The Mavs Take Game 1. Plus, What’s Wrong With Ant? | The Ryen Russillo Podcast

The Mavs Take Game 1. Plus, What’s Wrong With Ant? | The Ryen Russillo Podcast

two games into the Conference Finals on both sides and I want to focus on Dallas’s big win in Minnesota as they take game one uh after trailing at halftime so we start with a bunch of things that I want to get to Kyrie I didn’t want passive Kyrie in the first half I was actually a little surprised that he was getting so much credit for it but that’s what happens we just play the results like all right he was so smart and tactical about everything well he was just Unstoppable in the first half of this game it’s exactly what I wanted from him setting the tone 24 points in the first half 11 to 14 shooting ant was his primary Defender but I want to talk about four plays in particular that I think speak to a real fixable thing that Minnesota can can get on here um we’re going to talk about ant’s defense to Kyrie and what that meant for ant offensively later in this game because if you watched it it was fairly alarming but I tweeted this out about Jaden McDaniels and it was that I don’t think Jaden was ready for Kyrie’s speed it’s not like Kyrie’s new in the league but after ATT attacking Booker attacking Murray and you know granted guys get cross matched and there’s some switches from time to time this was a little different in that there’s just something going on in the league that I’ve noticed more and more where if you’re really good Defender it’s great to like get out and challenge but you can also be doing someone with great quickness or great ball handling skills with Kyrie has maybe the best that we’ve ever seen you’re doing them a great favor by just getting right up into them you think about when Steph Curry is beyond the three-point line and he’s in front of like the bench okay so he’s not in the corner he’s not at the top he’s at the break and Steph is like bent over he has the ball down low the defender’s like right up on him right like Jamie Fox Style just right on it and then Steph just kind of like pirouettes away gets the dribble gets that kind of Step before you put the ball down on the floor and then he’s gone and you’re like you you’re actually doing the offensive player a favor because you’re not cutting off any kind of angles by just staying like 30 plus feet away so I know that it’s it’s kind of like well wait a minute you guys all love it when he’s working Devin Booker and turning him two or three times just trying to get the ball up the court you love it when you see it against Jamaal Murray yes I do love those things but with Jaden I felt like he misjudged Kyrie’s speed or at least wasn’t ready for it in game one four different times one was just a complete brain lapse where Jaden doesn’t pay attention and Kyrie’s too smart back door Cuts Jaden because he can see exactly what it is and because Kyrie’s so quick that cut is going to be more damaging from Kyrie than maybe another player that’s Baseline behind you play number two there was a left side layup where Kyrie went left hand the entire way and Jaden just never really was able to get in front of him or deter his path which is really crazy if you’re thinking about Jaden’s defense and his length and his own speed speed he never was able to like get to Kyrie and Kyrie’s got the ball but as we know there’s some players that are faster with the ball than they maybe are in a 40- yard dash and Kyrie’s probably one of those guys too play number three 30 seconds left he picks him a three quarters court and he goes right past him and at that point I think Jaden felt like well I have Rudy behind me and then Kyrie finished against Rudy which in itself was like probably more impressive than any other stuff that I’m talking about here and Kyrie wasn’t even phased by it and Rudy’s just up there trying to guess right to contest the shot doesn’t happen play number four picks up Kyrie full court with 5 seconds left which makes no sense um because it’s Kyrie another player five seconds left ball handler who’s likely the number one option to get the shot up at that point yeah it makes more sense for Jaden to do the Jaden McDaniels things but against Kyrie I’m not sure that is guess what Kyrie goes past him uh questionable and one but a score that looked like it could have been eight points or more at halftime in a matter of 30 seconds of Kyrie ends up being a one possession game so when we looked at the half let me give you the totals actually and then relate it back to the half because Minnesota shot 49 threes last night I knew they were shooting a lot of them and then when I went back and looked at the box score I was like man 49 seems high they finished 18 to 49 so you could say hey 37% that’s not a big deal they’ve never taken 40 in a regular season game this year they took 40 in game six against Denver which I’m not sure was a real game Denver was up 50 at one point or excuse me Minnesota was up 50 in game six to was Sate game seven against dender Denver you want to know why I don’t they had 23 points combined in the first and fourth quarter doesn’t feel like a real game so all season long the timber wolves averaged about 33 threes uh attempted per game in the regular