For the second straight year, the Warriors and Rockets find themselves deadlocked at 2-2 with the series shifting back to Oakland for Game 5, and just like in 2018, the series is defined by earned stubbornness.
Some playoff series are defined by the adjustments one team makes to counter the other, and so on and so forth as the coaches play chess, trying to put their pieces in the best possible positions. In the East, the Bucks took stock of what happened in their Game 1 loss to the Celtics and made necessary adjustments — moving Nikola Mirotic into the starting lineup, switching everything on defense, and having Giannis work off the ball more so he can attack once given the ball before Boston can set up a wall at the rim.
In the Warriors and Rockets series, it’s not chess so much as two rams colliding headfirst until one yields. The Warriors won’t completely change their defensive approach in an effort to slow James Harden, as the Jazz did in the first round in trying to replicate the Bucks overplaying Harden’s step-back. Just as the Rockets refuse to go away from their iso-heavy attack with Harden leading the way, even after he struggled to score efficiently in the first two games.
Both teams have a firm belief in their system and approach — bordering on arrogance — that won’t let them make sweeping changes in the midst of a series. The Warriors have earned that right by winning back-to-back championships. Why should they change? The Rockets, on the other hand, are convinced they should have won last year’s Western Conference Finals and believe luck (and officiating) was the only reason they were not in the 2018 Finals.
There’s no great chess match between the coaching staffs, just two teams that are going to try and execute what they do better than the other on any given night. The result has been four incredibly close games as the two teams are confident they know what the other will try to do. It’s also been a somewhat frustrating series to watch.
It’s hard to describe why this year’s series isn’t resonating the way last year’s did, given that the games are (much) closer on average. When Golden State won games last year, they tended to blow the doors off of Houston, and there’s been high drama at the end of all four games to open this year’s edition.
Maybe it’s the matchup we were expecting to get in the conference finals coming a round early that has diminished the stakes of a year ago. Or the way it started, with the entire conversation after Game 1 revolving around the officiating. Or the tiresome nature of the personalities on both teams. Or that it’s simply not as fresh as when Houston emerged as the top contender out West. It’s likely a combination of all of those factors, but somewhere in there is also the fact that there’s little aesthetically pleasing about watching these teams crash into each other over and over.
They say styles make fights, and the Rockets have built themselves to be the perfect foil for the Warriors, which also results in sitting through some brutal basketball before we get to crunch time. There’s little rhythm to the games. It’s not two teams trying to adapt and adjust to the other’s movements. Instead, they step on each other’s toes for 48 minutes and hope they make more shots than the other team.
In a way, it’s almost admirable the way both teams are convinced they have it right. Over the next two or three games, one of them will be vindicated, and the other will begin a summer of soul-searching. If it’s the Warriors that win, Houston will have to wonder when their window will be closing as their cap situation remains a nightmare and Chris Paul is only getting older. If the Rockets win, Golden State has to begin preparing for a summer in which two of their top four stars enter free agency, and the expectation is that at least one of them will leave.
The fate of the West this year, and potentially for those to come, is likely to be decided over the next three games — a reminder that while it’s a semifinals series, the stakes remain incredibly high. Changes to both teams are likely to come this summer, but for the rest of this series they’ll remain true to who they are now, for better or worse.
