The Indiana Pacers play the Boston Celtics in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals on Tuesday night. The two teams that matched up in the In-Season Tournament with a trip to Las Vegas on the line now meet again with a trip to the NBA Finals on the line.
A quick turnaround from the high of winning a Game 7 on the road at Madison Square Garden for both the players and the coaching staff but not so much for Caitlin Cooper, who along with Samson Folk, have been delivering the best playoff basketball content available anywhere on her Patreon: Basketball, She Wrote.
Cooper and Folk, who normally covers the Toronto Raptors, provide an in-depth look at the possibilities of this series in a way that very few can. The weird strategies that both teams may employ based on the five regular season matchups, the actual basketball analysis that is unmatched by anyone out there. The content is as otherworldly as the Pacers shot-making in Game 7.
Cooper’s Patreon is worth every cent and I highly recommend subscribing to her work if you aren’t already but her playoff podcasts with Folk are free and very much worth your time to tune in. How will the teams match up with each other? What makes the Boston Celtics so difficult? How has Pascal Siakam matched up with this team with the Raptors this season? How much information can be learned based on the regular season games? They discuss these topics and much more in the video included below.
Timestamps as listed from Caitlin on her site:
- 0:00 – Introductions
- 1:31 – Samson the talisman
- 3:54 – Things are going to get weird
- 4:17 – Importance of the center position and how it is deployed and reacted to
- 14:36 – Differentiating between the Jays and who should be guarding them
- 27:07 – Guards playing as centers and centers defending guards
- 33:53 – Boston’s exaggerated coverages against Haliburton
- 37:04 – Why this might be a stamina series for Haliburton
- 41:36 – Brief aside on inside-hand dribbling out of hand-offs
- 44:08 – How the Celtics targeted Haliburton + finding off-ball hacks
- 49:12 – Does peel switching lead to complacency?
- 55:58 – Boston’s low drive rate vs. Indiana’s high rate of surrendering drives
- 59:19 – Thank you and Goodbye
There is a lot of quality diving in deep to these two teams. I can’t recommend it enough. Watch it, support her Patreon for just $3 a month, you won’t regret either one.
This is not a sponsored post.
