The Rockets finally took advantage of Steph Curry's struggles in Game 3

Enter a tight match with the Golden State Warriors, and more often than not, they will beat you. Since Steve Kerr was hired before the 2014-15 campaign, the Warriors have racked up a record of 108-46 in games played in the remaining time during the regular season; and before Match 3 against the Rockets, they were 24-11 in those playoff games, a win that included victories over Houston in games 1 and 2 of the second-round team series.

In the third game, the Warriors finally failed – much like Stephen Curry attempt to dunk at the end of the game. They fell to the Rockets by a final score of 126-121 and saw their lead halved. Of course, the warriors might not have lost if they did not find themselves in record time from the start. One of the main reasons they did it: the Rockets won the 3-point battle against the Warriors for the third consecutive game, 18 triples against 14 for the Warriors. This is, to put it plainly, a trivial event.

Golden State has now played 92 playoff games during the Kerr era, and this is the first time that a single playoff opponent is making more 3-point throws than the Warriors in the playoffs. three consecutive games. But the Warriors are also subject to the same hazards of 3-point shooting as any other team. Their winning percentage dropped sharply in the regular season and in the playoffs as the team made more 3-point throws during the game. They are now only 12-12 in the playoffs under Kerr, where their opponent has made more throws to 3 points.

It's not even as if the Warriors had fired the 3-point line on Saturday night. Their clip of 14 out of 33 would give a sufficient conversion rate (.424) to be the best of the league almost every year. You know who got really bad shot of 3, though? Stephen Curry. And not for the first time in this series.

Curry is widely (rightly) considered the best shooter in the history of the game, but he is icy right now. After shooting a combined total of 6 points out of 23 of 3 points in the first two games of this battle, he made his way to a deep shooting night of 2 of 9 points in the third match, he giving 8 times out of 32 in triplicate. in the second round. This conversion rate of .250 out of three is totally different from Curry. Of all the segments of Curry's career in the playoffs not overlapping, his 3-point percentage in games 1 to 3 against Houston is the third lowest.

And as cold as Curry saw from the outside, he was not much better in the third game. After two late-game end-of-game attempts, including the dunk attempt that was both embarrassing and overdue with over 20 seconds overtime, Steph ended the match with just five of his 14 2-point attempts, a rate of. 357. He had not shot better than two points in just eight of the previous 47 playoff competitions, where he had made 10 or more shots from behind.

Worse still, it is with the cruelty with which the Rockets target it the opposite way. During the regular season, the opponent used the man Curry kept as a coach in a trivia game 202 times in 69 games, according to Second Spectrum's tracking data. That's an average of about 2.9 per game. Borrowing a strategy that the Cleveland Cavaliers used to perfection during their 2016 NBA Finals thwarted by the Warriors, the Rockets used the Curry man as a filter for James Harden 58 times in the first three games of the series, or 19.3 per game.

The Warriors carefully avoided switching pick-and-rolls to prevent Curry from defending Harden in isolation. They have often distorted themselves to avoid such a situation, leaving Draymond Green or Andre Iguodala to completely abandon one of the other Rockets on the ground to make sure they pick up Harden for the resulting isolation game. Even though they do not often generate the preferred clash from a switch, these games still worked very well for the Rockets, who scored 1.14 points per game when they asked the Curry man to play Harden.

In games 1 and 2, Green, Iguodala and Kevin Durant made the effort to push the Warriors above mediocre performances despite Curry's poor performance, leading Golden State to two wins by 10 points. Green recorded a triple-double and Durant scored 46 points in the third match, but that was not enough. Given the quality of the game Rockets at the moment, it might not be enough in the upcoming games. The Warriors need their other MVP to return to its peak.