Before welcoming the Boston Celtics to San Francisco on Thursday, the Golden State Warriors had won nine out of nine Playoff games at their $1.4bn home arena this season. Yet in round one of the 2022 NBA Finals, the fortress that is the Chase Center – a goldmine that generates $15m in revenue in every Finals game it hosts – succumbed to the drive of a team that is the dictionary definition of the road warrior: the Celtics are 8-2 in their away games in this year’s postseason.
And that’s despite having to negotiate a hugely tricky Playoff path: Kevin Durant’s Brooklyn Nets, Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Milwaukee Bucks, Jimmy Butler’s Miami Heat and, now, a Warriors franchise out to reassert its dominance of the NBA of today by winning a fourth championship in eight years.
NBA history against Warriors if they go 2-0 down to Celtics
So the Warriors go into Game 2 with their backs against the wall. Steve Kerr’s men can’t afford to head to Boston 2-0 down in the series. And they need to establish whether Thursday’s game, in which they lost by 12 having been 15 ahead with time running out in the third quarter, was an accident, a bad dream, or a harsh dose of reality. If they lose, the title will recede into the distance and, indeed, the odds of a short Finals will shorten drastically.
If the Warriors win, the series would start over – albeit with the Celtics now in possession of home-court advantage. The team that takes the spoils in Game 1 of the Finals goes on to claim the title 71% of the time. However, the Warriors have won at least one game on the road in 26 straight series; an incredible record. And on top of that, the Celtics have been surprisingly fragile at their noisy TD Garden, losing four times at home across their series with the Bucks and the Heat. At 1-1, the complexion of these Finals would change ahead of the first coast-to-coast switch. But if it goes to 2-0…
Players like Klay Thompson and Draymond Green – guys who boast winning pedigree and three championship rings – need to step up. Put simply, they need to play better than they did on Thursday. Kerr will have to decide whether he wants to continue applying maximum pressure on the Celtics’ stars (Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown) at the cost of giving up space to shoot to their opponents’ support actors – the likes of Al Horford and Derrick White, who were the architects of Boston’s miraculous comeback in Game 1.
The Warriors can’t afford another defeat, and the Celtics have a golden opportunity to drench these Finals in green and open up a lead that would take them to within sight of their first title since 2008, and only their second since 1986. The 18th in the Celtics’ history – a haul that would break their tie with the Lakers, after Los Angeles culminated a half-century-long chase by drawing level with their eternal rivals in 2020.
The Celtics are 13-1 in the 14 Finals in which they have won Game 1. It’s a devastating record, one that you can only expect of a past master in winning championship rings: 21 Finals played, just four lost. It’s an efficiency that contrasts with the Lakers’ 17-15 Finals record. That said, there’s no reason for the Warriors to panic… as long as they win tonight. Defeat on home court is a less common start than it might seem. It has only happened twice this century in the Finals, and six times since 1990.
In such series, the outcome has been 50/50: three titles for the team that began with a home loss, and three for the team that began with victory on the road. The three franchises that came back from losing Game 1 at home were the Chicago Bulls in 1991 (going from 0-1 to 4-1 against the Lakers); the Lakers in 2001 (from 0-1 to 4-1 against the Philadelphia 76ers); and the Heat in 2013 (from 0-1 to 4-3 against the San Antonio Spurs. But if the Warriors lose tonight… No team has ever come back to win a series after losing Games 1 and 2 on home turf.
Possible Payton return for Golden State
The Warriors have spent the past two days projecting calm and assurance, insisting that they have all the tools to respond. On an individual level, all eyes have turned to Gary Payton, who has been injured since suffering a nasty foul at the hands of Dillon Brooks in the Conference Semi-Finals. Payton was part of the roster for Game 1, but didn’t play. He is one of the most aggressive outside defenders in the NBA, and given Andre Iguodala’s unimpressive performance and the defensive ineffectiveness of the Thompson-Jordan Poole partnership, his presence looks like being very important.
There were 15 minutes in which Thompson and Poole were on court together and the Warriors had a defensive rating of 171.4. Horrendous. The pair have scored at least 20 points in only two of the last nine games they’ve played. The Warriors need Thompson to be on top of his game after an anonymous display on Thursday, and greater dependability (or fewer minutes on the court) from Poole, who was chaotic in offence and absolutely feeble in defence.
The other major problem that the Celtics exploited was the presence of too many players who did not pose a scoring threat. With two of Kevon Looney, Green and Iguodala on court, the spaces that the mere presence of Steph Curry creates were swallowed up, and the Celtics were able to press much more effectively. Looney’s defensive and rebounding abilities make him a very important player, but he is maybe starting to play more as an alternative to and not alongside Green, who had a dreadful game in offence and must be growing weary of saying that there won’t be a repeat of this. We’ll see.
The best Warriors we’ve seen had him as the distributor, with four players capable of dribbling, passing, scoring… Payton and Otto Porter can work as axes in combinations with Curry, Thompson, Andre Wiggins and one of Green or Looney. We’ll have to see what combinations Kerr goes for from tonight, and how he shares out court time.
In defence, the Warriors put the squeeze on Tatum and Brown, but kept on giving up shots to the supporting cast. What worked against the Dallas Mavericks ended up amounting to suicide against the Celtics: 38 of the 41 three-point shots Boston attempted were taken by a player left free. For 15 of them, the defender was 1.5m to 2m away from the shooter; for 23, more than 2m. Today, we’ll find out whether the Warriors change their focus or trust that the likes of Marcus Smart, Derrick White and Horford simply don’t have as good a night as on Thursday. The former could stem the flow of points, but would allow greater freedom to Tatum, who was well shackled on Thursday, on a night when he gave a masterclass in maturity and how to read a game, and shone as a distributor.
The Celtics, meanwhile, know that they have a huge opportunity to put one hand on the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Having already done so against the Bucks and the Heat, they showed in Game 1 that they’re a steely unit who weren’t fazed by either the occasion, the Golden State narrative or their lack of experience. And, what’s more, Boston hit their opponents hard in clutch time, the decisive period that has traditionally been the domain of the Warriors. In the final seven minutes, from the point at which the score was 97-94, Tatum and Brown didn’t score a point, but supplied the assists for seven out of their team’s nine baskets.
Brown in particular was key to the Boston reaction that laid the platform for their game-winning run, scoring 10 points and assisting for another 10 as the visitors went from 92-80 down to tie the game at 103-103. The shooting guard has scored more points in the final quarters of the 2022 Playoffs than any other. If you look at the top 10 of this ranking, his percentages are 10% better on overall shooting and 25% better on threes than the other nine.
It’s not unreasonable to think that the Celtics won’t score as many three pointers, but it’s also not unreasonable to think that they won’t give their opponents the initial boost of the poor defensive approach that they later corrected, having given up six threes and 21 points to Curry in the first quarter. As for the Warriors, you’d expect them not to lose again if they’re 15 points up near the end of the third quarter. But it’s also inescapable that Iguodala, Green and Klay (three of the four major faces of a dynasty aiming to re-establish itself) looked unable to stand up to the physical demands posed by this Celtics team. That’s the nature of Game 1: it almost always offers up more questions than answers, as well as cause for both optimism and pessimism in the two finalists. After tonight, though, there’ll be many more certainties. Particularly if the Celtics strike again.
