After watching the dull, boring slobberknocker early Tuesday evening, it was Game 2 of the second series between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Boston Celtics, entering a late-night contest between the Golden State Warriors and Memphis Grizzlies, it feels like a controlled substance abuse. The content elevation of this speed difference is no illusion: The Western Conference semi-final in Memphis saw 186 shots lifted, compared with just 153 in Boston. However, despite playing out at a much greater pace, the game retains that beautiful post-season ugliness – sometimes injected with the hard-earned charm – established by the previous game.
No one is more responsible for the golden moments of two-way disappointment than Ja Morant. Morant, often the smallest player on the pitch, has a relationship with angles and atmosphere that makes him seem different. There are puzzling scenarios he unleashes on the go, and then stops and levitate drives taken from an unstoppable peak. The Grizzlies were able to get the Warriors to play their way, with the ball pinging back and forth between bodies moving harder than their brains could handle, creating a situation where their size and fitness could be. indomitable roots. Their intense front line of action featuring Jaren Jackson Jr and Brandon Clarke is an important part of this aspect, but it is Morant’s top-notch artistry that always puts Memphis at the forefront of these frenetic brawls.
It’s Morant’s touch, not his athleticism, it’s his secret ingredient. Every few years we see a person who can move just like he moves, but just once in a generation or so he can also put a gossamer coating all over the ball when he Release it from such unusual places, allowing it to take its time. gently fall into the net. Morant can jump and decelerate in frankly violent ways, humiliating the opposition, but it is his ability to end these whirlwind chains so gently that creates such fearsome defensive quagmire.
The veteran Warriors couldn’t handle them at the moment. Morant had 47 points in his win over the Grizzlies’ Game 2, with 18 in the fourth inning as he strode into the paint area for reliable dunks during the crack. Their best choice to defend Morant, Gary Payton II didn’t help Golden State, having been injured for the rest of the series by reckless Dillon Brooks, three minutes into the game. Payton’s departure, Brooks’ departure, Morant’s important companion Desmond Bane’s injured back, and Draymond Green’s swollen and bruised face, puffy around his right eye, all makes the competition seem a lot more like war than a contest especially the nasty playoffs usually do.
Maybe that’s because this Grizzlies-Warriors series projects, more and more with each game, a battle for what is so much appreciated as the future. Memphis seems destined to look much out there, but the three-time grizzled champion is unprepared to concede a current goal after spending the past few seasons licking his wounds and rebuilding around his core. they’re Green, Stephen Curry, and Klay Thompson, after a grueling seven-year stint that began for them as the emerging darlings upset the Grizzlies-like status quo and then stretched into a half-decade of age. In Game 3, with a 1-1 draw and progress to Northern California, the Warriors will certainly have the momentum to prove that those glorious years are not over.
Taking on the limp Denver Nuggets in the first round, the Warriors looked like the world-beater has captured global attention, especially with the addition of a dazzling offensive line that 22-year-old Jordan Poole, rising have added to their arsenal. Poole, like anyone in the Grizzlies, plays as if he is demanding that the future is now. His position was widened with a stellar performance in Game 1, in which he played almost to Morant’s level, but he struggled to defend Ja following Payton’s injury, contracting 5 personal fouls and lost the ball, while conceding a minute in, touched and shot Klay Thompson on the other end. And no one looks like they belong in that tumultuous court more than Thompson.
After missing two full seasons through injury, the 32-year-old returned to Golden State’s squad this winter, with an impressive result that approximated the three-and-D top spot. that he was known to. The moment when he was forced to do more than just a pretty good job, and be himself at the All-NBA, was sure to come, and now it has. In Game 3, Thompson will need to do a better job of shooting 5 to 19, with those numbers not really telling the story of how forced and unnatural his performance was. Klay ceding more offensive behavior to Poole could help the Warriors, but no matter what they’ll need to transform into rhizome attacking creatures they’ve been around for so long and still look like new. this. Thompson playing more in himself was key to that endeavor.
The Grizzlies may prove too disordered for a return to such form and once again impose a colorfully paced destruction on upcoming matches that ultimately favor their grip. Curry, who isn’t the hypnotizing three-point prince he used to be and more of a tough, tough game manager who finds victory in all sorts of quirky corners, will be put to the greatest test for this, the beginning of the last phase of his historic career. Morant will try to stop that in its way, and what we can see is not short-lived as a battle to see who gets the bigger spot in the next installment of NBA history.
