Through 5 games The big difference seems to be [barring D fish's shot] The STARS are killing the Spurs and the ROLE PLAYERS killed us Rocket River
How? Kobe had 36pts and 31pts in second and fifth game, Yao and Cato contained Shaq nicely but Malone averaged 18pts 10 rebs in the series agasinst us.
Like ivany said, Kobe did his fair share, so did Malone. Shaq is the only difference, in which Yao and Cato did extremely well. But role players have hurt the spurs as well. Fisher obviously; George and even Walton have hit painful 3s against them. There is no real difference; that's the lakers game. If you actually concentrate on one of their stars, another will step up. Or a scrub will hit a big wide open three on you. Two things to notice, however: The Lakers made an adjustment here that they did not make against us; they are making an effort to clog the lane and stop penetration by the guards. This is an obvious strategy this round. Whereas they did not make such an attempt against us, and (when we actually bothered to) we took advantage of it. All the talk about our low impact in the post - clearly Cato can't score and Yao was out of it - and yet the Lakers are actually slowing down Duncan as well. Perhaps we didn't give enough credit to LA when criticising Yao, Cato and Mo T. (Which is odd, when you think about it, considering they do have Shaq down there)
Honestly, I think the Rockets did a much better job on Kobe/Shaq than the Spurs are. Goes to show you that our 'team' defense is top notch...we just need to add more OFFENSE to this team to make it complete. What killed us was that we didnt have anyone to cover Malone. Our PF spot is still a hole for us.
We didn't adequately cover Malone, 'cause we were more concerned about Shaq. If you don't give up near 30 for Malone, you risk giving Shaq a 40+ game. That team is REDICULOUSLY stacked.
actually, the reason the Spurs choked (and yes, losing FOUR in a row after a 17 game winning streak IS a choke) the reason was simple... they couldn't hit ANYTHING - they shut down the Lakers, then miss wide open jump shots... they have no one to blame but themselves
They didn't shut down the Lakers. The field goal percentage of the Lakers was pretty high in the series. The Spurs were shut down by the Lakers instead. When the Lakers stepped up their defense, Spurs had much less open shots. Yes, the Lakers can play very good defense. They struggled with the Rox because their defense was much worse then, otherwise Francis would have been shut down just like Tony Parker.
