Yesterday was a sad day in San Francisco Bay Area sports as all our favorites went from being heroes to zeroes (literally in the San Francisco 49ers). IQofaWarrior seemed a bit bummed out by the whole mess and you can see it in his post-game linkage. I don’t blame him. The game was ugly. Tyrone Hill mug ugly.
In even weirder news, a toddler fell from luxury box suites during the game and died. Anyone know when this happened? Was it covered during the timeouts by the announcers? It definitely wasn’t talked about during the Lakers FSN West broadcast where the announcers spent all 48 minutes dissing the Warriors and cheering like drunk fans. I swear I heard several high-fives in the middle of their broadcast. I guess if you’re hometeam is that good, it is fine to indulge a bit in your own awesomeness.
But what did we learn from Pau Gasol’s “perfect” game? Can this be accomplished again?
Shooting a near perfect 10-10 from the field and 8-8 from the line is no easy feat. Having an all-around effect on both ends of the floor (4 blocks) shows that he’s possibly more committed to defense than he is scoring given he only took 10 shots.
By this I mean more than half if not all of his shots came with 1-3 feet from the basket. Repeatedly on fastbreaks, a trailing Gasol managed to sneak behind all 2-3 Warrior defenders for an easy alley-oop dunk. On other occasions, Derek Fisher would drive deep into the lane, weirdly drawing all 2-3 Warrior defenders (c’mon folks, it’s 36 year old Derek Fisher…not 36 year old champion-winning Michael Jordan) and dishing it to Gasol running straight down the middle of the lane with no one stopping him.
The Lakers are a phenomenal team but the Warriors definitely made it infinitely easier on them and particularly Gasol. Gasol, obviously a very skilled offensive player, didn’t do anything ridiculously amazing to dominate the game as much let his teammates find him in the right situations and part of those right situations is playing the Warriors.