SI:AM | Why I’m Excited for the NBA Finals
Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I sure hope I can stay awake through the whole Finals game tonight.
In today’s SI:AM:
🏆 The X’s and O’s of the NBA Finals
🇺🇦 What a World Cup berth would mean to Ukraine
📈 The WNBA’s most dominant team
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NBA Finals preview
You couldn’t have asked for a better matchup in this year’s NBA Finals. All postseason long, the Warriors and Celtics have shown that they are the most complete teams in the NBA and beginning tonight they’ll fight to see which is the superior team.
Let’s start with the basics:
- The schedule: After a compressed conference finals schedule that saw games played every other day, which may have been partially responsible for all the blowouts we saw, there will be two days off between most Finals games. (The only exception is the off day between Games 3 and 4.) If the series goes to a Game 7, that wouldn’t be until June 19.
- TV coverage: All games will air on ABC. And, sorry, East Coast fans, the weeknight games still start at 9 p.m. ET. (Game 2 and a potential Game 7 are scheduled for Sundays, with tipoff at 8 p.m. ET.) ESPN analysts Jeff Van Gundy and Adrian Wojnarowski will not be part of the broadcast because of COVID-19 protocols, according to the New York Post’s Andrew Marchard. Lead play-by-play voice Mike Breen missed Sunday’s Heat-Celtics Game 7 after testing positive and his status for Game 1 is still undecided, Marchand reports.
- Home court advantage: The series will start in San Francisco because the Warriors (53–29) had a better regular-season record than the Celtics (51–31).
- Injuries: Three Warriors players—Otto Porter Jr., Gary Payton II and Andre Iguodala—are listed as questionable for Game 1. Payton is the biggest question mark. He hasn’t played since he broke his elbow during Golden State’s second-round series with the Grizzlies, and the Warriors would love to get one of their best defenders back when they need him most. Robert Williams III is the only Celtic on the injury report. Marcus Smart, who hurt his ankle against the Heat, has been cleared.
The NBA playoffs as a whole have been frankly pretty underwhelming, but this series is shaping up to be a good one. It’s a perfect marriage of past and present. These are two of the NBA’s original franchises who have played in 33 of the 76 Finals. A Celtics win would give them their 18th championship, breaking a tie with the Lakers for the most titles by a single team. And on the other side you have the Warriors, playing their sixth Finals in eight years and seeking their fourth title in that time.
If you’re looking for a more modern narrative, how about this: This series is a rejection of the superteam model that has swept the NBA in recent years. The Nets and Sixers, teams hastily cobbled together in the belief that star power matters more than anything, made early playoff exits. The Lakers, built with the belief that, uh, I’m actually not sure, didn’t even make the playoffs. But both the Celtics and Warriors are led by cores of players that the teams drafted and developed.
As for who will win the series, a slim majority of SI’s experts picked the Warriors, mostly in seven games. It’s tough for me to disagree there. The series is so evenly matched on paper that it could end up coming down to home court advantage. For more on why that seems to be the case, check out Michael Pina’s extremely thorough X’s and O’s breakdown.
The best of Sports Illustrated
Courtesy of Maxim Mytsuk
Caleb Larson has been reporting from Ukraine since March, where yesterday the country’s men’s soccer team moved one step closer to the World Cup.
Michael Rosenberg wonders what the PGA Tour will do next now that Dustin Johnson has committed to the first LIV Golf event. … The Aces are 9–1 under first-year head coach Becky Hammon and look like the WNBA’s clear best team, Ben Pickman writes. … Bryan Alvarez breaks down the situation involving wrestler MJF and All Elite Wrestling and how it will test fans’ loyalty.
Around the sports world
WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert told The Athletic that the league hopes to add one or two expansion teams by 2024. … Former Cowboys running back Marion Barber was found dead in his apartment in Texas yesterday. He was 38. … RBC dropped Dustin Johnson as a sponsor after he decided to skip the Canadian Open in favor of the first LIV Golf event. … The Commanders have reportedly proposed building a stadium in Virginia that would be the NFL’s smallest. … Christian Pulisic expressed disappointment with fan support at the USMNT’s friendly against Morocco. … Mike Trout, the commissioner of the fantasy football league that led to the Tommy Pham–Joc Pederson spat, has broken his silence.
The top five...
… things I saw last night:
5. Timothy Weah’s long-range “golazo” against Morocco
4. Brendan Rodgers’s walk-off home run for the Rockies, his third homer of the game
3. The Rangers’ opening goal in their win over the Lightning
2. Christian Pulisic’s assist on the first U.S. goal
1. Cubs veteran Willson Contreras telling rookie Christopher Morel to take a breath before his walk-off sacrifice fly. (Morel gave him credit for keeping him focused in a postgame interview.)
SIQ
It’ll be tough for the Oilers and Avalanche to follow up their 8–6 thriller in Game 1 of the Western Conference Final when they meet tonight in Game 2. Edmonton star Connor McDavid had a goal and two assists in the opener, giving him 29 points this postseason. Add that to the league-leading 123 points he had in the regular season and he’s the first player since the 1995–96 season to have 150 points in a season, playoffs included. How many of the three players who eclipsed 150 points that year can you name?
