Why Corbin gets paid the big bucks...

While I get paid nothing for my opinions.

John Hollinger wrote:

All that said, Oklahoma City's best and most important adjustment may have been completely unintentional:

Slowing the game down.

You read that correctly. The young, athletic Thunder have little chance of winning an up-and-down, end-to-end game against the veteran Spurs. Everybody has been saying the opposite, and everybody is 100 percent, dead wrong. The Thunder's best hope, if not their only hope, is to limit the pace to something less frenetic.

The evidence for this is simply overwhelming, if you care to look (and a big shoutout to TrueHoop Network blogger Timothy Varner, who first pointed this out to me, and Aaron McGuire for this chart that outlines all the evidence in gory detail).

Remember in Game 2, when they showed Spurs coach Gregg Popovich in the huddle yelling "Pace! Pace! Pace!" and making the international gesture for "hurry up"? There's a reason for that. San Antonio is almost unbeatable when it plays fast. In the regular season, when the Spurs played in a game with at least 96 possessions per side, they went 28-3 with an inhuman plus-9.6 efficiency differential. That's Jordan Bulls territory, and that's even though one of those games was a 40-point loss to Portland where Popovich played the third string.

Keep the game to 95 possessions or fewer, however, and San Antonio's invincibility wanes, with a 22-13 record and a plus-5.5 efficiency differential.

http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2012/story/_/page/PERDiem-120601/nba-playoffs-oklahoma-city-thunder-key-adjustments

I remember questioning coach Corbin when he was yelling at the Jazz over and over to slow it down because I felt like the Jazz actually played a little better when they ran. Well, clearly Corbin was on to something, and I was not.

Yeah, I think Corbin was right. And, I think the Jazz did a pretty good job of "trying" to slow the game down, against the Spurs. The big problem with the Jazz series against the Spurs is that they slowed it down offensively at the wrong time! The Jazz slowed it down bringing the ball up the court, which is always a bad time to slow it down. By taking 5, 6, or 7 seconds to get the offensive game in a half-court mindset, you lose 3 or 4 seconds from the shot clock, and that prevents the offense from being able to make one extra pass that may make a difference in the posession. Of course, with the Jazz, we also suffered from not having any high-percentage 3-pt shooters that may have benifitted from the extra 3 or 4 seconds.

OKC did a great job in game 4 of slowing the tempo while still allowing enough time in their half-court ffensive sets. Of course, it didn't hurt OKC that their bigs (Ibaka, Perkins, and Collison), particularly Ibaka were almost perfect both at the rim and from the mid-range.

Solid points Saint. It's definitely easier to shoot a high percentage in the paint when the other team has to guard the 3 pt line. The Thunder aren't a great 3pt shooting team but Durrant, Harden, and Wesbrook all draw so much attention that it opens the floor up for the bigs.

Utah was outclassed in every way by San Antonio, but then so were the Clippers, so I'm not too heartbroken about it. I just wanted to give Corbin a little credit. I thought he did a pretty solid job this season, and I'm exited to see him grow with this young team.