You snooze, you lose… unless you’re the Golden State Warriors against the New Orleans Pelicans in the first round of the NBA playoffs.
The team with the NBA’s best record is about to reach the second round after a remarkable Game 3 escape. However, a clear pattern of regression coexists with the Warriors’ impending advancement in the playoffs. This captures the mixed-bag feel to Golden State’s first playoff series this spring.
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The Warriors obviously woke up in the fourth quarter on Thursday night against the Pelicans, but if better habits and increased vigilance don’t become regular parts of Golden State’s game in the second round, the Memphis Grizzlies will certainly be able to put this snoozing team to bed, and a magical regular season will quickly be forgotten.
It’s easy, especially here in the San Francisco Bay Area, to get so caught up in the excitement of the Warriors’ thrilling comeback in New Orleans last night that you overlook a troubling fact: The Warriors trailed by double digits for almost the whole game, and would have lost against any other team in the Western Conference playoffs.
How did this happen? We already saw the W’s tested in Game 1, when the Pelicans slowly reeled them in and almost did what the Warriors pulled off last night. That was supposed to be the “wake-up call,” the “hey, these guys are pretty good” moment that would keep a thing like last night from happening.
That’s where this Warriors team is a little different from most.
It may sound crazy to say this about a team that lost only 15 games all season, but the Warriors seemed to grow more from each loss (and some near-losses) than they did from their wins this season. They won their first five games of the season, despite turning the ball over 20 or more times in four of those games. Then the W’s lost to Phoenix on the road, committing 27 turnovers. Then they lost to San Antonio on their home floor, a game where the Warriors shot 54 percent and still lost because of 20 turnovers.
Steve Kerr’s reaction? He said, “Maybe now they’ll listen to me about turning the ball over. ” And they did. They ripped off 16 wins in a row, without hitting the 20-turnover mark once.
Until the Warriors lost those two games, Kerr’s voice was a dog whistle where turnovers were concerned. Even the Phoenix loss, which was on the road and the second night of a back-to-back, wasn’t enough to get their attention. It took a loss to San Antonio in which they were never really in the game despite shooting 54 percent for them to commit to taking care of the ball.
Obviously, if it takes a loss to get your attention, you’re not going to have many deep playoff runs. You need to react to “near-losses,” like the one in Game 1, to tweak, fine-tune and adjust so that you don’t wind up down 20 heading in the fourth quarter of a subsequent playoff game, especially one against a No. 8 seed.
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One important thing to keep in mind about playoff basketball is that as teams go after each other game after game, they can expose weaknesses that can be covered over in the regular season. The Pelicans have done that to the Warriors, and only their own lack of experience has kept them from having a very good chance in this series. They could have won either of the two games in Oakland, and last night’s collapse was, of course, historic.
The Warriors, with seven minutes to go in the fourth quarter, were in very real trouble in this series. If they lost Game 3 in a blowout, the possibility of this series going six or seven games would have become very real. The Dubs dodged that bullet, and they obviously deserve credit for that. One of the most impressive things about the comeback was that they didn’t shoot “lights out” as they have so many times this season. They simply got almost every offensive rebound, and played much better defensively.
Steph Curry is going to get much of the credit, and he should, although Marreese Speights, Shaun Livingston, Klay Thompson, Harrison Barnes, and especially Draymond Green were all indispensable in the effort. There was a play Curry made, however, that I think bears noting, and my guess is that you won’t see it mentioned in any of the game stories today.
With a little over a minute remaining in the third quarter, Andre Iguodala missed a 3-pointer. Curry jumped over a Pelican’s back and tipped the rebound to himself on the left baseline. He then whipped a pass to a wide-open Iguodala under the basket for a dunk.
What’s a point guard doing on the baseline when his teammate is shooting a 3? Who knows? However, it’s that kind of play that makes me marvel at Steph Curry. His 3-pointers are great, but if you think that’s all he’s bringing to the table, you’re not paying attention.
The reason I don’t know who he jumped over is that TNT never replayed that play, despite Steve Smith being very impressed by Curry’s effort. The Warriors were down 16 after the basket, and who knew that those two points would mean anything in the larger scheme of things? It’s not as though this play started a fire of any sort, but it was a great play by a great player that reminded his teammates that they weren’t out of it yet.
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In the end, as with all sports, the result is all that matters, and the Warriors got the win and went up 3-0. The brutal non-foul call on Curry’s game-tying 3-pointer doesn’t matter, nor does the mysterious “foul away from the ball” call on Klay Thompson in overtime that could have changed the outcome in the Pelicans’ favor. All that remains is for the W’s to close out this series, but they have some serious work to do to be ready for the second round.
If the Warriors make the same mistakes against the Memphis Grizzlies that they’ve made against the Pelicans, not only will they fail to get a 3-0 series lead; they might not even reach the Western Conference Finals.