Yesterday’s SIQ: Who hit the sharp line drive that left fielder Mike Baxter snared while crashing into the wall to keep Johan Santana’s 2012 no-hitter alive?
Answer: Yadier Molina. The play came with one out in the seventh inning, at which point Santana had already thrown 101 pitches.
Santana, who was 33 at the time, had missed the entire 2011 season after having surgery on his throwing shoulder at the end of the ’10 season. The injury, a torn capsule, had been basically a death sentence for plenty of pitchers (like Dallas Braden, Rich Harden, Mark Prior, Bret Saberhagen and Chien-Ming Wang), and Santana still had three years left on the six-year, $137.5 million contract he signed after being traded to New York by the Twins. Manager Terry Collins told SI’s Phil Taylor in ’15 that he felt it was his responsibility to protect Santana’s health.
But Collins let Santana go for history on that Friday night 10 years ago, a decision he told Taylor he had come to regret.
“It was without a doubt,” Collins said, “the worst night I’ve ever spent in baseball.”
Santana ended up throwing 134 pitches, the last of which was a perfect changeup to strike out David Freese. (You can watch all 27 outs here.) He tore the same anterior shoulder capsule in spring training before the 2013 season and never pitched in the majors again. (A comeback attempt in ’14 was thwarted when he tore his Achilles tendon.)
Still, Santana doesn’t blame the high pitch count for the misfortune that befell him later.
“You can’t say it was the right decision or the wrong decision,” he told Taylor. “Because you don’t know. No doctor ever told me, ‘Oh, if you didn’t throw so many pitches in this game or that game, your shoulder would not have been hurt again.’ Maybe if I would have gotten knocked out in the fourth inning, everything would have been different, or nothing would have been different.”
The story is different for Baxter, though. The Queens native displaced his collarbone and tore some rib cartilage when he crashed into the wall making his catch. He spent two months on the injured list and struggled upon his return. In 40 games before the injuries, he slashed .323/.392/.523. In 49 games after, those numbers plummeted to .228/.350/.351. The Mets cut him midway through the 2013 season, and he played only another 38 games in the majors.
“I can’t say that the injuries slowed my career down, but obviously they didn’t help,” he told Taylor. “But regardless, it was worth it to be able to not only be there for the no-hitter, but to be a part of making it happen.”
From the Vault: June 2, 1958
Richard Meek/Sports Illustrated
Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews was only 26 in 1958, but public perception of him had already changed several times. He had a good rookie year for the Braves in ’52 when they were still in Boston, then led the majors with 47 homers the following year in the franchise’s first year in Milwaukee, becoming, as Robert Creamer wrote, a “matinee idol.” But the honeymoon didn’t last long:
“Later, however, reports began to leak out of Milwaukee that Eddie pouted occasionally and now and then stamped his foot. The leak became a flood of rumors, most of them unfounded. But enough were true. Mathews, slated to receive an award between games of a double-header late in the 1953 season, had been booed in the first game for a bad play and therefore stubbornly refused to come out of the clubhouse between games to accept the trophy. And the following spring Mathews was arrested for reckless driving in Wauwatosa, a suburb of Milwaukee. It was night (he was on his way home from teammate Bob Buhl’s house), and he tried to elude the arresting officer by turning off his lights and ducking into side streets. At the hearing the next morning, Eddie threatened to break a photographer's arm if he snapped his picture, and later the judge asked for Mathews’ autograph. The publicity was instantaneous, rich and widespread. Here was a spoiled, willful child. Everyone hurried to throw a rock. One New York columnist shed bitter tears over the fate of Milwaukee’s children if Mathews were allowed to run loose behind the wheel of a car.”
But by the time Creamer was writing in 1958, the consensus among members of the media was that Mathews was a changed man, “mature” and “adult.”
Creamer’s story also gets into Mathews’s life off the field, and the sections that talk about money are perhaps the most interesting today. For example, there is this detail about when the Braves first signed him:
“He received several bonus offers from major league clubs, but at that time a bonus player (one who signed for more than $6,000) had to be moved up to the big league club after only one year in the minors. Mathews and his father decided that he’d be better off refusing a bonus and working his way up through the farm system. He signed for $6,000, the maximum non-bonus sum, with the Boston Braves. Many persons have since implied that the Mathews family received an under-the-counter bonus, but Mathews denies this.”
I had no idea that baseball at one time had a system like that requiring teams to rush players through the minor leagues.
Mathews made up for the lost bonus money after he made the majors by investing, but ballplayers didn’t get paid all that much in those days. As one of the best players in the majors in 1958, Mathews’s salary was around $60,000, according to Creamer—about $600,000 today. That’s a ton of money, but nothing compared to what players of Mathews’s caliber make today. If the game’s economic structure had been different, maybe Mathews’s wife, Virjean, would have been able to see him play more often. Mathews told Creamer that Virjean didn’t make it to the ballpark much because, “We’d go broke paying babysitters.”
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