249 Comments

OUR GUYS ARE FUCKING GIANTS

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I'm glad they're winning but please leave their private lives out of this. No need to go the tabloid route.

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Jun 14, 2022·edited Jun 14, 2022

Yeah, if they like partners who are of a certain height, that’s their business lol.

Kind like those huge dudes who date girls that are barely 5 feet tall. Or guys who don’t crack 6 feet dating girls who look like they played in their college basketball or volleyball teams.

Love is love, man.

(P.S: And now I remember that KD said he would lie about his own height because he didn’t want to tell a potential date that he was 7 feet tall. I mean, c’mon man. You’re KD. If a girl does or doesn’t want to date you, she ain’t making that decision based off of whether you’re 7’0 or 6’10 lol.

😜)

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Not want to jinx it, butAfter game 5 vs mavs, klay told something about feeling nice about not having to bring game 6 klay out. Is this the time now ???

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21 on 14 shots with 5 3s is pretty good already. If he’s also zen about bringing out Game 6 Klay, it’s gonna be amazing

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Wiggins just completely dominating the game on both ends while getting nothing from 3 was dare I say it Jordan-esque. Without the maple.

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Wow, seeing Celtics fans blame the refs for this loss. When the Celtics shot twice as many FTs as the Warriors. When the Warriors were called for a boat load more fouls.

Fans gonna fan.

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Warriors defense activating = “why the hell didn’t the refs call fouls”

😂 😂 😂

Fans taking after Tantrum and Smart

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The Draymond foul out body bump was something they’ve been letting go all series, especially against Steph layups. And the third quarter was an epic Ref generated comeback for Boston. How could anyone have watched that game and thought the refs favored the Warriors? Maybe just because they didn’t reward Smart’s antics?

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Delusional, not so Smaaaat fans.

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*** Refs not falling for flops in the finals ***

Celtics fans: GAME IS RIGGED!!1

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Boston has solved Curry. As some other teams have found, all you have to do to stop him is not guard anyone else. Tonight was the night Curry broke Boston's defense.

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That was a vintage performance for the Warriors’ defense last night. When Great Draymond shows up on D, the whole D just eats teams. Tatum and Brown got owned (Tatum hit threes to save BOS for a while) and transition opportunities galore helped the warriors survive a bad shooting night.

Add in Klay’s D being good and him hitting some “fuck you, Klaybot activate” 3s and Maple Jordan swooping in to the building to save the day and that was one hell of a game.

Here’s to Steph dropping 35 in Boston and ending the series in 6.

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Exactly, the 8 points on 6 shots is a bonus, Draymond is primarily responsible for putting Brown in hell. Game 2 and the last two games he did that and those were all Warrior Ws (even though people were shitting on him for Game 4 because of the offense which is mostly irrelevant).

Warriors have the defensive gameplan to hold Boston under 100 points, execute it and hope that the 3 point shooting variance gods are not on Boston's side (like they kinda have been for most of the series).

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author

hot damn! I love it here!

Hell day of travel (12 hours at airports followed by a 4 hour taxi ride) but coming through and reading through all this with my morning coffee makes it all better! Still hella bummed to have missed this one

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4 hour taxi? That's not a thing.

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Jun 14, 2022·edited Jun 14, 2022Liked by punk basketball

… and 538 grudgingly moves the Warriors’ title chances up to 3.08%.

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They had a five part series of articles about the failure to predict Trump's victory in 2016 - they're gonna need at least a ten part series to apologize for their basketball model's failures.

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lol wut! I thought they had us at 15% a few weeks ago?

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Haha, was kidding. They grudgingly put us at 62% today, which is a generous bump from the 18% they gave us a week ago, the 2% chance they gave us on March 12, or the 0.1% chance they gave us going into the season.

Still, fuck them. Their motto should be, “Always Underestimate the Heart of a Champion.”

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https://www.bball-index.com/2021-22-lite-playoffs-app/

Fuck 538 and RAPTOR, I am more of a DRIP kinda guy (click matchup simulator).

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I shouldn't derive this much schadenfreude from a statistical model, but... lol:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-nba-predictions/warriors/

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Jun 14, 2022·edited Jun 14, 2022

Their numbers cannot measure or capture the heart, mentality, and attitude of a player. So take their predictions with a grain of salt. Or just ignore them.

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Super interesting, I think their model is confused because they have the Boston core rotation as positives on both sides of the floor, whereas the warriors players are ranked as positive on one end and negative on the other. So to their model we’re definitely outperforming the sum of our parts, and the Model didn’t know How to compute.

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Ignoring home court effect that 61% title chance comes to about a 38% chance of the Warriors winning a given game. Bonkers.

