NEW ORLEANS — There were a lot of reasons the Warriors lost Game 3 to the Pelicans Friday night.
The Golden State defense was lazy, the Pelicans couldn’t miss from behind the 3-point arc in the first half, Anthony Davis was immense, Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Kevin Durant combined to go 23-of-59 from the floor, the Warriors were outrebounded by 10 and only shot 38 percent from the field.
Pelicans guard Ian Clark had 18 points off the bench Friday.
Curry scored 19.
Yes, it was a downright stinky Warriors performance. A real Limburger game.
But I can’t help but think that Warriors coach Steve Kerr also deserves a nice chunk of the blame for the Game 3 debacle for his decision to start JaVale McGee.
To be clear: it’s not all Kerr or McGee’s fault that the Warriors lost — it’d be ridiculous to even insinuate that. No, Golden State’s Game 3 performance was an uncharacteristically incredible confluence of bad, but having the mercurial big man on the court for 9:10 didn’t help the Warriors’ cause, and those minutes loomed large in the game.
Kerr’s move to go with McGee — and the big man’s unsurprisingly poor performance — highlighted a huge issue for the Warriors as well in a series that has a newfound intrigue: outside of Green, the Warriors don’t have a reliable option to guard Anthony Davis.
That could be a problem — one that the Warriors’ coaching staff will have to devise a clever plan to tackle.
A plan that must be more clever than “let’s start McGee.”
I think I can understand Kerr’s logic in starting McGee. With Curry back in the starting lineup, Kerr had the choice of playing Draymond Green at center to start or going with a more traditional big man in his opening five.
And considering Kerr’s comments Thursday that he expected the referees to call plenty of fouls against the Warriors early in Friday’s game, with most of those fouls likely to be drawn by Davis, not starting Green at center in an effort to help him avoid early foul trouble made sense.
But starting McGee instead of Kevon Looney? That was bizarre.
McGee is the Warriors’ most foul-prone big man and there was a reason the had only played garbage time in this series before Friday — his skills, which helped the Warriors in the last round against the Spurs, don’t translate to this series with the Pelicans.
Kerr said after the game that he wanted to “buy” minutes at the center position — that with Game 4 looming on Sunday afternoon, he didn’t want to overtax Green with the minimal turnaround time between games.
But Kerr bought those minutes on a credit card — after the Game 3 loss, Green will have to play his full complement of center minutes, with interest, in Game 4.
“I do expect that,” Green said after Game 3 when asked if he expected to play more center in Game 4. “We’ve been successful with it. I 100 percent expect it.”
I know Kerr wants to get everyone involved in games — Strength in Numbers was his phrase, after all — and that’s laudable, but his explanation for McGee’s playing time was baffling. Did he seriously suggest that he gave away minutes in Game 3 because of Game 4? That’s putting the cart before the horse.
A better plan: go all out in an all-important Game 3 and worry about Game 4 later. Either you won and the series is effectively over or your all-out gameplan didn’t really work and it would likely be disadvantageous to do what you did in a losing effort again on Sunday.
Again, it would be ridiculous to pin the Warriors’ blowout loss on McGee playing nine minutes, but the impact — or lack thereof, however you want to look at it — McGee had on the game cannot be ignored. And if the Warriors want to win in Game 4, it cannot be repeated.
Overall, McGee was a minus-10 in his limited, but critical minutes, posting an offensive rating of 46.9 for a net rating of minus-44.9. For the uninitiated, that’s ostensively terrible.
McGee did not play well to start — the Warriors clearly wanted to get him the ball at the rim early, but bad passes and poor positioning meant the lob game never got going. Meanwhile, McGee consistently found himself in no man’s land on defense, incapable of guarding Davis one-on-one and too big to help out on switches.
New Orleans’ inability to made open baskets or maintain possession (the Pellies had four turnovers before the first timeout of the game) kept Golden State in the contest, though — the McGee lineup was bad, but the Warriors didn’t have to face the immediate repercussions.
But everyone could see that McGee wasn’t going to be successful in Friday’s game. And yet, at the start of the third quarter, Kerr ran McGee back out there again.
He rolled the dice on McGee twice Friday, the second time he crapped out. (Shades of Anderson Varejao in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals.)
The Warriors had cut the lead to six points thanks to a 20-point Klay Thompson second. In the less than five minutes McGee played at the start of the third, that six-point lead had turned into a 14-point lead — one that the disjointed Warriors weren’t able to erase. The Warriors’ bad night only snowballed from there.
That stretch at the beginning of the third quarter decided Game 3.
But Kerr was thinking about Game 4.
So now the Warriors have to worry about a Game 5.
It’s just another reminder that small decisions can have major ramifications in the playoffs.
Yes, a lot of things went wrong for the Warriors on Friday, but you can’t convince me that the decision to play McGee at the start of each half didn’t play a role in Golden State’s loss.
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