Despite all odds being stacked against them, the Golden State Warriors eliminated the Houston Rockets in Game 6 with a 118-113 victory. With the Warriors missing Kevin Durant due to a calf strain and Golden State playing on the road at the Toyota Center, the defending champions relied on a huge first-half performance from Klay Thompson (21 points in the first half), a clutch fourth quarter from Stephen Curry and a surprising performance from the team's bench to eliminate their Western Conference rivals. Curry led the way with 33 points while Thompson finished the night with 27 points. Golden State will now face the winner of Game 7 between the Portland Trail Blazers and Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference finals. Here are some major takeaways from Golden State's victory: The old Warriors This is no disrespect to Kevin Durant, who is, at this point, pretty indisputably the best player in the NBA. But my goodness are the old Warriors something to behold. They are not perfect. They turn the ball over. They make stupid plays and get in foul trouble. But have you ever seen a team that fights like this? A few days after Kyrie Irving and the Celtics showed us what it looks like to wither up and die when the going gets tough, the Warriors reminded everyone what the heart of a champion actually looks like. Given the circumstances -- the Durant absence, Curry being held scoreless in the first half, the foul trouble, on the road -- this might very well be the most impressive victory throughout this entire five-year run. Just absolutely incredible. "Not going to swear tonight. They're giants. They're champions. These guys are a historically good basketball team," head coach Steve Kerr said of his Warriors after the Game 6 win. "You do not do what these guys have done without an incredible combination of talent and character." Stephen Curry is a god Curry has never struggled with his shot like this. For five games against Houston he was shooting 26 percent from 3. He went 0-for-5 in the first half and was held scoreless. He looked awful. That is not an overstatement. Full-blown awful. So what does he do? He comes out and scores 33 second-half points, including some monster shots in crunch time. Forget the otherworldly shooting ability -- this is what pure, unabashed confidence looks like. There might not be another player in the world who can go from shooting, and playing, that poorly to flat out dominating in the blink of an eye like he never missed a beat. Just remarkable, the willingness and self-belief to keep playing through those struggles at full speed, no hesitation, against relentless double-teams and traps, with the stakes that high and a world of criticism awaiting him if he didn't turn it around. Never doubt Steph Curry. Ever. Unless you want to look like a fool. "That game personified Steph Curry," Kerr said after the game. "He's just fearless. That's what makes him who he is." Can't say it better than that. Game 6 Klay Thompson Klay has a history of going off in Game 6s, and he did it again when the Warriors needed it most, finishing with with 27 points, but it was the 21 first-half points that were beyond huge. If Klay doesn't carry the Warriors in the first half while Curry was on the bench with three fouls and zero points, there are no heroics to be had at the end. It would've been over long before that. Never mind Klay's defense all night. He had some of the most impressive defensive possessions you will ever see in this game. This dude is such a battler it's hard to find the words for it. Unfazed by anything. Kudos to Chris Paul and James Harden Especially Paul, who finally had a vintage Chris Paul game with 27 points, 11 rebounds and six assists. He hit 3s. He got into the lane. He gave Harden, who finished with 35 points, the support he needed, and it just wasn't enough. This is as brutal a loss as Paul has ever suffered, and he's suffered some brutal ones. The Rockets did not lose this game, however. The Warriors won it. That's a big distinction that needs to be made. Recap of live updates CBS Sports was with you throughout Warriors vs. Rockets Game 6. Scroll through our LIVE blog if you missed anything. If you're having trouble viewing the live application below, please click here. TV listings All games will air on ESPN, ABC, TNT and NBA TV during the postseason. Games on TNT and NBA TV can be streamed via fuboTV (try it for free). Odds and Analysis Check Sportsline's NBA pick sheet for all your daily odds.