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How is the mood in the locker room now that the Warriors are only one win away from winning it all?

Jordan Poole: “The same. How we've been all series… The job’s not done.”

https://twitter.com/957thegame/status/1536563500671062018

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Good. Boston is gonna be a tough place to play in game 6 and you bet they're gonna hustle to try and force a game 7. They've already won two game 7's this postseason so we better not write their epitaph until the job is done.

Poole may be here for the first time, but he's learning from the best. Championship experience—in some ways, having lost championships even moreso—gives these lessons weight.

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Few questions:

- Did our other guys break free because Celtics were double teaming Curry or atleast way too focused to stop him?

- And was that the reason Curry was out of rhythm (besides emptying everything he had in G4)?

- There is play in first half where Dray is matched up with RW uptop and Dray does a fake hand off and goes for Dunk. RW spins around on his okay foot but hobbles on other as he tries to take off after Dray fast. I think Dray is figuring things out - may be as to which way to spin RW?

- Are Celtics having dead legs/dead mind (so to say) by 4th quarter? Seemed that way last game too. Or was it just that they had to mount a comeback in Q3 and that wiped them out? Kind of like for us in G3.

- Sometime in second half, camera focused on Curry talking to Q and Curry showing him one of his fingers and talking about it. I wonder what that was about.

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The Celtics in the first 4 games: We will play under screen & drop coverage and dare Curry to beat us.

During game 4: Oh crap Curry can beat us that way if the Warriors play any kind of defense.

After Game 4: oh the media says the rest of the team are a bunch of scrubs. Instead of just playing up with our bigs and going over the screen let’s shade a third guy off of Klay or Wiggins on the perimeter to create a Bermuda Triangle of Curry containment and see if those scrubs can beat us.

Game 5: Oh crap they have their energy back on D and we still have no clue how to defend this team.

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Jun 14, 2022·edited Jun 14, 2022

Regarding the spin move, there is only one way to spin for that to be effective, which is in the direction of the person you’re faking the handoff to. The idea is that RW will lean/hedge towards Steph since Dray would be screening Steph’s defender if it were a real handoff. Dray wouldn’t be spinning the other way since that’s the side RW is expected to be if he’s assumed to be helping to guard Steph.

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Jun 14, 2022·edited Jun 14, 2022

Glad I’m not the only one who’s tired of the Jackson/JVG team.

I like where this meme is going…

https://twitter.com/bydavidgardner/status/1536551740463534086?s=21&t=bmhG4cTi69sixv3TVKL_fw

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Though in the interest of fairness, they at least had that self-referential gag when the camera crew showed those seals for some Threesus-forsaken reason.

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*sea lions

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Also when I showed my wife this, the first question she asked was “why are they on TV”

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Jun 14, 2022Liked by Eric Apricot

I was at this amazing, glorious, as Draymond would call it, absolutely incredible game. Some thoughts from (and around) Chase Center:

- I was lucky enough to be able to go to game 2 of the WCF against Dallas and that was the loudest the arena had gotten to that point in the few times I've been able to go to games there. Tonight surpassed it without question. My section up in 203 (near where the recent championship banners hang) was downright boisterous. Not every single person was a loud cheerer, but there was enough of us there to keep the volume up all night long. We also had the benefit of some Celtics fans being peppered amongst our section, giving those of us with something to say a little more motivation to make sure our voices were heard. It wasn't just my section though; it was the entire Arena. As Sheriff Bart would say, "let me tell you baby, they was open for BUISNESS". The place was raucous. Every time the Celtics would touch the ball, a chorus of boos would rain down on them. Every time they crossed half-court, the "DEFENSE" chants arose from the aisles with enthused defiance. The "Waaaarriors" chant organically manifested itself at the right parts in the game, including at the end of the third when the crowd was willing the boys to get back into it after the Celtics' run. It was another experience that hearkened back to the Oracle days and I was proud of all the Dubs fans who made that building as hostile of a place for the Celtics tonight as it was energizing to the Warriors.

- How about one Andrew "Mr. Fantastic" Wiggins? Best game of his career, right? When taking the stage into account, I don't see how it isn't. He is outplaying Jayson Tatum and it is totally demoralizing the Celtics. You could see it in their body language which got increasingly frustrated as the game wound on and as Andy kept eviscerating them from the mid-range and at the rim. I think the amount of Wiggins unbelievers on this forum is slim to none at this point, but I can't stop marveling at the fact that at the time that this dude was traded to the Warriors, he was considered the worst contract in the league by broad consensus, and now he is dropping 26 points and snagging 13 rebounds (a game after getting a career high 17) on the biggest stage in the NBA. On the way out of the Arena and on the various forms of public transit back to Oakland, I heard many murmur his name in awed, proud tones, as if he was one of the homegrown core. Given how the team has embraced him and let him be the best version of himself, he might as well be at this point; an adopted son that's no less a part of the family.

