After seven months of basketball, we’re down to at most 11 games remaining in what has been a wildly unpredictable and vastly entertaining NBA season.
After all the twists and turns, we enter the respective Game 6s in the Eastern and Western Conference Finals this weekend with the top two teams in each conference going head-to-head — and the No. 1 seeds in position to advance.
In the East, the Heat head home with a 3-2 lead after dropping Game 5 in Indiana on Wednesday. They haven’t suffered back-to-back losses in the playoffs since dropping the final three games of the 2011 NBA Finals, so how can anyone really expect them to lose three games in a row to choke away this series?
While history favors the Heat to close out the Pacers for a third straight season, so does the way this series has played out. Let’s look at Game 5: The Pacers extended their season, but it took LeBron James playing just 24 minutes because of foul trouble and finishing with seven points, plus Paul George scoring 37 points – including 21 in the fourth quarter.
It’s hard to see that combination of events – specifically, James having a second straight poor game – happening again, especially with the Heat playing in front of their home fans. Indiana still has plenty of issues to sort out – the up-and-down play of Roy Hibbert, Lance Stephenson being all over the place, their inconsistent offense, etc. Expect Miami to close things out in Game 6 and become the first team to reach four straight NBA Finals since the Celtics of the mid-1980s.
In the Western Conference Finals, perhaps the difference in this series wasn’t Serge Ibaka returning in Game 3, but the series shifting to Oklahoma City?
One of the strangest series in recent memory continued to defy logic in Game 5 Thursday night. The Spurs – after getting bludgeoned in the previous two games by the Thunder, who have dominated the matchup in recent years when Ibaka has been healthy – ran the Thunder off the floor inside San Antonio’s AT&T Center to move within a game of a return trip to the Finals.
The Spurs have won their three games in San Antonio in this series by an average of 26.7 points and the Thunder claimed their two victories in Oklahoma City by an average of 11 — and none of those games felt as close as the final score indicated.
After Ibaka — returning from a calf injury initially deemed season-ending — terrorized San Antonio in the paint in Games 3 and 4, leaving the Spurs’ usually brilliant offensive scheme completely discombobulated, coach Gregg Popovich made the drastic decision to start Matt Bonner over Tiago Splitter.
Popovich needed a floor-spacing shooter on the floor next to Tim Duncan or Splitter. Bonner didn’t have a massive impact on the stat sheet — going 0-for-4 from the floor and 0-for-2 from 3-point range in 17 minutes — having either Bonner or Boris Diaw on the floor next a traditional big man had the exact impact Popovich hoped for.
How the Thunder will react? The Thunder don’t really have a good option to combat it with. They could bench Kendrick Perkins and play Ibaka at center and Kevin Durant at power forward, but the Thunder have proudly never changed up their starting lineup. It’s hard to see that happening now.
They have to hope that Ibaka plays better in Game 6 – he went 3-for-10 and finished with six points in Game 5 – and their role players perform better at home, then take their chances with Durant and Russell Westbrook in a winner-take-all Game 7.
It looks like we’ll get a Finals rematch from a year ago, which is something any basketball fan should want. After all, last year’s tussle between the Heat and Spurs produced the best Finals in at least 20 years.