<doc-sep>All the good, bad, and STEPH BACKs of the Golden State Warriors’ 118-113 victory over the Houston Rockets in Game 6 on Friday to close out their second-round series, 4-2. Winner: The Splash Brothers The Kevin Durant–size void loomed large over Game 6, and for a little more than two quarters, Stephen Curry didn’t do much to fill it. After Durant suffered a calf strain in Game 5 that will keep him out at least a week, there was a belief that we would see the Warriors of old, with Curry leading the charge, peacocking and pulling up from 30 feet and clowning the opponent on his way to a signature win. As if the longing for nostalgia weren’t real enough, Andrew Bogut started at center too. Related The Three Biggest Offseason Questions Facing the Houston Rockets But Curry was cold. And not in that ice-in-his-veins type of cold, but rather in a way that looked like it was going to cost Golden State the game, maybe the series. In the first half, Curry picked up three fouls, played only 12 minutes, took five shots—and missed them all—and scored zero points for the first time in his playoff career. And yet Houston could do nothing but keep the game tied at halftime. That was, in large part, because Klay Thompson was the fire to Curry’s ice. There’s something about Thompson and Game 6s. In the 2016 Western Conference finals against Oklahoma City, he put up 41 points; two years later, against Houston, he had 35. In the first half on Friday, Thompson scored 21 points, made five 3s, and drilled eight of his 15 field goals. In the regular season, there were 23 times when Thompson took 15 shots or fewer in the entire game. Usually when Thompson catches fire, the Warriors look like an unstoppable force, but in this context, he was more of a lifesaver. And yet, just when it looked like the story of the night was going to be that Curry disappeared and Thompson’s valiant efforts were simply not enough to close out Houston, the two forefathers of this Warriors dynasty didn’t let that happen. Curry scored his first bucket with just under 10 minutes in the third quarter. Slowly but surely, he began to warm up, and suddenly he was cooking. The 3s started going in—not just open 3s, but contested and off-balance ones too. Every shot Curry took in the paint in the second half went in, and he missed only four field goal attempts after halftime. In the end, he finished with 33 points—23 in the fourth quarter alone. ☔️ @StephenCurry30 goes off for 33 PTS in the 2nd half, leading the @warriors past Houston and into the Western Conference Finals! #StrengthInNumbers #NBAPlayoffs pic.twitter.com/1A26pJfLEk — NBA (@NBA) May 11, 2019 Thompson wasn’t done, either. The Warriors were up three with 36 seconds left and Curry was trapped on the right side of the court. He bounced the ball to an open Draymond Green, who drove and dished to Andre Iguodala, who slid the ball over to Thompson. Thompson’s 28-footer splashed in and sealed the game. The ball had found its way from one Splash Brother to the other Splash Brother, pinging through the glue guys who helped spur the franchise’s first title in between. The play was old-school Warriors to a tee. When the buzzer sounded, both Thompson and Curry had combined for 60 of the Warriors’ 118 points. The peacocking that we expected ensued. Loser: Chris Paul Let it be said that with the series on the line, during a game in which the Rockets didn’t just need to win, but should have won, Chris Paul showed up. He was his pesky self—looking for contact on nearly every play, and creating it when he needed to—and hit fadeaway midrange jumpers like he was back in his prime. Paul scored 27 points, dished six assists, made three 3s, and grabbed a team-high 11 rebounds. (That the Rockets’ starting point guard had such a high rebounding total is an indictment of their center Clint Capela, but it’s at least a moral victory for the 6-foot Paul.) In the third quarter, Paul carved up the narrative around his postseason by forcing his way through the Golden State defense with deceptive dribbling and then, at the last possible moment, flipping two picture-perfect lobs to Capela for dunks. But the basketball gods wouldn’t let Paul have his night. He made three of his five shots in the fourth quarter, and he grabbed more rebounds and looked like he was trying to will the Rockets to victory. But Houston couldn’t get a stop, and Paul couldn’t do anything in the face of the onslaught from Curry. “They just outplayed us,” Paul told reporters postgame. “They played smarter than us and made the big plays, and we didn’t.” It was a succinct and accurate summary of the night, but it doesn’t necessarily describe Paul’s own performance. Either way, yet another chance to finally break into the NBA Finals had escaped him. Paul is 34 years old; we’ll see if this was his last, best chance to finally change the conversation about his playoff career. Loser: James Harden We have to start here: Harden scored 35 points on 25 shots, hit six 3s, grabbed eight rebounds, added five assists, even swiped four steals. It was, by all accounts, a good Harden game. But he also missed five free throws. And the Rockets, you may have noticed, lost by five points. Harden was an 88 percent free throw shooter during the regular season, and in the playoffs, he didn’t have a game in which he missed more than two free throws. Until Game 6. I don’t subscribe to the notion that a moment can be too big for a professional athlete, or believe in a “clutch gene,” but Harden isn’t helping the argument to prove otherwise.