Cant believe

[coolm]

GS is manhandling Denver like this

ugly

and this is WITHOUT Lee.

 

[playmakr]

If anything the Warriors have become more versatile without Lee. Green is overwhelming and shutting down Faried at one end and draining long 3's at the other. Denver goes small so often anyways, so they are just starting Jack and Curry together. Works well against Denver's wild child chickens with their heads cut off guards/wings.

The Nuggets just sort of run around and don't know what they are doing and the Warriors have direction and are more steady. It's a mark of who coaches each team. Pretty big mismatch there. Karl is nice if you want to have the same type of under achieving team every year, with occasional flashes of brilliance. Jackson is building an organization/team, Karl just has some nice players running around.

 

[Smash Williams]

If anything the Warriors have become more versatile without Lee. Green is overwhelming and shutting down Faried at one end and draining long 3's at the other. Denver goes small so often anyways, so they are just starting Jack and Curry together. Works well against Denver's wild child chickens with their heads cut off guards/wings.

The Nuggets just sort of run around and don't know what they are doing and the Warriors have direction and are more steady. It's a mark of who coaches each team. Pretty big mismatch there. Karl is nice if you want to have the same type of under achieving team every year, with occasional flashes of brilliance. Jackson is building an organization/team, Karl just has some nice players running around.

Yep.

Lee is such a poor defender that they lose almost nothing on that end regardless, aside from some rebounding. Whereas going small usually involves a defensive tradeoff, it's a defensive upgrade against this Denver team (especially without Gallo), despite losing some rebounding. On the offensive end, going small allows GS to make up for the loss of Lee's playmaking ability.

I don't really get what Denver is trying to do defensively. It's a combination of bad individual matchups and blown rotations. Zach Lowe wrote extensively about the Nuggets a few times this season, and two things about Denver's defense were consistently mentioned: 1) Andre Miller is a poor defender, and 2) Karl frequently likes to have his defenders switch, especially when Miller is in the game, partly because the resulting "mismatches" often lead to the opposing offense getting out of character in order to attack those mismatches.

Thus, it makes no sense that Miller guarded Curry for large portions of the game. Several of those Curry buckets in the third were the result of him being isolated with Miller. Karl also went with Fournier and Brewer on Curry a bit but rarely used Iggy on Curry. If I'm Karl, I'm making Curry beat Iggy or Brewer. Against those guys, Curry becomes more reliant on bad defensive rotations by Denver or big defenders not doing their jobs on pick-and-roll.

As for teams getting out of their offense in attacking mismatches from switching, Denver falls into the same trap. ESPN's Beckley Mason noticed it as well:

George Karl, who is happy when a switch encourages the other team to play through the post, is repeatedly calling post ups of GSW's guards.

Denver's offense also seemed to get into a lot of isos with marginal one-on-one players attacking these mismatches.

 

[thebigabd]

Everyone should have known Denver was in trouble when Gallinari went down. The Nuggets are pretty even in terms of scoring, without a dominant scorer... but both he and Lawson were the leaders at 16 ppg. Most would argue that he is their most versatile player and primary scoring threat.

On top of that, he was the most aggressive player on roster with more FT attempts than anyone else. Shoots 38% from the 3pt line too.