Chapter 425: In a desperate situation
Although Spurs fans have a lot of complaints about the team they support losing their first home court, they still feel that it is acceptable, after all, the Trail Blazers have much more rest time before the Western Conference Finals begin, and the Spurs are a veteran-dominated team, so it is normal to lose the first game and think about it carefully. Pen? Interesting? Pavilion wWw. biquge。 info
But in the fourth quarter of the second game, the Spurs fans couldn't sit still, and they began to clamour, although they didn't boo the Spurs players on the court, but the banners they held up made people blush, and it was obvious between the lines that they hated iron but not steel.
The live score on the big screen was clear, with the Trail Blazers leading by 18 points at 89-71 with five minutes left in the game. It's not impossible to chase 18 points in 5 minutes, but the difficulty is quite high, and it requires someone in the formation to suddenly burst out of the small universe. But judging from the previous matches, this is a small probability thing.
Mr. Popovich has always admired team basketball, and even if he has a historic power forward like Duncan on the team, he rarely needs the ace to score three or four points to lead the team to victory. If he could, he would rather have all 10 players in double figures than see anyone on the team score 450 points in a game.
And now even if he relaxes the restrictions, it's useless, Parker has just recovered from injury, has only played one game, and has not had much time to rest; Ginobili is entangled in Matthews, and his flashy but high-stakes high-angle passes have been tackled three times; Duncan was a good option, but now that Oden has done a good job of defending him, the basket is out of the reach for him to play with his back to the basket.
Although Leonard is still conscientious on the defensive end, he can't stand Ye Feng's transformation into a pure organizer in this game, and directly robbed Felton of his job. The key is that Leonard still has to focus all his energy on Ye Feng, everyone in the league knows how terrible this young Asian player is, as long as you dare to let him vacant, you will be sorry for his shooting skills if you don't score forty or fifty points in a game.
In fact, Ye Feng originally wanted to continue to compete with Leonard, but for the sake of his teammates, he deliberately suppressed his desire to score, and instead helped his teammates to make the ball and create better opportunities for them to shoot. Judging from his statistics, although he didn't score a lot, only 18 points, and all of them were three-pointers, he delivered a game-high 22 assists, completely revitalizing the offensive system of the Trail Blazers.
In the end, the Spurs couldn't complete the comeback in the last five minutes of the fourth quarter, and they lost the second game 83-101. And the most unacceptable thing for Spurs fans is that this game is very different from the first game, the biggest difference is that the Spurs are falling behind from beginning to end, and there is no lead for the whole 48 minutes, and the whole team only sent a total of 13 assists, just over half of Ye Feng's alone.
It's a completely atypical Spurs, considering that they averaged the second-most assists in the league in the regular season with 27.1 assists per game, and even in the Western Conference semifinals against the Grizzlies, they still averaged 17.2 assists per game when the offense was so bad, and the 13 assists in this game were just hilarious.
For a team like the Spurs, who is keen on team basketball, the reduction in assists means that each offensive round of the team is filled with a lot of ball-handling singles, either the mentality has collapsed and only wants to rely on their own individual ability to solve problems, or the Trail Blazers are very good defensively and don't give them a chance to pass the ball, so they can only hold the ball themselves. As long as the fans who watched the game live, they should not think that the second is the truth.
The Trail Blazers' defense is honestly based on only two people, Ye Feng and Matthews, especially when McMillan increasingly has Oden on the floor with the rest of the starters. Oden's physical condition is good, but his experience is much weaker than Camby's, and he relies on his instincts to defend a lot of the time, and his average of 4.2 individual fouls per game says a lot, and he still has a long way to go before he can become a qualified interior gate.
Back on the home court of the Trail Blazers, the Spurs seemed to wake up and played pretty well in the first three quarters of Game 3, with Duncan stepping up to become the team's leading scorer, with a double-double of 22 points and 13 rebounds in the third quarter, as well as two blocks. And at the end of the third quarter, the Spurs led by 13 points, 73-60, which is extremely rare in this year's Western Conference Finals, and arguably almost no such happens.
Just when everyone thought that the Spurs were going to win this game easily, the situation on the field changed abruptly, and Ye Feng directly took over the team's offense. The Trail Blazers only scored 60 points in the first three quarters in large part because their offensive efficiency was too low, and at this time, Ye Feng, as the leader and scoring champion of the team, had to step up and charge.
When Ye Feng completely turned on the scoring mode, it was difficult for Leonard to stop him, and at the beginning of the fourth quarter, Ye Feng made all 4 shots from outside the three-point line, half of which were forced against Leonard's defense. Despite Leonard's big hands covering his face, the basketball obediently flew into the basket as if it were equipped with autopilot. It's not that Ye Feng didn't think about causing the opponent to commit a three-point foul, but out of respect for the opponent, he hoped to beat Leonard in a more upright way.
Although the Spurs players are also constantly scoring, but under the instruction of McMillan, the Trail Blazers have completely locked the outside line, and if you want to score, go inside, and there is no guarantee that you will be able to shoot smoothly. In the face of a group of seniors in the Spurs team, the Trail Blazers did not plan to carry forward any style of respecting and loving the old, tactical fouls are not uncommon, anyway, they just don't let you score easily, which is also a great blow to the morale of the Spurs.
Ye Feng basically did not get off the rest in the fourth quarter, scoring 22 points in a single quarter, helping the Trail Blazers beat the Spurs 45-27 in the fourth quarter, and narrowly won the game. In this game, Ye Feng once again let everyone see his versatility, with a big triple-double of 45 points, 15 rebounds and 11 assists proving his strength, while Leonard, who was in charge of opposing him, only had 11 points, 4 rebounds and 3 assists, and the gap was clear at a glance.
Falling behind 0-3 is a complete nightmare for the Spurs, you must know that they are the first in the West, and the Trail Blazers who are second in the West are powerless, who can imagine this before the Western Conference finals start? Now they are in a desperate situation, and if they lose one more game, the season will be over.