EXPLOITING Steph Curry: The Celtics Have THIS Figured Out!

Jaylen Brown had a great offensive game but look at this suffocating defense on Curry, being all over Steph and not giving him even an inch of space.
And just moments later, watch him hounding Thompson now, and as Klay goes for the give and go, Brown is glued to him and finishes this incredible defensive sequence with an emphatic block as TD Garden explodes.
The Celtics fought incredibly hard for this win, but some of their strategic decisions let me know that they have fully matured and this could finally be their year.
Let me show you how they won this game. What up everybody, my name is Stefan and this is Heat Check. Let’s get into it.
Watch the clear intention here as Smart goes to get Curry on him, gets the switch and then immediately the ball goes to Marcus for the post up.
Backs him down, bumps him, then turns, fades and hits.
Boston made it a priority to go at Steph throughout the entire game.
As you can see on some of these examples, they would hunt for these switches, and made Curry work on defense, which also resulted in him getting in foul trouble early and having to manage that during the game.
Steph still had a terrific offensive game but had a lot of troubles on the other end of the floor.
Thing is, it wasn’t just him. The size of the Celtics but maybe more importantly- their aggressiveness and determination to attack the basket were too much for Golden State as they don’t have a solid rim protector, so as you can see, anyone from Derrick White to Marcus Smart to almost anyone on the Boston team you name it. They would penetrate time after time and finish inside. So they ended with 52 points in the paint, exactly twice as much as the Warriors and that’s just too many high percentage looks given up so you know you’re losing the game if you have that type of discrepancy.
The dribble penetration from the Celtics was phenomenal but just as impressive to me were the great passes- getting rid of the ball quickly, and that was the case especially for Jayson Tatum.
He had a similar night to game 1 where he didn’t shoot the ball well but made some incredible decisions and passes to find the wide open teammate off of all the attention that he attracts as you can see, and when you have this much time and space to fire away of course these shots would fall.
Boston is showing me in this finals series that they have fully matured. Whether it’s attacking the mismatch instead of forcing difficult shots, or the great passes by their main superstar trusting his teammates, or the defensive effort by the whole team, this is what a championship level team does.
Speaking of defense I have to give a shoutout to Robert Williams who was out there clearly with a limited mobility due to his injury, but in only 25 minutes he had a game high plus minus of +21.
That number comes from his unbelievable rim protection, getting 4 blocks, each one better than the other. Right here he swats Curry’s shot into the stands. Also the 10 rebounds as you can see here ripping this one away from Draymond.
The 1 thing that I would criticize for them however is how they kept defending Curry the same way they did in game 2 with the drop on the screen and he kept torching them.
Golden State came back from down 18 to take the lead with these shots, so I’m interested to see if Boston changes things since they avoided a full on comeback.
And with all the momentum on their side now, this is a chance for the Celtics to take a commanding 3-1 lead on Friday and get extremely close to winning the championship title.
Do you think they finally got what it takes for it? Let me know in the comments. That’s it for now, subscribe and talk to you in the next one. Peace out.