Tags: Bruce Bowen, Chris Paul, David West, Gregg Popovich, Kevin Garnett, NBA 2K8, New Orleans Hornets, San Antonio Spurs, Tim Duncan

Hello all. The Tsar has given me a visa to post here, and I’m grateful that procuring this didn’t involve marrying a foreign bride (yet). I’m Mark, and I’ll be regaling you with my (mostly pedestrian) insights on various sports, my lousy fantasy teams, wacky terminology that George and I have come up with over the years, and so on and so forth. Anyway, for my first post, I’d like to reveal just why, from an extreme outsider’s perspective, the San Antonio Spurs find themselves in such a deep hole in their playoff series with the New Orleans Hornets.

You see, in my spare time my roommate and I play quite a bit of NBA 2K8. Probably too much, since we now play seven games series in order to get our fix. Anyway, whenever our friend Jeff comes over he also plays. Jeff, it turns out, is ridiculously good with the Hornets, namely because they fit his style of play to a T. Whenever Jeff plays as the Hornets, he employs a simple yet effective strategy: he clogs the middle and dares his opponent to shoot 3-pointers. And when I say “dare,” I mean that he sags off perimeter players by a least a couple feet. The natural inclination when seeing this is to think to yourself, “Damn, he’s really giving me a lot of space. I know I shouldn’t but…I’m so open…if I make this, it’ll be huge…SCREW IT.” Then you hoist up a three and (probably) clank it. Then Jeff gets the rebound, runs back before you can get in transition, and gets an easy 2. Fall victim to this a few times in a row, and suddenly you’re down by 10. Then you get freaked out that it’s seemingly impossible to get inside on offense, start to settle for more open 3s, missing more than you make, and before you know it you’ve lost by at least 15. And every single time, as the game ends and the awful NBA 2K8 music begins (”I GRIND I PUSH I WORK REAL HARD”), you smack yourself in the forehead. “Why did I fall into the trap?! Why did I take so many damned 3s?!” Around our apartment, playing against Jeff when he’s the Hornets is referred to as “taking the Hornet Challenge.” This strategy, of course, is not without its downsides. Namely, if you make your 3s, the strategy is fairly ineffective. I have beaten it before, but it took some ridiculous 3-point shooting (I made something like 60% and shot over 30) to do so. Also, getting to the line can overcome it as well (though counting on this in NBA 2K8 is like counting on Kevin Garnett to take the big shot).

I bring this up because this must be exactly what the Spurs and Gregg Popovich are thinking after the first 2 games in this series. There are obviously a number of reasons the Spurs are getting smacked around in this series (effective defense on Tim Duncan, Chris Paul having his way with a slow, aging Bruce Bowen, David West being an absolute terror even when he only scores 10 points), but this is one that has been mostly overlooked (Though ESPN’s TrueHoop blog made note of it today), and the numbers don’t lie. In the regular season, the Spurs attempted 19.6 3-pointers per game. In the playoffs, they’ve averaged about 16 3-point attempts. But if you look at these past couple games, the numbers tell a different story. In Game 1, the Spurs attempted a whopping 31 threes, connecting on just 12 of them (38.7%). They settled down (slightly) in Game 2, taking “only” 27, but making just 8 (a ghastly 29.6%). In Game 1, three Spurs attempted 8 or more 3-pointers, only one of them shooting 50% (Bruce Bowen, 5-10, most coming in the first half). This is in keeping with how the Hornets have played all year, as they allowed the most 3-point attempts per game of any team in the league.

Watching this series, whenever a Spurs player jacks up a 3, you can see the wheels turning in their heads, and I imagine them thinking the same things I do when I play Jeff. “Man, a 3 would be huge here. Why are they sagging off on me so much? I can totally make this!”

HOIST. CLANK. “DAMMIT!”

It happened 19 times in both Games 1 and 2. It doesn’t surprise me that the Hornets defend like this, because it is a good strategy…but it’s usually most effective against gunslingling teams like, say, the Nuggets or the Warriors. The obvious downside, like I said before, is that a team will suddenly make its 3-pointers in bunches, but in that case Byron Scott will live with getting burned by such low-percentage shots. After all, as a team the Spurs shot 37% from beyond the arc as a team this season. If I’m Byron Scott, I’ll live with them taking shots with that sort of success rate instead of banging to the basket or having Tony Parker or Ginobili penetrate for easy looks. But with all that said, I’m frankly pretty shocked the Spurs are falling into this trap instead of working to get better shots. Is it because they’re too old and lack the quickness to get around the defense? Are they that confident in their 3 point shooting (I hope not)? Are they just falling behind early and desperately gunning to get back into the game?

Beats me. I’m just a couch potato who plays way too much NBA.

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