<doc-sep>Photo : Ezra Shaw ( Getty I’m sure most Rockets fans are lovely people. The Rockets have a fine basketball organization, as creative and nimble and determined as any in the NBA. And James Harden genuinely is one of the most unstoppable offensive players in modern basketball history. Now. Can that team please get all the way out of my face, immediately, and possibly forever? Advertisement They had everything lined up in their favor Friday night, at home, in Game 6. Kevin Durant was ruled out for the remainder of the series with a calf strain, depriving the Warriors of their best player. That’s a huge loss for Golden State, and a huge advantage for the Rockets, who fancied themselves capable of competing with this Warriors team even at full strength. Hell, this Rockets team, from the makeup of their roster down to the nitty-gritties of their defensive approach and their Harden-centric, isolation-heavy, three-bombing offense, are designed as specifically as possible for the narrow task of competing with and beating the 2018-2019 Golden State Warriors. And even in this game—which, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, the Rockets lost, 118–113—everything lined up for the Rockets to win. Steph Curry, the sole engine of Golden State’s Durant-less offense, got himself into early foul trouble, and failed to score a single point in the first half. Listen. That massive edge is as much as you can ever ask for in a matchup against the Warriors. That’s it. On the road. No Boogie Cousins. No Kevin Durant. Andrew Bogut in the starting lineup. Jordan Bell and Quinn Cook and Alfonzo McKinnie off the bench. A complete no-show first-half from Stephen Curry. This is like facing the Black Knight after he’s had both arms and one leg lopped off. The friggin’ Wizards would be disappointed to lose a game to the Warriors under those conditions. The remaining Warriors are sharp and tough and fearless, sure, but if you can’t cruise past them under these circumstances, that’s all there is! Etch it into stone! You are not a championship contender while this team exists. That’s worth bringing up because the joyless, bloodless, game theory-ass siege-style basketball advanced by the Rockets makes for a grim, nutrient-rich but wildly flavorless nightly meal. Harden step-backs are amazing as an athletic feat but actually extremely dry as an entire offensive playbook. A man can only stand to see Chris Paul bait contact and then hurl himself into the ground so many times. The question of whether this stuff works has been answered, many times over. Curiosity over the limits of this miserable straightforwardness, it turns out, is exhaustible. If you are not a Houston Rockets fan, there’s no way that curiosity can possibly survive under the weight of so much juiceless, ruthlessly optimized Moreyball. And, anyway, we now seem to have identified its limits, or at least the limits of such a narrow application of this strain of game theory. Even against a massively wounded and undermanned Warriors team, the Rockets couldn’t just loosen up and play some damn basketball. They still forced the game to crawl along at a grueling 97.50 pace, a number that would’ve been third-slowest in the NBA across the regular season, but only slightly slower than Houston’s regular pace (98.43). They couldn’t break the mold, push the ball in transition, make quick decisive moves to the cup. Not even with Steph Curry and Draymond Green in foul trouble, with slow-ass Bogut on the floor, with stiffs like Jonas Jerebko doing the defending. The Rockets don’t have variations in their style of play; they don’t have freedom and fluidity and verve. They’ve whittled the sport of basketball all the way down to one thing, and that thing is a guard standing at the top of the key, using a whole possession to get a defender to lean a little bit one way, so that either a three-pointer or a foul can be produced. That’s it. Advertisement Contrast that with even the Warriors, whose fans are fucking herbs and who have felt more inevitable than Thanos for half a decade, and who I am deeply conflicted about having rooted for for so much as a single quarter. When this game got tight, the best and coolest Warriors players did cool basketball things. Classic Steph shit has never been so welcome in a basketball series as it was down the stretch Friday night: The word “fraud” gets thrown around maybe a little more freely than it should be, here and elsewhere, but damn. If your basketball operation is built over the course of years for the purpose of beating the Warriors, and here they are, and this is the Warriors team you get, this wildly depleted unit, on the road, and after deploying even the single most shameful weapon in your anti-Warriors arsenal, you still get bounced in six games, and closed out at home, that’s it! The Rockets are frauds. Get them out of here!