grandchildren, when we show them a replay of why Draymond Green was suspended, will be slightly confused by that just as a discrete event.

But beyond that, there are a few things happening. One of them is that LeBron James is incredible, and I’m not sure that Andre Iguodala is totally healthy right now and can do anything to stop him. Moreover, LeBron is making his jump shot. That makes him nearly impossible to contain. He’s been great with the jumper the last two games. And he’s absolutely controlling the rock, not turning it over. And Steph Curry in these playoffs has kind of been reduced to just a three-point shooter, and I feel as though that’s gotten ignored in part because we define him by three-point shooting, so people haven’t noticed that that’s all that’s really left right now. He’s not finishing at the rim, which is important because this team has a dearth of people who finish at the rim. He’s shooting 45 percent within five feet of the rim in these finals. He was at 64.5 percent during the season. I think that’s an underrated aspect, one that hasn’t gotten as much attention as, say, Harrison Barnes not being able to hit any kind of shot.

Levin: We’re definitely in the realm of weird basketball. It kind of reminds me of a 22-inning baseball game where you have a pitcher playing left field. When you see guys like Dahntay Jones playing meaningful minutes, and the rotations narrow down so much—by necessity somewhat for Golden State, because of injuries to Andrew Bogut and Draymond being out for Game 5—but you also have a situation where Tyronn Lue doesn’t trust Iman Shumpert and Kevin Love is now basically relegated to the bench. And for the Warriors, even with Iguodala barely able to move, Barnes was stuck to the bench. I’m interested to see who plays and who doesn’t play in Game 7. The teams are not the teams that played throughout the year. We’re going into a deciding game with weird lineups.

Strauss: That was such a narrative with the Warriors, that this was a 73-win team. Well, yes and no. They’ve won 73 games, but right now, it’s almost like one of those scenes from a movie when people are coming back from space and their aircraft is breaking up as they hit the atmosphere. They’re falling apart right now and just trying to keep it all together. They’re incredibly battered and I don’t know if it’s an especially great sign that they had champagne on ice the last two games and couldn’t get it close to done, regardless of the circumstances.

They are certainly not the healthier team, as an inversion of what happened last year. Certainly they’re going to be incredibly desperate and I can’t wait to see what happens in Game 7. But I do wonder if we get caught up in this concept of momentum and we assume that whatever just happened is going to continue to happen. If you step back from this, the Warriors were up 3–1, you had the dick punch, they were without their second-best player at home and lost, and in Game 6 they lost in Quicken Loans Arena, which is a very hard place to win. They still have a pretty good shot at this. I know it’s all doom and gloom and the walls are caving in, but we wouldn’t be shocked if they won at home in Game 7 as teams tend to do, right?

Levin: Of course not, and with Steph and Klay Thompson, if that is your whole offense and they’re taking “bad shots,” there are a large number of games where those shots will go in and they’ll win independent of anything else that’s happening on the court, independent of anything else the other team does or that their teammates are doing.

Strauss: Game 6 was divided into two parts. In the second part of the game they did do that, but by the time that Klay got hot, they couldn’t stop LeBron. It began with their inability to hit any shots in the first half, and then later they couldn’t stop the Cavs when they needed to close that gap. And then there’s another weird aspect to all of this, and it’s just so hard to talk about, which is the topic of Curry’s health. In the world of sports, it seems very loaded and emotional, where if you discuss it logically people are going to flip out and scream that you’re making excuses as opposed to just analyzing the evidence. It’s strange to me that we can’t just have a logical conversation about that—not just for this series, but as an explanation for why he hasn’t played up to his usual standards these whole playoffs.

Levin: Yeah, the Cavs were targeting him on defense. There had been this strange trend of Curry defending LeBron very well, which definitely did not continue in Game 6. I’m curious what your view was from an X’s and O’s standpoint on what the Cavs were able to do, especially getting Curry on those switches. Because so much of what we’ve heard, and I think what we’ve seen with our eyes, is that in the games the Cavs have won, it seems like they’re trying harder. But it did feel like in Game 6, in the early going when the Cavs did build that lead that turned out to be insurmountable, they were really feasting on those Curry switches.

Strauss: It wasn’t the most complex offense, and that can be an issue. The Cavs got bogged down into isolation ball as the Warriors were starting to close that gap, but when you’re doing iso ball and high pick-and-roll, it’s hard to do better at that poor offense than using LeBron James. He’s kind of a master at it. I was so impressed with how he went from destroying the Warriors with shooting, how he really leveraged his size when switched against a smaller player, to just moving Tristan Thompson around like a chess piece to finish it off at the end. He was just absolutely incredible, and the Warriors have issues with two guys who are tasked with guarding him. You’ve got Iguodala with the back spasms and you’ve got Barnes with the I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-is-going-on-with-him spasms. It’s such an interesting juxtaposition that the Warriors have this amazing advantage of having Game 7 at home and at the same time it seems like everything’s going wrong.

Levin: With LeBron, it was just a couple of days ago when Haralabos Voulgaris was saying on Twitter that the amazing thing about LeBron is he hasn’t developed a consistent jump shot for however many years he’s been in the league. You can look retroactively and say the years he’s won championships were the years when he was making jumpers in key moments in key games, and so much of the conversation around him tilts when he does make those jumpers. I do think you can also go back and say, it’s not like they would’ve won any other championship, except for the one against Dallas, if LeBron had played any better or differently in the finals—maybe you disagree. But the conversation around him is so different and the game is so different when he’s shooting those jumpers with confidence and they’re going in.

