Ability to focus with Curry out a testimony to what makes Warriors great

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Considering how messy they were 13 days ago, leaving town bearing the scars of perhaps their most distasteful regular-season loss in two years, the Warriors returned home this weekend more whole than one could reasonably expect.

They faced numerous trials on the road and won every one of them. They did not look good. They looked great.

They found a higher level of professionalism. Taking an objective look at themselves, they solved some nagging problems of their own creation and found what the coaching staff had been urging them to seek.

That’s what losing a great player like Stephen Curry will do to a team that had spent more than few games paying the price for feeling its magnificence.

“It was a crazy trip for us,” Kevin Durant said at the end of the road trip. “But that’s what we need. We needed to go through some adversity to make us a better team.”

Remember those losses where the defense rested or the sloppy turnovers kept coming, or both? That’s how the Warriors had lost to clearly inferior teams such the Grizzlies and the Pistons and the Thunder and, most gallingly, the Kings. Lack of attention to detail explains how the Warriors nearly lost to the Lakers.

It was after that game that coach Steve Kerr proclaimed that, for most of the season, the team had not competed to its capability. He was right and the players knew it.

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Taking action when Curry limped off the floor in New Orleans last Monday, they closed the trip with two wins during which they didn’t mutilate their work with untimely defensive lapses or costly turnovers.

There was Durant, taking his complete game from very good to outstanding. There was ferocious defense and a bushel of blocked shots, two indicators of determination. There was Klay Thompson, who got away from himself on Nov. 27 against the Kings but recovered quickly and emphatically on the road.

Though these are all significant elements, the overriding factor is a team coming together when faced with the prospect of falling apart.

“Other guys have stepped up,” Draymond Green said. “It’s even more impressive that it’s not just like one guy is trying to do it. We do feature KD more on the offensive end, which is happening organically. But it’s not like KD is saying, ‘Give me the ball every play and I’m going to go do this.’ We just let it happen naturally and it’s a beautiful thing.”

It took the Warriors nearly two weeks to do that last February, when Durant went down with a knee injury. They lost four of their next six games before coming together to win their next 14.

That the Warriors needed only two days to recover from losing Curry is persuasive testimony to their self-awareness and the progress they’ve made in 10 months.

Maybe it’s muscle memory. Maybe it’s fear of losing. More likely, it’s the acute awareness of how they became champions.

“(Curry) being out actually, probably helped us focus because we knew we had to play sharper in order to win,” Kerr said.

The Warriors know they are fallible and having that knowledge drives them. They flourish not because of criticism or slights but because they hear them and, moreover, feel them. That’s what drove them to 73 wins two seasons ago and drove them to a 16-1 record last postseason.

Coming home is great, though not in and of itself enough to make the Warriors invulnerable. It merely provides a comfortable backdrop while allowing set routines. They still have to do the work, do it right and do it consistently. But that mentality comes easier to an intelligent group when a superstar is not available.

“We’re just steadying the ship, starting to get our season legs under us,” David West said. “We’re working through some things, still haven’t figured everything out in terms of execution and some looks. But we’re good enough to win games even when we’re not executing as well as we can.”

They’ll spend the next 23 days in California, all but two of them at home. Curry will be out of the lineup for most, if not all, of that time. The Warriors understand that. They know what it means. And they seem to be embracing it.

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