OAKLAND -- And two days later, all was well again. Kind of. The Golden State Warriors will be day-to-day as long as Stephen Curry and Draymond Green are.
Nevertheless, Friday’s 125-97 throttling of the justifiably weary Portland Trail Blazers was thoroughly Warriors in the same way that losing 123-95 to the Oklahoma City Thunder two nights earlier was not, and as dramatic a turn as this represented in the short turn, Kevin Durant explained it best.
“I don’t believe it’s just gonna be over when it’s over,” he said as he surveyed not just his brilliant performance, but those of his mates in breaking their four-game losing streak. “I don’t believe in fairy tales or anything like that. It won’t be over until we start to impose our will. We have to play with more passion and energy, (and) I never believe it’s gonna happen eventually.”
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SIGN UP HERE Well, it happened Friday night – the kind of energy and purpose, drive and smarts, tactical smarts and strategic discipline that they lost 12 days ago and struggled to regain while they went through the Time Out From Hell and its aftermath. All the questions of their fragility and lack of depth and the uncertain future that awaits them as a team made them seem almost like a dynasty in the past tense.
Almost, that is. It’s still November, and their standard isn’t a reasonable one for most teams. Not only that, Portland had just flown in from Milwaukee after taking a 43-point beating at the hands of the Antlered Freaks, an unreasonably hellish bit of scheduling.
Nevertheless, the Warriors applied their standard, and this game was the first time they’d met it so comprehensively since maybe the Phoenix game a month ago.
They defended with zeal and intelligence, and offensively they moved the ball with crispness and thought so that the burden of the evening didn’t fall on Durant and Klay Thompson – even though the results (63 points on 25-of-42 shooting plus 15 rebounds between them) seemed to indicate that.
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Instead, they got a mega-useful and effervescent performance from Jordan Bell (who had been outside the rotation), confident and opportunistic shooting from Quinn Cook, and noticeable contributions from nearly everyone else. The 11 steals and 48 field goals on only 85 shots showed how intelligently and quickly they turned defense into offense, and in all discernible ways had snapped themselves out of their fortnight of torpor.
The Warriors are good for a few such games each year in which they hit a lull that seems to baffle them, and then free themselves in a burst. More to the point, they take embarrassing losses like Wednesday’s as a reason to recalibrate. They have lost 19 games in the championship era -- playoffs included -- by 20 points or more, and their record in subsequent games is 16-3.
Of course, every situation has its own unique corners, and the current struggle has come without Curry and Green, a difficult transition for a team that functions best at pace and with the spacing to make that pace work best. This latest run of indifferent results was compounded by Green’s run-in with Durant and the argle-bargle of looking ahead to the offseason while the in-season is barely five weeks old, a level of insanity that speaks to our cultural resistance to process and boredom.
In other words, this looked worse because they lost four-straight and looked miserable doing it, as though the season had decided to put up a “Closed For The Winter” sign then and there.
But from the jump Friday night, the crowd exhorted them to revert to their truest and most attentive selves, and eventually they responded in kind, most notably Durant, who played 37 minutes and in different rotations, including the second group that starts the second quarter. Indeed, he played the entire second quarter, scoring 14 of his 32 points and logging a plus-18 to highlight the Warriors’ game-breaking 35-17 period.
“I thought he played a brilliant game with every unit he was in,” Kerr said. “I don’t think it was anything dramatic. I just think he was playing so well that he was going to be good in every unit he was in.”
And Durant’s freedom created freedom elsewhere, in Thompson and in Bell and in Cook.
“We just looked like ourselves,” Kerr said. “The activity level at both ends ... it was just a really good night.”
Just when the hystericals were wondering if there would ever be another.