Predictably, the Lakers dominated in this area, even more than you might have anticipated: they finished with a 29-6 free-throw-attempt advantage. The Lakers also permitted the fewest opponent free-throw attempts, while the Warriors were 25th. The Lakers were first in free-throw attempts, and the Warriors were last. In fact, you will basically never see a head-to-head matchup in one category in a playoff series quite this one-sided. The Lakers’ lack of shooting loomed as a huge negative against the Warriors’ shrewd defenders, but L.A.’s domination of the free-throw game (+5.8 per game) stood as a major advantage against the Warrior’s league-worst performance in this category (-5.0 per game). To wit, the Lakers won the season series 3-1, but there were key players missing in most of those games, and the Warriors had home-court advantage.
Both had elite superstar talent, both had closed the year stronger than they had started and for each advantage on one side, you could come up with a corresponding plus for the other. I’ll walk you through the entire menu in a minute, but first, let’s take a step backward.Ĭoming in, this looked like a fairly evenly matched series between two teams that finished one game apart in the final standings. It almost goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: If you’re hungry for tactical food for thought, this game presented an entire banquet. Both gambits worked! Meanwhile, the Lakers felt compelled to respond by taking their best Steph Curry defender off the floor at the most important point of the game … and that mostly worked, too. So prominent were the matchup considerations, even at this early stage, that the Warriors felt compelled to play one player who had scored zero points in the previous series … and then later were equally compelled to pull a guy off the court in crunch time who had 20 rebounds through three quarters. Nonetheless, even in this modern pace-and-space era of 2023, it was the Lakers who cave-manned their way to a 117-112 victory via domination of the paint and a gargantuan free-throw advantage. The Warriors launched 53 3-pointers despite the Lakers top-locking their guards in an effort to prevent such outbursts, while the Lakers converted only 6 of their 25 attempts.
And man, did we have some incongruity in Game 1. The greater the stylistic incongruity between the two sides, the more all those considerations are magnified.
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