San Antonio Spurs 87-79 Golden State Warriors: 5 talking points
Heading into their colossal match-up on Saturday with the Golden State Warriors, the San Antonio Spurs had won 34 games in a row at home to begin the season and 43 overall. This game is basically the biggest game in NBA history on the basis of the team’s combined records. Never in the history of the league have two teams faced off, whose records are at least 42 games above .500.That kind of a stat shows the dominance the Spurs and Warriors have been able to exercise on the rest of the league this season. However when it comes to head to head, it is a completely different story. Their lone match-up so far this season on the 25th of January was a 30 point blowout in Oracle Arena courtesy of the Warriors.Then again the history of these two teams in the regular season in San Antonio turns the tide. Golden State has not won a single regular season game in San Antonio since February 14th of 1997, a 32 game losing streak spanning almost 20 years.Coming to the result of the game: streaks stayed alive as San Antonio remained unbeaten at home and denied the Warriors from winning in San Antonio. Here are the five biggest talking points from the showdown between the two West giants:
#1 Spurs dictated pace of the game
The Spurs offense consists of a regular feed into the post, whether it is to LaMarcus Aldridge, Tim Duncan, David West or Boris Diaw and the rest of the team plays off of those post-ups. In the previous match-up in Oracle, the Warriors played terrorizing defense and never let the Spurs settle into their regular motions and plays.
To make matters worse in an attempt to compete the Spurs began to play an uncharacteristic up-tempo style of offense, which is like gift wrapping the game to the Warriors. This time around the Spurs slowed down the pace of the game, ran their plays involving ball movement and regular post-ups with Diaw early on and later through Aldridge.
Although 17 is no small number but their turnovers were down by a huge margin from the previous encounter (25) and that had a lot to do with the pace they were playing at. Despite their quite number of 17 turnovers they were in the game cause of their defense.