BOSTON — The clock ticked towards zero and along the Nets sideline two future Hall of Famers with more than 200 playoff games between them looked shook.
I don't know if Chris Mannix of SI and Stephen A. Smith of Espo share copy but Smith used the same grammatically incorrect term to Durant. "He looked shook. He looked rattled [on offense]."
This was a game Brooklyn had to win. Needed to win. Should have won. A 10-point halftime lead. Help from the supporting cast. A Celtics defense that in the first half allowed the Nets to shoot 61%. A team with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving would have to kick the game away to lose this one.
And it did. Badly. The Nets shot 31% in the second half. Durant, in those final 24 minutes, didn’t make a field goal. Irving...finished 4-of-13...Durant and Irving rank among the NBA’s most feared fourth-quarter scorers. Boston throttled the Nets 29–17 over the final 12 minutes.
Boston 114, Brooklyn 107.
The Celtics take a 2–0 series lead.
And the Nets are in a world of trouble.
For weeks, Brooklyn was the NBA’s boogeyman. Two games against the Celtics and the Nets have been exposed. Durant looks tired. He averaged 41 minutes per game in the final five games of the regular season. He logged 42 in the play-in game. Against Boston, Durant isn’t just matching up with good defenders. He’s wrestling with them. He’s scored 50 points in the first two games of this series. He’s needed 41 shots to do it.
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Said Durant, “They’re playing me with two, three guys sometimes when I’m off the ball, mucking up actions when I run off stuff. I see [Al] Horford leaving his man and come over to hit me sometime. They’re just playing two or three guys, hitting me wherever I go.”
Irving was brilliant in Game 1. In Game 2, he was a no-show. He played 40 minutes. He scored 10 points. He handed out one assist. His most positive contribution was on the glass (eight rebounds)...In Game 2, he flopped.
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Ime Udoka spent one season as Steve Nash’s assistant. And in his first postseason as a head coach, he is schooling him. Udoka, who designed the NBA’s top ranked defense, is now wielding it like a two-by-four. The Celtics are manhandling Durant. They are squeezing Irving.
That's good insight. In some of the screen grabs in the earlier post Irving and Durant look *squeezed* together.
Bruce Brown and Goran Dragic scored 30 points in the first half. In the second half, they scored 11. Offensively, Boston is engineering switches onto Brooklyn’s smaller guards and bulldozing them.
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Nash’s adjustments have not been bad—they have been nonexistent. His offensive system is as imaginative as a checkers board. Boston didn’t make any defensive changes after Game 1. Yet in Game 2, there was Durant, forced into deep catches before staring down a wall of defenders. He isn’t running off screens.
They're bumping him so much he couldn't run if he had to.
He isn’t setting many of them for Irving. Nash has two of the most skilled players of this generation and his game plan has been to effectively to tell them to do something with it.
Ah, brutal. Excellent and insightful writing by Chris Mannix for Sports Illustrated.