Yahoo! Sports: Warriors open as massive NBA Finals favorites over Raptors in Las Vegas
In the season series (one game each, home and away), the Raptors won both games. The first in Toronto, by three points in overtime, without Curry, and by twenty in Oakland, without Kawhi. Thus, Toronto’s best bet is to bench Kawhi Leonard whenever Curry is playing, and simply weather the ensuing Kevin Durant 50 point outburst.
Ok, never mind. In all fairness, Toronto has a very good team. To dispatch the 76ers and Bucks, two young and impressive teams back-to-back, is not the easiest of feats. And the Warriors have looked lethargic at times. But since Kevin Durant’s injury, they’ve dismantled the team built and coached specifically to beat them and slaughtered a hot, though tired, Trail Blazers team. The Warriors can rotate a plethora of very good defenders on Leonard, including, but not limited to, Andre Iguodala (when he’s back), Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Kevin Durant (whenever he comes back). Lowry’s good, but he ain’t CP3 or Harden good. This is the same basic team that absolutely annihilated LeBron James, Kevin Love, and Kyrie Irving two years ago.
Until the Raptors solve the Warriors offense, something only two teams have barely achieved in the past four years, they can maaaaaaaaybe hope to slow them down. But they don’t have anywhere near the firepower to keep up. Warriors in five, if Toronto gets lucky and catches them napping. No one else has managed that in the Finals for years.
Toronto was ranked 3rd all year in defensive efficiency, and they just dispatched the number one team in that category. They’ve also now defeated 2 teams with offensive scoring threats in Phila and Milwaukee. Granted, the Sixers and Bucks aren’t the Warriors on offense, but the Raptors will make the Warriors work both ends of the floor probably as hard as any team GS has faced over the past few years. And without KD that could be a problem.
I anticipate a very good series. Many are saying the Warriors in 5, but with that Raptors defense I think it’ll go 6 or 7. As the saying goes, offense sells tickets but defense wins championships. I guess that comes from Bear Bryant, but will it hold true here and lead to Toronto winning?
I said before that I’d take Golden State in 5 over anyone from the East, so I’ll stick with that. I didn’t realize at the time that game 5 is a road game for the Warriors, so maybe 6 games makes more sense. It just seems like the Warriors are too good.
Raptors in 7.
I absolutely think the Warriors are the favourite, but the number of people saying there is no chance Toronto could win just haven’t been paying attention. I’d say the Raptors have one chance in three. Anyone who wants to give me much better odds than that, I’ll take that action.
I haven’t followed NBA nearly as much as I have in the past - haven’t even had a chance to check out playoff games much, which is a shame.
The defensive stats for Toronto caught my attention though. I don’t know whether they will win or even make it past the 5th game, but just their defense, Kawhi Leonard, and the quality of their competition leads me to believe that they’re probably the most complete team GS has faced certainly this year, and maybe going back to Cleveland in 2016. This is also the one series that makes me think they might actually miss KD.
Well, the books have the Raptors at +240 or +260, so the action is there for you to take :). Interestingly, though, I’m seeing that the line is Raptors by 1 for game 1, which seems strange since the Warriors are so favored in the series overall. Maybe the series odds are based on the assumption that Durant will be back. It doesn’t seem at all certain to me that he will be, though.
Interesting note: the Raptors are the only team that the Warriors haven’t beaten yet this season.
Statistically I don’t see a huge conflict between Toronto by 1 in a home game and heavily favoring Golden State in the series overall. If you’re going to give Toronto a point at home, and Golden State (just making this up) nine points in Oakland, that probably adds up to GS winning the series the great majority of the time. You’re essentially saying the Warriors will probably win two games in Toronto, and probably will not lose a game at home.
I notice the many, many folks who laughed at the Raptors for making the Leonard-DeRozan trade are very quiet now.
Yeah, I guess that’s right. Making the Toronto games toss-ups and the Warriors favourites at home should make the numbers work out.
