Game 1 of the NBA finals came to an end, and if I can tell you one thing, It’s that it wasn’t pretty for the Dallas Mavericks. As we all know, Luka did his thing, scoring 30 points in this game. Which is around the average that he has had during the postseason. P.J. Washington would get 14 points, which is on par with his average ppg. What was surprising was that Kyrie Irving only had 12 points. In a series like this, 12 points will not cut it, especially from your number two player.
Another surprising and impressive was that Kristaps Porzingis scored 20 points. You would never think he was working his way back from injury with the way he was playing. He was cooking all the first half, posting up the smaller players from the corner free point line and getting buckets. Tatum was lackluster to put it nicely; he had 16 points and 11 rebounds, but “star” did not pop on my TV. A lot of the time, I saw him drive to the bucket and mishandle the ball or kick it out. What I will say about that is that he did get double teams pulled to him a lot of the time. This allowed him to kick the ball out to the open player to either shoot or swing the ball.
Making the right play is important to being a part of a team, but Kobe Bryant wouldn’t have done that. Kobe would’ve gotten his buckets. This is me being selfish in hoping Tatum would be the next Bryant, and I’m not talking about Bryant’s success. It would be cool to nickname him the Bryant of the East or something like that. It’s hard to be as successful as Bryant was; what I was hoping for was for Tatum to get into that mamba mentality and take over the game. On the other team, I was watching Luka, and he was at the free-point line shooting two. As I watched him, he looked calm, cool, and collected. I also felt like I saw his brain working at the same time. I was thinking, “Oh crap” or something along those lines, and I’m not saying that this game was too big for him. I mean, he did drop 30 points; it just looked like his brain was processing everything for me.
As we wondered how the Celtics would guard the Mavs duo, it was somewhat by committee. Tatum, Jaylon Brown, and Jrue Holliday were some of the players I saw play defense on them. When Holliday would get a foul called on him, the Celtics head coach would rotate one of the other players, Luka or Kyrie. The Mavs would bring the game closer from the huge lead the Celtics had going into the half, but they could never take the lead. In the final minutes of the game, both teams’s starters would take the bench and regroup for Game 2.
My thoughts on the Mavs’ defense are to throw away everything that they had planned, stop with the double teams, and play 1v1 on defense. Every time they double-teamed Tatum, they got cooked elsewhere, just like I mentioned in the last article. The Celtics were shooting a lot of threes. Now we all know that if you live by the three, you die by the three. But when you’re making those threes, times are good, and it’s hard for teams to catch up. Mavs players didn’t want to stretch out too far to the three-point shooters and not be in a position to help in the paint. As a coach, I would let them have all the two points they want, but you’re not going to turn into the Boston State Warriors shooting three balls over my head. Game 2 is on Sunday at 7:00 PM. Well, see what changes the Mavs decide to make.