Strauss: I disagree—I feel like they could’ve won any of those finals if he was making 100 percent of his jump shots. No, I agree with you, and the jump shot for him it has been rather mysterious—it comes and goes. He starts really dancing with it when he starts to get comfortable. And I think the Warriors really erred in Game 5, when Iguodala—look, you can go under screens on him, but get some sort of close-out there. He gave him a wide open 3-pointer to begin his onslaught in Game 5, and then another wide open one where he really died on the screen. Maybe I’m doing a correlation-is-causation error, but it seems as though that got him going and he started to find that jump shot that had eluded him, and that’s really a huge difference. If he has the jumper firing, he is the best player in the world, and I don’t know if that carries into Game 7, but he certainly has a lot of reason to be comfortable considering the defensive options against him right now.

Levin: The thing I’m most curious to hear you talk about are the emotions in the Warriors’ locker room and around the team. There was all of this noise on Twitter after Game 6 where Steph Curry’s wife, Ayesha, was talking about the ill treatment they were getting in Cleveland with her dad reportedly being racially profiled because the police in the arena thought he was some scammer who habitually breaks into sporting events. Which is just an incredibly odd subplot to be happening at the end of the NBA Finals.

And then at the end of the game she tweets, then deletes, the fact that the games are rigged, and the NBA just wants higher ratings, and Steve Kerr’s daughter is talking about how classless the Cleveland fans are. And I should add, perhaps slightly more importantly, Steph Curry is outraged about the refs, throws his mouthpiece, hits a fan, Steve Kerr goes on this long rant about the refs. What is going on in these guys’ heads right now?

Strauss: I’m not sure I know what is going on in their heads, but it was a fascinating scene to behold. In the locker room, Steph was by himself for a long period of time just sort of staring at the ground. He’s not a sullen guy. He is really good at taking losses with equanimity, and he is always very optimistic. In this case, he seemed somewhere between fuming and depressed, I guess understandably.

He just sort of sat there, he had this big bandage on his knee, wrapping his knee, looking almost like a little bit of a smoothed-out papier-mâché, which we just—for I guess the macho reasons in sports, and the fact that you have no excuses and whatnot—we almost just avoid talking about as media. Well that and you’re not allowed to take pictures in the locker room, so we just sort of don’t talk about it, like the reporters who pretended that FDR could walk. Then you see Kerr and Warriors general manager Bob Myers, they go into a room to have a conversation and deliberate over something.

And then Kerr exits the room and goes to the press conference, and you can see when he is talking about the calls that Steph is not getting, that this is a conversation he had with the GM where he decided, “You know what? I’m going to spend my fine money right now.” It was really a desperation move to finally get some of those calls off the ball for Curry. I guess we would define it as a rant, but this was a very strategic rant.

I think it speaks to a general desperation right now for this team, precipitated by the injures and everything else that we’re talking about. But you know what? This is a team that plays a lot better when it’s actually desperate than when it has some laurels to rest on.

Levin: In all of the studies that I’ve seen about sports and home court/home field/home ice/home pitch advantage, that advantage comes from refereeing, whether its conscious or unconscious. Obviously, Steve Kerr complaining about the refs after Game 7 would not only look bad but would be ineffectual. We can’t sit here and predict what will happen, but Kerr’s rant does seem like a smart, strategic move, both to tell your players that you have their backs, but also if it gives you some micro chance of influencing the refs. That’s why,when people talk about “should the Warriors have gone for all those wins in the regular season?” at least, by virtue of having many more wins that the Cavs, they have the refs and they have the home court and the crowd in Game 7.

Strauss: Yeah, and I think that working the refs can have an impact. It’s not like these guys avoid SportsCenter. I don’t think they live some monastic existence. So if this becomes a talking point, you’ve planted that in their heads, and then the crowd will be even more aggrieved and rabid. I think it could have an impact. I do wonder if the market inefficiency is having your wife complain about the refs on Twitter and having that be a story because, unlike the coach, she can’t get fined. I actually found it interesting that media members, when they saw that, were lamenting it and shaking their heads that Ayesha Curry was tweeting that about the NBA. Ultimately, what’s the downside?

We do have to step back and think about the sheer absurdity of everything that happened in that game. You’ve got the mouthpiece throwing, that’s hilarious on its face, but then it hits the son of a minority owner and Steph has to apologize because there is a little bit of a fear of suspension. It’s just an amazing turn of events precipitated by a dick-punching or swipe or whatever we’re going to call it. I think this is really making up for the fact that we just haven’t had close games in these finals. It’s just an absurd circus.

Levin: Yeah, and assuming the NBA isn’t rigged, then this series has been fortuitous for the league because of the amount of interest and excitement and anticipation for what could happen in Game 7. I am not a huge fan of the pyramid-of-success legacy talk, but it is just amazing to think that in three days the entire history of the NBA and how we talk about it and think about it—and actual real things like who gets traded where and who decides they need to move on and free agency—will be decided because of random moments in Game 7.

Strauss: The legacy talk is a funny thing. We mock it because it’s so prisoner of the moment, and you can’t actually know how things are going to affect a legacy because you can’t actually know the future. But that doesn’t diminish that the legacy is what they’re playing for ultimately, right? It does kind of matter. It’s huge for the Warriors. It’s just massive. As silly as that is, that it would come down to one game to validate the 73-win season, make it seem like it’s not all for naught. It’s staggering. And then for LeBron James to bring Cleveland its first championship in 52 years? Well, I don’t know, a few people are counting the minor-league hockey championship that happened a week ago, but I don’t know how we count those things. Anyway, to have those two things as the options—it’s just absolutely incredible. It’s glorious. It’s going to be great.