I don’t think anyone laughed because DeRozan was better than Leonard, they laughed because it made the organization look disloyal and Leonard was likely to leave. I don’t think either of those things has changed.
Nobody here in San Antonio laughed, we just made the cogent observation that what Kawhi claimed the Spurs did is precisely what the Raptors did - exhibit a great deal of disloyalty to their best player.
First of all, it is simply untrue that all the criticism of the trade was based on the argument of “loyalty.” That’s just false.
I mean, let’s look at the SDMB thread on the subject; the word “loyalty” is never once used by any person criticizing the trade. The criticism was that Leonard wasn’t likelier to make the team better. One SDMB poster, for instance, typed this, nary a thing about loyalty:
The same poster also referred to Leonard as “Kawhibaby” and “Kawhilitter,” never mentioning, though, Toronto’s lack of loyalty to DeRozan.
Good luck indeed. The Raptors have had their best season ever and they’re playing with house money to win the NBA title. It’s exactly what Masai Ujiri was hoping for and loyalty? It’s business. What about Ujiri’s loyalty to Kyle Lowry, Serge Ibaka, Pascal Siakam, and all the other guys to give them the teammates they needed to make the Finals?
As a Spurs fan, almost nobody in San Antonio laughed and thought that the Spurs got a better player by dealing Kawhi for DeRozan. It was well known that Kawhi was better. But Kawhi simply didn’t mesh with the Spurs’ ways or approach. At that point, the best you can do is just deal for what you can get. If a player doesn’t want to stay you can’t make him stay.
LOL. When I wrote
… does this not strike you as me saying the dipshit was disloyal, just in 30 words instead of 1?
Note that I didn’t remark as to the Toronto end of the deal where they absolutely lied to DeRozan, saying he was their guy. But that was “disloyal” too. If you’re going to trade the guy, tell him. Don’t lie to him and don’t @ me with the “it’s a business” bs, because you can conduct business without lying about it.
But the reason why I didn’t remark about Toronto? Because I didn’t give a shit about Toronto. It’s that simple.
That’s revisionist. San Antonio thought he was the ultimate Spurs guy, right after Tim Duncan. The perfect late period complement and successor to Duncan’s reign. Quiet, undemonstrative, coachable, low drama, tremendously skilled two-player. He was the perfect Spur. Right up until he wasn’t.
I don’t blame Spurs fans for disavowing him now. Even at my remove the situation with San Antonio struck me as weird. But he meshed perfectly fine with the Spurs’ organization from 2011-2017.
Literally four posts ago you claimed the criticism was that the RAPTORS were disloyal to Demar DeRozan. Now… um, what was the problem with the trade from the Raptors’ perspective again?
Even Demar DeRozan is fine with this now. Honestly, what nonsense. It’s a business, they made a trade, and it worked, and the folks who said it was a bad trade were wrong.
Sure, Demar liked Toronto and it liked him. Oh well. As a team executive, if you think like the fans, you’ll soon join them. Ujiri made the right move at the right time.
Incidentally, whether Ujiri lied to DeRozan isn’t actually something you know. DeRozan felt mistreated, but that’s understandable; he didn’t want to leave, was going through a really rough patch (his marriage was falling apart) and, hey, misunderstandings happen. He and Ujiri seemed fine with each other pretty shortly after.
Hey, you know who else was upset? Kyle Lowry; he was, and maybe still is, Demar’s best friend. Ask Kyle today how he feels about the trade.
Absolutely meaningless. Remember what G.S. did to Cleveland during the regular season the year that Cleveland (somehow) defeated them in the Finals?
I like to think that’s a safe bet, as long as the Warriors don’t sleepwalk through the series the way they apparently did when they faced the pathetic Clippers (‘course, if they “sleepwalk” through THIS series then they’ll probably end up LOSING it, just as they did to Cleveland 3 years ago when they had SLAUGHTERED the Cavaliers in the two teams’ regular season meetings. But they seem to have “upped their game” since letting the pitiful Clips complete that historic comeback against them in Game 2 and push them to Game 6 of that series)