Good grief. The point isn't that Boston is a horrible team. They aren't. Nobody left is. The point is that they are drastically underachieiving, and that they are not displaying championship characteristics. I.e., that they are playing like maybe the fifth or sixth best team in the league, not a dominant one. When their own coach says they need to be better under stress, that should lend some credibility to this, no?
Quote:
|
I love that people have already forgotten that KG hit two clutch shots and LeBron missed a layup at the end of game one. Three games later and we've determiend that LeBron is clutch and KG is not because LeBron helped his team win two home games.
|
Eh, actually it's more to the point that KG didn't want anything to do with the ball and did pretty much nothing of substance in Game Four(0-2, 1 reb in the 4th Q). Meanwhile in game 1 LeBron did miss a shot he should have made(a lot of them in fact). He was ready and willing to take those shots though. Garnett usually shrinks from them. Not hard to fathom the difference between the two.
Quote:
|
It is definitely worse this year. Honestly it's puzzling to me. Home court advantage should be marginally lessened in the playoffs -- I think the grind of the regular season, the back-to-backs, the jetlag, etc are a big factor in HCA, but you don't have that stuff in the playoffs. You get to settle in a city, no back-to-backs... it seems like the crowd is the biggest factor left, and it's hard to understand how professional athletes can be that rattled by crowds. The Hornets-Spurs series is insane. You're talking about literally 40+ point swings depending on the location of the court they're playing on. It's like there's no point in trying to analyze these games this year. Just pick the home team and be done with it.
|
This misses a few points. One, San Antonio has led all three games in NO at the half. The Hornets are winning because they have been physical with the Spurs and are as tough mentally as they are, which is not a combination SA sees often, to put it mildly. Game 3 was tight well into the fourth quarter. It's easy to look at the final score and say blowout, no contest for the home team but only Game 4 in the five games so far has been that way prior to halftime. Last time out, San Antonio just absolutely could not hit a shot in the third quarter, and that had a lot to do with it.
It's not so much the crowd this year as it is evenly matched teams and the familiarity with the environment, etc.