Search Results for: duncan
As we near the tip off to this season, I can’t help but be thrilled to watch some basketball. No one hates baseball more than I do and if it weren’t for fantasy football, I wouldn’t watch that either. The Olympics are cool, I guess, but the level of intensity and drama doesn’t match what comes out of the David Stern Basketball Association. But more than that, I am rotating…
Where did the offseason go? One minute we were crying in our beer after watching the Oklahoma City Thunder beat our Spurs in four straight playoff games. The next, we were watching Manu (Argentina), Tiago (Brazil), Tony, Boris and Nando (France) play in the London Olympics. (Way to bring home the Gold, Dream Team 2012!) And now, here we are, in the midst of the World Series, seven weeks into…
The recency effect is a cognitive bias wherein we assign too much significance to an observation that occurred recently in comparison to earlier observations or to the trend represented by the entire record of observations. Or, in terms of the San Antonio Spurs, we remember the last 4 games of their season, and not the 20 (or 45) that preceded it. Flaming out so spectacularly to a team that seemed…
63. 36. The perfect mirroring of the two halves perfectly mirrored the 2 distinct phases of this series. For 24 minutes (and 2 games), the Spurs were the Spurs we’ve seen all season, running an immaculate offense, getting every shot they wanted (and hitting a good portion of them) and running roughshod over whatever the Thunder threw at them. With the building a complete ruckus, the Spurs came out quickly…
Got ‘em right where we want them. The rush to crown the Spurs champs after 10 playoff wins was premature; the rush to bury them and claim the Thunder as the Western powerhouse for the next decade is probably likewise premature. The truth is, 5 games have been played between these two teams, 3 have been insanely close and contested, 1 has been kind of close but mostly controlled by…
In most ways, that last play kind of sums up the last 5 days. Down 3, we get a miracle turnover and the ball back with about 15 seconds left and a chance to tie. This is the Spurs bread and butter, play calling, execution, getting good shots out of time-outs. And…I’m not quite sure what happened. I didn’t see any discernible play (which is rare from Pop); Duncan passed…
The old pivot game. Statistically speaking, whichever team wins this game will most likely go on to win the series. Erase everything that has happened in Games 1-4, as they only matter tangentially. These teams are dead even, and the 4 games have more or less borne out that truth. Here are some thoughts heading into Game 5 Monday night: –In the 2 games in OKC, the 2nd quarter was…
I’m no great basketball mind…but I do think about it. A lot. Particularly after my team gets pasted in Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals. The Thunder made a lot of key adjustments after losing the first 2 games, overwhelming the Spurs and winning easily. As the script goes, it’s time for Pop’s counters. Again, I’m no great basketball mind. But here are many of the things I’ve been…
The problem with waiting a night for a recap in the Western Conference Finals is that within 24 hours, pretty much every corner of the basketball world has already written five articles about the game. Plus, unlike Game 1, Game 2 really had no cohesive narrative structure. So I’ll fall back on my old trick, bullet points. Here we go: • The Spurs offense reached near orgasmic perfection in the…
The ‘Inside the Huddle’ moments of NBA games are usually fairly innocuous, showing coaches giving tired cliches and non-emotional motivation to the team. This is by design, of course, as the broadcasts can’t actually show any sort of strategy on live TV during the game. Still, I always get a kick out of hearing Pop mic’d up. And tonight might have been my favorite moment ever inside a huddle, showing…
