On April 20, Beijing time, the NBA playoff Suns continued to sit at home to meet the Pelicans. Although before the start of the series, most people were optimistic about the Suns playing a dominant performance in the regular season, and would eliminate the Pelicans in the first round without bloodshed, but after two games, the Pelicans caused a lot of trouble for the Suns. In today's game, the Pelicans took the initiative from the second half, and finally beat the Suns 125-114 to rewrite the big score to a 1-1 draw.
There's an old NBA saying that the playoffs start with winning away from home, and now we have to revisit this series, and that's the beauty of the playoffs. The playoffs are all about alignment, and through the first two games of the series, the Pelicans have found their absolutely constant advantage, enough to overturn people's previous predictions about the series!
G1 and G2 give people the most intuitive feeling that the pelicans are too high and too capable of grabbing, which greatly increases their fault tolerance rate. In addition, the height advantage is different from some other shooting advantages, it is constant, will run through the series, because the height advantage of the interior and front, the Pelicans can occupy a natural advantage in rebounding, and there will be a lot of misalignment on the offensive end, Ingram can face who is misplaced, can be pulled up and shot.
The G1 Pelicans grabbed 55 frontcourt rebounds and won 20 rebounds for the Suns, including 25-5 suns in frontcourt rebounds, 17 more shots than the Suns, and Valanciunas and Nance Jr. tumbled in the penalty area. With an absolute advantage in rebounding in the frontcourt, the Pelicans almost erased the 23-point lead that the Suns had built up with a system advantage, and the result in the final quarter would be difficult to predict if it were not for Paul's miracle performance of 17 consecutive points.
So, although the Sun won the G1, they must have sweated as well, and the Pelicans were far tougher and more tenacious than they thought. So, after the game, the Suns definitely watched the game video carefully, emphasizing the protection of rebounds, because you can't expect Paul to have such a magical performance every night.
Today's game, although the Suns strengthened the protection of rebounds, but still appeared to be very bad on the inside, losing 10 rebounds. In addition, perhaps because too much physical energy was spent on grabbing rebounds, the Suns repeatedly appeared today to regress in a timely manner, allowing the Pelicans to easily play a fast attack, coupled with the overall poor feel of outside shooting, the Suns could not easily open the score as in the previous game.
In the first half, the Suns were only 5 points ahead of the Pelicans after Booker scored 31 points! In the second half of the game, Booker suddenly suffered a hamstring injury and withdrew from the game, the Suns' offensive firepower was greatly reduced, and Paul failed to replicate the magic of the previous game, shooting only 5 of 16 in the whole game. The Pelicans gradually took the initiative on the field, and in the second half, Ingram and CJ doubled stars to shine, and finally led the team to steal a victory at home to the Suns.
Through today's tough away win, the Pelicans will be more determined about where their advantage is, and when G3 returns home, their confidence will reach its peak, and they will not care at all whether the opponent is the first in the regular season.
And the difficult thing for the Suns is that they may have to move forward without Booker, and if they want to win on the road, more people need to stand up and be mentally and physically ready to fight, let's wait and see!