OAKLAND — This Warriors season has been anything but typical.
The Warriors entered the 2017-18 campaign with so much talent on their roster that there was preseason talk of them challenging their own single-season wins record this year.
That, of course, didn’t happen. Instead, the Warriors have been consistently undercut by disengaged basketball and injuries. The result: the worst Warriors regular season in the Steve Kerr era and the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference playoffs.
The last few weeks have been particularly harrowing for the Warriors. As injuries have piled up, so have the losses — after Thursday’s loss to the Bucks, Golden State has lost three straight games and seven of their last 10. And while the circumstances are extenuating, this is Warriors’ worst run of form in years, and it’s coming in the final stretch of the regular season.
And yet, even without Stephen Curry, who is out until two more weeks, at the minimum, with a sprained MCL in his left knee, the Warriors are confident that they have the talent and the experience to beat any team in the NBA come playoff time.
That absolutely could be the case — the Warriors still have Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, and Klay Thompson (all will be on the court next week) — but with only seven games remaining on the schedule and the possibility of a hellacious first-round series looming, it would certainly be nice to see the Warriors play a game or two of we-can-beat-anybody-without-Steph ball before the playoffs start, if for nothing else but affirmation.
Because on Thursday, with Durant and Green back in the lineup, the Warriors didn’t look anything like a team that is going to run through the competition come the postseason.
The loss to the Bucks featured many of the problems that have hindered the Warriors all year, and, this late in the season, that should raise serious concern.
Thursday was Durant and Green’s first game back from their respective injuries, and while it took both players a bit of time to catch back up to the speed of the game, but both eventually caught up after an early lull.
Yet at the same time, the Warriors were turning the ball over with gusto — challenging the super-long, super-switching Bucks defense with lazy or ill-advised passes that Milwaukee’s athletes couldn’t help but pick off and take the other way. That, paired with less-than-stellar half-court defense and a good shooting night for Giannis Antetokounmpo and Eric Bledsoe (23-of-29, combined), was a recipe for disaster for Golden State.
Without Curry, the Warriors’ top emphases were limiting turnovers and playing better half-court defense. Golden State might be without Thompson — an elite on-ball defender — but against a solid playoff team Thursday, they dramatically failed to live up to either standard — Golden State turned the ball over 14 times in the first half and allowed Milwaukee to shoot 55 percent from both the floor and beyond the arc.
Worse yet, the Warriors can’t chalk up the poor performance to one game against a team that gives them matchup trouble — the Warriors have seen a stark drop in assists and an average of 14 turnovers per game over the last eight contests and are tied for the fourth-worst defensive field goal percentage in the league over the last 10 games.
And the Warriors don’t have much time to lock in and build up some positive momentum in those areas before the season starts.
Thursday’s game also saw Durant ejected with two seconds remaining in the second quarter. Along with injury and sloppy play, the Warriors have also been emotionally sloppy — particularly towards officials — this season. Durant’s less-than-friendly language towards earned him his fifth ejection of the season — the highest mark in the NBA this season and far-and-away a career high for him.
The Warriors have struggled with their emotions and in handling referees all season, but the issue was most glaring early in the year. Is that bad attitude coming back? The Warriors downplayed Thursday’s incident, and there’s plenty of reason to believe it was a one-off thing (that happened for the fifth time this year), but if whatever infected the Warriors that made them go crazy towards referees earlier this year is, indeed, coming back, it couldn’t arrive at a worse time.
The Warriors need to be in control of both their play and emotions heading into the playoffs. Right now, it appears they’re 0-for-2.
Kevin Durant straight up ejected for cursing out ref pic.twitter.com/UcaCszvnrq
— gifdsports (@gifdsports) March 30, 2018
Finally, the Warriors couldn’t escape injury on Thursday. Boy, what a game it was.
Andre Iguodala left Thursday’s contest with a sore left knee. Watching him “walk” in the hallway outside of the Warriors’ locker room after the game, I’ll simply say that Iguodala’s knee sure is sore. He made it clear to me that he was, despite what I might have thought, not limping. I have no comment beyond that other than to say that a kid, also in the hallway, announced in a loud voice after Iguodala and I had our short back-and-forth “why was he walking like that?”.
Kerr effectively ruled Iguodala, who has been playing his best basketball of the season since the Warriors returned from the All-Star break, out for Saturday’s game against the Kings. I’d be shocked if he played.
So while, yes, Durant and Green are back, and Thompson isn’t far behind them, losing the 2015 NBA Finals MVP for more than one or two games would be a huge blow to the Warriors, who look nothing if not beatable at the moment.
Perhaps that will change — maybe Golden State, no matter who is healthy around Durant, Green, and Thompson, can simply flip the proverbial switch when the postseason starts and turn into the worldbeaters Kerr believes they can be.
But wouldn’t it be easier for the Warriors to simply ramp up their level play over the next two weeks; stacking solid performances on top of each other and finding their best form right as the postseason begins?
That latter option sounds like the safer play, no?
Golden State might still be the team to beat, even without Curry, but we haven’t seen any on-court evidence of that statement in 2018, and they’re running out of time to show us that — despite everything that’s gone down over the last few weeks — that everything is going to be just fine come playoff time.
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