- I predicted big games from Draymond and Poole before the game, as well as more good shooting from Klay. While neither had a huge scoring night, both played excellent games tonight, Poole with his timely and efficient scoring and Draymond with his ferocious defense and rejuvenated aggression. Klay was great for the third game in a row and I think we can all feel that Game 6 version of him stir on the horizon. I think the team is hungry to close this out in Boston and will come out guns blazing on Thursday.

- On the way to the game, I sat next to a Celtics fan on the Muni from the Embarcadero to the arena. Chatted with him for most of the way and learned that he is from LA, which seemed odd to me given his choice of team. Apparently (according to him), there are a bunch of Celtics fans in Los Angeles who absolutely hate the Lakers but aren't even mostly from Boston. Seems weird, right? I've never heard of this before. Pretty cool dude although I had to manage a weird miss of disgust and confusion for someone who was at the same time a Dodgers and and a Celtics fan (also an Eagles fan for whatever reason).

- I brought my little pocket radio to the game so I could listen to Tom Roye and Tim Tolbert, another pleasant side benefit of not having to watch the national broadcast tonight. Tim Roye was out sick though, so Fitz filled in for him. At first I was pretty disappointed because Tim Roye is fantastic and I am not Fitz's biggest fan. However, I gotta give him credit, he called a great game. He was fantastic on the PBP, generating the right level of excitement for the biggest plays (I recommend you find his call on the Wiggins dunk in the 4th, absolutely perfect) and providing a continuous stream of useful commentary in between the action. Why can't he be like that on the TV side? If he was on Warriors broadcasts more like he is on Warriors radio (or when he was at the Olympics), he would be an unequivocally great broadcaster. Part of my frustration with him though is that although he seems perfectly capable of being that guy, he chooses to try and act like the color analyst as well during most Warriors broadcasts and I hate analyst Fitz.

- I know that many of the posters here are not baseball fans, but the SF Giants swept the rival powerhouse LA Dodgers over the weekend, which is always a big deal around here. Combined with the 2 definitive and defining finals wins over the Celtics on Friday and today, this may have been the best (extended) weekend in Bay Area sports in a very long time.

- There was a group of deaf fans sitting in the row right in front of where me and my buddy were sitting. This is not extremely notable in itself (outside of making me feel better by knowing I didn't have to worry about screaming too loudly right behind them), but during one of the breaks there was a t-shirt thrower guy who ascended into our section and was doing the time-honored tradition of getting fans engaged with the possibility of a free shirt, and these dudes were the most animated about this than they were about anything else the entire game. They gestured at themselves wildly and tried to get the guy's attention until he ran out of shirts and left. It was just nice to remember that regardless of what kind of fans we are or what are journeys in life have been, everyone just ultimately wants a free shirt. Ideally fired at them out of a cannon. But any kind will do.

- Godamn do I love this team and this organization. Let's go close this out in Boston, I want to tear those fans' hearts out on their own home floor.

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I too agree about Wiggs. He's family now.

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Yes!!! Given Wiggs’ blossoming he definitely feels “homegrown”, couldn’t be prouder

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Jun 14, 2022·edited Jun 14, 2022

Our Steph, always with the positive attitude

Ros Gold-Onwude

@ROSGO21

Stephen Curry postgame on his first game without a 3 pointer after 233 straight: “All good things come to an end, glad I can stand here with a smile”

https://twitter.com/ROSGO21/status/1536553984877395968

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He took it better than I did.

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It's a beautiful thing that we're going to have a Game 6 Klay in the Finals. I don't know if he'll score a point or get a rebound. But I do know that he will play in a Game 6 of the Finals, and I do know that that was in doubt for a long, long time. An entire pandemic started and waned and Klay just kept rehabbing. He obviously lost his spirit to some extent, as anyone would. He worked really hard to get back that first year and to have his comeback stolen in preseason would leave some people with no desire left to bother. He bothered. He worked. He looked so frustrated, then he was traveling with the team but it was like he was a mascot: cute, loyal, but not an actual player. Like a water boy who can hit the three when no one is guarding him in practice. Then he came back and he wasn't himself but he worked on it and finally looks like the player he used to be, almost. And now we are going to get the ultimate: Championship Game 6 Klay. You can't make this stuff up.

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Such a great story. If it was a movie, you'd think the plot was too outlandish and cheesy. It's just too perfect.

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Series would have been over in 5 if a bunch of tole players didnt go crazy game 1.

I'm looking forward to a crazy curry and game 6 klay performance in the garden

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