season that’s 23rd in the NBA but I wonder if the success that Minnesota had at the half because they were 44% from three at the half they were plus 27 points because Dallas I think was two of 15 they couldn’t make any I wonder if that pulled Minnesota into something game planwise where maybe Dallas was like look we can’t let ant go off so if the ball is with cat if the ball is with Rudy if the ball is with McDaniels McDaniels was terrific offensively I mean that that’s a huge Plus for Minnesota to get that kind of night out of him offensively specifically in the first half but the collection of the rest of the shooters went real cold and I don’t know if it’s a comfort thing with a team where it’s like hey we like shooting all these threes a little bit easier saving some energy on on defense um and we’re making enough to justify it when Dallas is like great keep doing this and there was a bunch of that stuff throughout this game because it looked like Minnesota was making sure that they weren’t going to give up any of the corner threes from Dallas and we’ll get to those numbers in a second here the next part of this story is ant was 6 to6 but more alarming than going six to6 is that he’s five of 12 from three like hey wait that number is good not to me it isn’t the shooting is great the percentage is great but that means that 12 of his 16 shots were outside the ark you want me to make it worse I can make it worse that’s four shots inside the paint but there’s only two of those shots at The Rim he was also 05 with zero points in the third quarter he took two free throws all game because he only had two shot attempts at The Rim the entire game he’s averaging six free throw attempts per game in the playoffs two is not going to get it done so if we look at the percentage of shots at The Rim in game one it’s only 15% which again is low but it’s just the one game but compare that with his Rim attempt percentage based on the rest of his attempts throughout a game in the playoffs it’s 35% ant was either tired was either in love with the three um and honestly I think he was all of those things because in the fourth quarter we did get the Reggie Miller alert I don’t know what Reggie Miller’s batting average is on the Reggie Miller alert game that I like to play at home where he’s like oh something’s happening but he was talking about ant he’s like he’s grimacing he’s grimacing and it’s someone who did one play-by-play game in his NBA history I can tell you it’s weird when I’m at home on TV going why are they not noticing how hurt this guy is or why are they not noticing like Luca in my game was it three I forget the third quarter of game two maybe I was like how come they’re not talking about this yet you know the game you’ve done it we all do it and yet when I think about when I did one game of play byplay and it’s probably because I only had one under my belt where I was like yeah there’s all sorts of stuff I wasn’t noticing I was just hoping to say the teams and names of the players right the entire time while giving out the score enough for the radio listener to not be upset with me so Reggie Miller’s on the an alert I’m like great somebody picked up on this cuz is he actually hurt because he seems to be somewhat not involved it wasn’t hurt I guess he was just exhausted um I know there’s a bit of a Victory lap there where it’s and I don’t really feel like he was calling out Kyrie when he gave out the defensive assignment in the postgame presser against Denver where he’s like yeah I got Kyrie like yeah I mean I think worse things have been said then that unfortunately leads depending on where you are with Kyrie postgame content I can’t change the channel fast enough but where Kyrie is just super into this Sage wisdom role that he gets into um where he was like I love that I love that from him you know but I was like I don’t really know was Kyrie motivated by all that or were the perimeter Defenders just kind of like hey this guy seems to go way faster and it’s going to take us two hours in some film to adjust to how fast Kyrie is uh and by the way I should be fair about about the sage old man thing with Kyrie because I remember a guy came up to me at the beach sitting there reading a book I think something about the withdrawal from I don’t know I forget where I forget which region I was locked into at that point and this guy comes up to me he’s like hey my buddies over there said you were a some like BigTime podcaster and I was like yeah I don’t know I was like yeah things are going all right at the beach the middle of the day and uh he was like yeah cool man so then I was like all right well this guy came over here for a reason I’m in a decent enough mood uh I was like what do you do he’s like I go to USC I was like well you know I think the important thing that I kind of figured out was that um you know getting people to actually like you can be a skill um I think you know worrying about saving money in your 20s might drive you more crazy than just kind of being broke in your 30s but I always wanted to pursue things that had like high ceiling value I don’t know if that’s worth it and then I think I get to like a third tidbit of advice and the guy’s like yeah man I’m actually like