Well it's 2:18 AM time for me to put the beer to bed and have a nap.Everyone else is crashed out lol. 59 Jurassic Park's across Canada,now that was amazing.Of course a couple of assholes in Toronto smashing windows on a police car.
Just finished watching the game (boy was it hard staying away from spoilers all day at work). Great match, I had no dog in this fight (my Spurs were out early) but was low key rooting for Toronto. A shame with all the injuries to the Warriors but that's part of the game I guess. After game 3 I thought it would be very difficult for the Warriors to win the series without Durant but they still made it competitive nonetheless.
A close game. The Warriors really gave it their all and stepped up, making it competitive 'til the end despite all the injuries. For a moment, I thought we would blow it again when Green made that errant pass (we were lucky that Curry missed). The final seconds were the longest seconds of my life, LOL. It's been an amazing playoffs and series, and I'm looking forward to the parade. What feel odd to me, as a Torontonian and Maple Leafs fan, is seeing the rest of Canada behind us (for once) - I would have never imagined people in Montreal cheering for a Toronto team, but there it is. It's a great day for Canada and therefore the world.
Or people in Vancouver cheering for a Toronto team I'm originally from Ontario (London) and have always been struck how much people here can't stand Toronto. I had a Leaf's jersey when I moved out here in 2001 and people would hang out of cars yelling at me lol.
Haha Raptors should've closed the series out in game 5; I am one of those people that was baffled by the time out Nick Nurse made when Kawhi made that scoring run and thought that was one of the main reasons (along with failing to execute in the end obviously) Warriors was able to win that game.
Gratz to Raptors, first of all. I watched game 5, my first NBA game since the 90s. And I can't believe how much worse the NBA is now. I couldn't believe my eyes. The up/down excitement is still there, I've always loved how this is a game of trying not to get scored on and then next second trying to score. But that's about it. Shooting in current NBA is great, these guys can shoot. But that's about it. I was watching game 5 and then someone went all the way and laid up. I was like wait, this is the first time someone did go to the rim and laid up in ages. Let's not mention how many dunks there were. I could count them on one hand. It's all gotten really boring, the attacking team walks up to the final 3rd, they run a play and whoever ends up in a shooting position, shoots. They can all shoot and they either score or miss. That's it. There's nothing more to the game, to be honest. Such a far cry from the NBA games I used to watch back in the 90s. We had MJ scoring his fade aways, we had big guys dunking, we had Steve Kerr and Reggie Miller shooting 3 pointers, we had some great playmakers with eyes on the back of their heads picking the perfect pass, we had some real characters in Gary Payton. We had people who were mean defenders, we had a lot more of a natural game, it was a lot more instinctive and a lot more creative, a lot more fun to watch. Still, that game 5 made me realise that I still like watching the NBA, it's just a far cry from what it used to be.
The problem with the current NBA is that they're protecting offensive players too much to promote scoring. Basically you can't touch an offensive player if they're facing you so defense was more or less non-existent this season (though they did let the teams play more physical in the playoffs particularly the finals). The other issue is the game today is so much about "analytics" in that they consider the mid range game to be the least efficient way of scoring therefore you're either scoring at the basket or jacking up threes. What ends up happening is you have a bunch of players just running down court and hurling up threes (particularly in conjunction with the rule changes regarding defense) to the point even centers are jacking up threes which you just don't see in the NBA even just a few seasons ago. I hope they do go back and look at the defensive rules again this season but I do agree with the rule change protecting shooters post shot (Zaza Pa-cheap-shot against Kawhi on the Spurs few years ago).
What baffled me about that game was our inability to score 3s - 8/32 by the end of the night. If we had just gotten a couple more 3s then we would have won that game handedly. Nurse's mistake was just the icing on the cake. You can blame Steph Curry for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Curry
What was scary was despite all that AND Durant's first quarter scoring explosion the they only lost by 1 point lol!