<doc-sep>For the third time in four seasons, Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson came up big in a crucial Game 6 of a tight playoff series. In 2016, the Warriors were down 3-2 in the Western Conference Finals to the Oklahoma City Thunder when Thompson hit 11 three-pointers and scored 41 points in the Warriors' 108-101 Game 6 win. In 2018, the Warriors were again down 3-2 in the Western Conference Finals, but this time to the Houston Rockets. Thompson again led the Warriors in scoring after adding 35 points and nine three-pointers in the Warriors' 115-86 romp to force a Game 7. Which brings us to Friday night's Game 6 against the Rockets, where the Warriors were able to weather Stephen Curry's scoreless first half after Thompson scored 21 points in the first half and kept Golden State in the game. GAME RECAP: Curry, short-handed Warriors knock out Rockets in Game 6 Curry exploded for 33 points in the second half, Thompson finished with 27 and the Warriors advanced to the Western Conference Finals for the fifth straight season after defeating the Rockets 118-113. Several Warriors fans on Twitter celebrated the legend of "Game 6 Klay," and compared him to other legendary heat-of-the-moment performers, such as Michael Jordan when he stuck his tongue out and Kobe Bryant immediately after biting his jersey. ALSO: Beyonce, Jay-Z, Emilia Clarke all courtside for Warriors-Rockets Game 6 "The game 6 Klay Thompson is inevitable," one fan wrote along with a picture of Thompson wearing the infinity gauntlet from "Avengers: Endgame" and "Avengers: Infinity War." There were plenty of other Avengers memes, although Thompson may not understand them since he walked out of "Endgame" an hour early because "the plot didn't interest him." Click through the slideshow above to see the best reactions to "Game 6 Klay."<doc-sep>
Playing without injured star Kevin Durant and working with what appeared to be a rapidly thinning bench, you might have figured the Golden State Warriors would be in deep trouble if they saw a half in which Stephen Curry went scoreless on 0-of-5 shooting. After all, while the Warriors entered Game 6 having compiled a 29-4 record in games when Durant sat and Curry played, those games involved Curry averaging 27.8 points. But instead of finding themselves in trouble on Friday, the Warriors found themselves headed to the locker room at halftime tied with the Houston Rockets. They earned that halftime deadlock behind both a 3-point explosion from Klay Thompson and timely contributions from several of the same players who had seen their performances maligned earlier in the series. Then, Steph poured in 33 second-half points — including a career-high 23 in the fourth quarter — to send the Rockets home and the Warriors back to the Western Conference finals for the fifth consecutive season. Thompson knocked down five threes during that first half, pouring in 21 of the Warriors’ 57 points. He scored only six points after the break, but the early burst was key in allowing his team to survive Curry’s frigid shooting. Not that this was anything out of the ordinary for Thompson — he has become something of a Game 6 specialist over the past several years, knocking down in excess of 52 percent of his 3-point tries in the Warriors’ seven Game 6s during the Steve Kerr era. This victory also pushed the Warriors’ record during that time to an incredible 95-9 (and 18-3 in the playoffs) in games when Thompson makes five or more shots from beyond the arc. Thompson was not alone in buoying the Warriors while Curry struggled. Golden State’s bench players had been absolutely dreadful during this series, but in the first half of Game 6, Shaun Livingston, Kevon Looney, Quinn Cook, Jordan Bell, Jonas Jerebko, Andrew Bogut and Alfonzo McKinnie actually came to play. That group of seven players combined for 20 points prior to halftime — more than they had collectively scored during any of the previous five games in this series. Livingston finished the game with 11 points, marking just the fifth time all season he cracked double digits and the first time since the middle of January. Looney hammered the Rockets on the offensive glass, collecting 16.7 percent of available offensive boards while he was on the floor — a rate that would rank among the best in the league if he sustained it over a full season. His 14 points also marked the second-highest total of his playoff career, and Friday was only the third time he’s reached double digits during a postseason game. Cook didn’t score in the second half, but he dished out two extremely timely assists before the break and, late in the third quarter, set up Curry’s first 3-pointer of the game. The Warriors also got incredibly valuable contributions from Andre Iguodala, who should somehow find a way to include the tape of this game on his application to the Basketball Hall of Fame, if such a thing is possible. Iguodala not only finished with 17 points, but he also knocked down five threes for the first time in six years. His most valuable contributions, though, came on defense, where he hounded James Harden into an 11-for-25 shooting line and came away with a steal on four of Harden’s five live-ball turnovers, including one that essentially sealed the game late in the fourth quarter. Iguodala was Golden State’s preferred defender on Harden throughout the series, and Game 6 was an object lesson in why. Of course, all of those players’ contributions were merely the preamble to Chef Curry getting cooking in the second half. After going scoreless during the first half for the first time in 102 career playoff games, Steph had the most explosive second half of not just his own playoff career but of any player who had gone scoreless before halftime in the past 20 postseasons. Seemingly out of rhythm for most of the night, Curry didn’t really get going until he knocked down one of his classic relocation threes late in the third period.