The San Antonio Spurs have been a wrecking crew for the past month. (Getty Images)
One night after the Oklahoma City Thunder convinced a lot of people that they were the team to beat in the Western Conference by walloping the Los Angeles Lakers, the San Antonio Spurs offered their retort: A measured, professional destruction of the Los Angeles Clippers.
In the 108-92 Game 1 win, the Spurs made perhaps the best point guard in the world look absolutely ordinary. They choked off Chris Paul's patented pick-and-roll game, eliminating his outlet options and forcing him to take contested shots, harassing him into a 3-for-13 showing, five turnovers and his lowest point total since Feb. 4. Without its primary weapon, Vinny Del Negro's team became a half-dimensional one-on-one team, and the results — 92 points a 7-of-17 shooting performance by Blake Griffin, barely any offensive spark to speak of (save for the excellent bench play of Eric Bledsoe) — spoke for themselves.
On the other end, San Antonio calmly got just about whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted. Of the Spurs' 80 field-goal attempts in Game 1, 65 came either in the paint or from 3-point range, according to NBA.com's shot location statistics, and they made 32 of them (52.3 percent), including a shattering 13-of-25 mark from beyond the arc. That pushes their postseason success rate on long balls to 43.4 percent; the next most accurate team from distance, the Thunder, has hit 38.6 percent. To do all that on a night where point guard Tony Parker — who carved up the Utah Jazz in the opening round (21 points on 50 percent shooting and 6.5 assists in 32.8 minutes per game in the sweep — but missed eight of nine shots, scored just seven points and turned it over nine times in 38 minutes? That's pretty impressive.
Also impressive: The win was San Antonio's 15th straight. (As BDL editor emeritus/TBJ co-host J.E. Skeets noted last night, it's also their 28th in their last 30 games and 43rd in their last 50.) They haven't lost since a 14-point defeat at the hands of the Lakers on April 11 — that was 35 days ago.
But it's not only that they've been winning; it's the way they've been winning. Just how good has Gregg Popovich's team been during its rampaging run? Let's take a look inside the numbers.
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