interesting side point -- wasn't the turning point of the series when the team STOPPED switching everything off the ball? It seems that was causing massive confusion, and when the team made an effort to stay on the off-the-ball guys the situation changed. (They were switching too easily, for one thing.)
I am, admittedly oversimplifying to coverage because there seemed to be certain situations they did switch off the ball, but by and large I thought one of the big keys was when they stopped. But I defer to you, you've probably watched even more than I did.....
Yeah...that's what I mean by having TT switch in the PnR and us being able to not worry about him getting torched by a guard, or jumping out to the perimeter to defend on off ball screens...doing that allows you to play straight up on the other 3 or 4 out of the action, or "stick with their motion off the ball"...what makes GS so special is the consistent off ball movement to get open or wide open looks from their players by forcing you to just pay attention to Curry and Green or whoever is in the action with the ball, so you kind of lose track of Thompson, or Barbosa, or Barnes, or Speights, etc....by having a big you don't have to worry about when covering guys on the perimeter, you can just play those guys straight up and limit their clean looks.
Only problem for the rest of the NBA is there aren't many bigs as good at that as Tristan is in the league. Why I think GS has never looked like their normal dominant self, offensively, in any series vs the Cavs yet, even though I don't consider the Cavs a good defensive team by any means and you take into consideration some of our health problems in 6 of those games. I mean, we have a sample size of 13 games the last 2 summers, and to this point they average 100.2 points per game vs us. They've averaged 107.8 in their 32 other playoff games over that same time period. Cavs are doing something right vs them, and I think Tristan is a big reason for that.
And yeah, we did it in the first 4 games too, but we would scramble and rotate on the backside to get Kyrie or whoever was guarding the ball-handler in the PnR off the bigger player, but eventually just said fuck it and played straight up and dared their bigs setting the screen to beat us...they didn't, though Draymond tried in game 7.
Big thing is, if we see them for a 3rd straight year, I'm not so sure we can do that with Durant in Barnes' spot...LeBron, not Tristan, will be the defensive key in the next series vs GS, should we even see them. I have a feeling they will try to do the same thing we did to them if they see us, and go heavy with the small/small PnR with Durant and Curry.