doing pretty good I’m selling like 20 something Grand worth of stuff on eBay by like finding it on Amazon and then like marking it up he’s like I made I made like 20 plus Grand like each of the last couple semesters and I’m at the beach on a Wednesday too man so I didn’t really come over here for advice so I was like wow that guy just me up pretty bad so yeah I I can have a little Kyrie in me okay so anyway back to anunt uh it was bad it was bad because there were just too many possessions where you’re like what are you doing you’re going to you’re just going to stand there in the corner now and Conley and cat have to two-man game Minnesota to a win here and the thing is they still almost pulled this off but I think even the hardest the hardest of the hardcore Minnesota fans would be like all right you want to run your offense through cat to CL I mean if that’s what they’re going to be doing then they’re not going to win this series so for ant to be that tired chasing Kyrie around after a bad shooting night in game seven you want to say hey one less day off I don’t know dude 22 years old but these are the rules so as we pivot this from Ant to Luca where look I have Luca as the second best player in the world I voted him second in MVP I don’t think there was much of a conversation of hey do I think I would want to take ant over Luca where all of a sudden too like ant was the Undisputed two-way King which felt a little disrespectful of Giannis despite the bag the accessories one guy may feel like he’s buying something at you know the power up airport shop where he’s getting a carryon there and the bag for Edwards is a bit more of the Gucci Louis Vuitton line yeah I mean I got you there but I mean this is what happens with all of the praise now enters in a lot of the doubt I saw some wild today because people were like well look I don’t really I have no allegiance to this cat guy it seems like everybody really likes him that’s another bad playoff game at least statistically although look he played defense he made some great passes some good rebounding but not really going to do it that’s not going to be enough buddy because these are the rules especially when you see Luca do what he did at the end of this game 15 points in the fourth manipulating every Defender the way he needed to be manipulated getting past the first perimeter Guy having Rudy in Hell on those plays where I’m like do I show they think they blitzed it once late it may have led to a wideopen three but Dallas wasn’t hitting any threes last night I think they only took four corner threes because Minnesota wanted to drop Rudy and they wanted to cover up the threes in the corners so they took only four after averaging I think between like 11 and 13 attempts in the corner so far in the playoffs and the problem is is that and this is why like Luca against Lou Dort where you look at the overall numbers you go okay so Luca was only 24 points per game in this and the shooting numbers weren’t better but he was getting better like he definitely closed healthier again looks healthy in this game one as opposed to of those moments early in the series against Oklahoma City but you’re like maybe the credit to Lou Dort was that he was just able to impede some of this from time to time because as great as Jaden is and his length you need to be Stout against Luca and Luca got right into what he wanted to get into whenever he wanted to and I actually find it more surprising that he can’t do this every single time because my expectation is that he can so it actually works all the way back around here where it’s like man this Luca Kyrie one two punch um this is the scary part of Dallas to go with the defense and everything else that Minnesota didn’t seem to want to do on offense last night so Minnesota will attack more they’ll probably take less threes they’ll probably speed themselves up to match the speed of Kyrie on some of the stuff in the drives I don’t know what you’re GNA I always feel like that Luca thing can get really unsolvable certain nights so you know here we go but look if they’re two evenly matched teams which I think they are I gave the edge to Minnesota um think we’ve all learned the lesson that two teams that you know it’s not a wide massive like insurmountable Gap I don’t believe talent-wise between the two the one two punch for Dallas feels better than ant and then whoever number two is that night from Minnesota but there’s a depth thing that could be crazy to think is Dallas going to win this series because of their defense against the defense in Minnesota that can’t solve what Dallas is doing but here is the lesson that we have to remind ourselves every single time two closely matched teams 4 hours later and completely different after the result of game one

Ryen Russillo recaps the Mavericks’ win over the Timberwolves in the first game of the Western Conference finals. He runs through how the Jaden McDaniels vs. Kyrie Irving matchup was a problem for Minnesota, and what the problem is with Anthony Edwards’s offensive approach right now—and whether it can be attributed to health or Dallas’s defense.

Check out the Bill Simmons YouTube channel: youtube.com/billsimmons

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