To say that the Golden State Warrior made a ‘statement’ in Game Two against the LA Clippers is a bit of a ‘under-statement’. Golden State completely dismantled the Clippers on their home court at the Staples Center. Golden State held the Clippers to 10 points below their scoring average this season and shredded their points against average by nearly 20. The end result was a 132-105 win and a 2-1 lead in their best of 7 opening round series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The question before game two was ‘Can the Warriors bounce back?’. The statement now is ‘Can they maintain their momentum?’ It has become evident during the Warriors’ championship run–and particularly this year–that when the team is focused and ‘dialed in’ that they’re the best basketball team on the planet. More significantly, they’re close to being unbeatable when they’re playing at this level. The problem is that they’ve demonstrated that they’ve got focus issues. This isn’t uncommon in championship level teams and particularly dominant ones. This season was characterized by more unfocused efforts than at any previous point during their run to the point that they didn’t even finish with the best record in the NBA and had to fight to take the Western Conference regular season title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Warriors have a first rate head coach in Steve Kerr but one of the most impressive things about their team makeup is that unlike many other teams in the NBA the players on the floor ‘get it’. Stephen Curry is an exceptionally cerebral player and brings a coach’s understanding of situational nuance to the floor. Based on media accounts, Kerr didn’t even need to lecture the team following their Game 2 loss. The players all knew what the deal was, what the implications were and what was necessary. That was all on display in the Game 3 destruction of the Clippers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s every reason to expect that it will be on display once again in Game Four. The Warriors understand the significant distinction between returning home up 3-1 and tied at 2-2. They realize that even a #8 seeded Clippers team that hadn’t played particularly well down the stretch (with the exception of Game 2 in this series) remains extremely dangerous. Golden State certainly understands that now that they’ve seized momentum in the series and eliminated any improvement in the Clippers’ confidence following Game 2 that they need to finish the job. They can’t let their foot off of the Clippers’ throat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Including the end of the regular season, the Clippers are 2-6 in their last 8 games and their Game 2 win was their first pointspread cover during that stretch. The takeaway from that would typically be that even against overmatched teams they haven’t played up to their ability though its important not to automatically assume that in the waning days of the regular season. Prior to their utterly meaningless season finale at Memphis the Warriors had won six straight and 8 of 9 going 4-2 and 6-3 against the spread. They’ve won 12-3 SU and 9 of 15 ATS against the Clippers during the past three years and they’ve been at their best at the Staples Center–on the Clippers’ home court, the Warriors are 6-1 SU\/ATS. The Clippers haven’t been much of a home underdog this season going 3-9 SU\/ATS when getting points at home. As NBA pointspreads<\/a> go, -8.5 points is a sizable prize to lay on the road. The Warriors have shown that they can perform well SU and ATS on the Clippers home court and they should come up looking to take care of business once again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n BET GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS -8.5 OVER LA CLIPPERS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To say that the Golden State Warrior made a ‘statement’ in Game Two against the LA Clippers is a bit…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[134],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nba"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5394"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15507,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5394\/revisions\/15507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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