OAKLAND — While Kawhi Leonard was back at the team hotel ordering dinner, the
rest of the San Antonio Spurs were getting handed their lunch.
The similarity seemed to be that everyone on both ends of the Bay Bridge had
their feet up.
There would be no emotional heroics, no inspirational efforts to be memorialized
and passed down through generational lore.
What the world learned from Game 2 of the Western Conference finals is that the
Golden State Warriors are not the Houston Rockets, susceptible to get picked
apart by any Tom, Dick or Dejounte.
And, oh yes, taking that Kawhi fella out of the lineup is like taking the air
out of the basketball. Whatever you’re left with is deflated.
“It’s not what I expected,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said after the Warriors’
136-100 conquest. “I’m disappointed. The only way I can process this is, I think
it’s not about O’s and X’s or rebounds or turnovers or anything like that. I
think we’ve maybe felt it too much, Kawhi being gone, in the sense that I don’t
think — as I watched — I don’t think they believed.
“And you have to believe. I don’t think as a group they really did, which means
probably a little bit feeling sorry for themselves psychologically,
subconsciously, whatever psycho-babble word you want to use. That’s the way I
process it. I don’t think they started the game with a belief. And it showed in
the lack of edge, intensity, grunts, all that sort of thing. That was
disappointing.
“It looked pretty collective to me. I don’t think it was one guy who didn’t
believe, and he infected everybody else or anything like that. I think as a
group, they just let themselves down.”
The Spurs are 1-4 under Popovich when they trail a best-of-seven series 2-0, and
none of those other situations were even remotely close to being head-locked by
these above-it-all Warriors, who are undefeated in the playoffs, have won 11
games in a row and 25 of their last 26 going back to March 14.
This was always going to be a heavy lift for the Spurs. Now it might as well be
an elephant atop a boulder holding a grand piano that’s weighing on their
shoulders.
Any enmity toward Golden State center and public enemy No. 1 Zaza Pachulia for
causing the badly sprained left ankle that sidelined Leonard or extra spark to
compensate for their missing MVP candidate was not evident.
“It was clear to see that as a team we didn’t come out like we wanted the game
and they just protected home floor,” said Jonathon Simmons, who took Leonard’s
place in the starting lineup and was the only Spur to show a pulse.
There was no win-one-for-the-Gipper moment. In fact, the Gipper might have been
left in a ditch at the side of the road.
“I think everyone sensed it for sure,” point guard Patty Mills said. “The whole
building sensed it. They came out and played really well. They hit a ton of
shots and played great. They shut us up early.”
The Spurs are back to dissecting LaMarcus Aldridge like a lifeless frog in
biology lab. The shrinking power forward couldn’t have been more out of sight if
he had covered his head with a towel and hid beneath the San Antonio bench. He
didn’t make his first basket of the game until the 4:55 mark of the second
quarter, at which the Spurs trailed by 24. He finished with eight points and
four rebounds in 26 minutes.
“LaMarcus has to score for us,” Popovich said. “He can’t be timid. He turned
down shots in the first quarter. He can’t do it. You’ve got to score. Scoring
has to come from someplace. I think he’s got a major responsibility in Game 3 to
come out and get something done. Whether it’s for himself or teammates. They
come after him, to find somebody, take good shots. He’s got to do it. No doubt
about.”
“I took the wrong approach,” Aldridge said. “I thought I would come out and move
the ball, but I ended up taking myself out of rhythm and out of the flow of the
game…I kind of got lost in the flow of just standing around.”
What the Spurs can’t rely on is the return of Leonard in Game 3 at home in San
Antonio as a magic elixir to cure what ails them. While it’s true that the Spurs
had a 78-55 lead when he limped off the court in the opener and have been
outscored 164-108 since then, he can’t pull the wagon now to four wins out of
five games by himself.
In addition, there is no rock-solid guarantee that Leonard will be back, despite
the four-day break break until Saturday’s Game 3.
History shows a similar situation back in 2000, when the Spurs were defending
champions and franchise foundation Tim Duncan injured his knee four games before
the start of the playoffs. It was a minor cartilage tear and Duncan could have
played on the injury. But the team chose to take the long view on Duncan’s
career, sat him out, and the Spurs lost in the first round to the Suns. It was
Popovich’s way of saying he’d always look out for Duncan. It also happened that
Duncan was a free agent that summer, re-signed and went on to lead the Spurs to
four more championships.
So if the 25-year-old Leonard is not very close to being fully recovered from a
second painful sprain to his left ankle in the past two weeks, he could stay on
the shelf. Of course, it won’t matter a bit if the rest of the Spurs act like
they’d rather just sit there.
“You can’t sugarcoat it or (say) if we had just made a couple shots, we would
have been right there,” Popovich said. “That’s pretty lame. So, call it like it
is, and we didn’t come to play. We felt sorry for ourselves, we need to get
slapped and come back and play Game 3 and see who we are.”
Fran Blinebury has covered the NBA since 1977. You can e-mail him here, find his
archive here and follow him on Twitter.
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