Q12543 wrote:longstrangetrip wrote:Q12543 wrote:I can guarantee you Flip was watching the Finals game last night and turning to his younger, more progressive colleagues (assuming they even exist in his front office - I'm thinking of his son, Ryan, perhaps) and saying, "Boy, couldn't Golden State use a low post presence right now? Imagine the breathing room it would give Steph and Klay!". It was a game that will only re-inforce his bias towards Okafor.
He's somewhat right of course. No team is perfect and Golden State doesn't have a consistent low-post presence. Of course, Cleveland doesn't either, although LeBron can pretty much do anything.
What Flip should really be paying attention to is the defense Cleveland played. That was impressive.
Ouch...good point about how Flip might have perceived last night's game. On the other hand, the Warriors couldn't get a rebound last night, and Towns is the superior rebounder.
Yeah, the Cavs defense was sensational last night. I watched them a lot during the regular season, and never saw that kind of defensive intensity.
I'm wracking my brain trying to figure out what's different in this series, and nothing's coming to me...
What's different is the addition of Shumpert and Mozgov, not the subtraction of Love, as much as you would like that to be the case. Their defense started to improve once they acquired those two guys, when Love was still in the lineup and healthy.
The Cavs could really use Love right now because it gives them another big that can exploit Golden State's weakness in rebounding and being a bit small at the 4.
While I agree that Shumpert and Mozgov really help the Cavs defensively, I'm not buying your premise that they are the reason for the Cavs' dramatically improved defense during the playoffs. It can't be...the Cavs had those two guys for over half the regular season, and their defense the last half of the regular season seldom looked like it has the past few weeks.
No, the answer is that the increased minutes for Delly and TT instead of Love and Irving creates a vastly different defensive team, and that's giving the Cavs a chance against a team that looks superior on paper. Defense and offense are completely different concepts, and I continue to think that generally it's defense that wins championships. A team with a brilliant distributor like James who commands so much attention will usually still be able to score if they lose one or two scorers...NBA players can make open shots, and James creates open shots for his teammates. But even a great player like James can't turn a team into a great defensive team if 40% of the starting lineup doesn't seem to consistently care on defense. It's not that Love and Irving
can't play defense, much like Kevin Martin, it's more that they are much more interested in the offensive side of the game. We have seen moments where Love, Irving and Martin all played pretty good defense...Irving in Game 1 against the Warriors, for example. But the problem is that they just can't sustain it, and that will always hurt the teams they play for. On the other hand, Delly and TT are offensively challenged, but because of the extraordinary effort they consistently bring on the defensive side of the ball, they are a net positive when they play more minutes. Blatt recognized this when he would bench Love for TT at the end of close games.
It's true that the Warriors appear to be a much better offensive team on paper than the Cavs. But James, Mozgov, TT, Delly and Shumpert is a better defensive unit than the Warriors, and that's how the "depleted" Cavs were able to play a healthy Warriors team dead even in the first two games on a court where they went 39-2 this past season!
And to bring this back to the original topic of this thread...that is the case for Towns over Okafor.
