OAKLAND -- Five days after thinking they’d hit the low point of the season, the Warriors on Sunday dug deeper into the abyss. They continued to dig shortly after blowing a 16-point lead and losing on their home floor to the lowly Phoenix Suns.
Not long after the horn sounded and the Warriors zombie-walked into their locker room at Oracle Arena, a video from the game surfaced wherein coach Steve Kerr served amateur lip-readers several tons of red meat.
The speculation, based on various websites attempting to read Kerr’s lips, is that he said “I’m so f---ing tired of Draymond’s s--t.”
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The video, of course, went viral.
The Warriors went silent. Draymond Green didn’t address the media. And neither did Kerr upon exiting his office nearly two hours after the game.
“I’ll address media tomorrow,” he said.
This revelation was the perfectly dyspeptic conclusion to a night when the Warriors, proud champions the last two seasons and in three of the last four, were more inept in the final minutes than the Suns, who hadn’t beaten Golden State in four years and are in the midst of their fourth consecutive season with at least 50 losses.
Golden State Warriors
From defensive slippage, to cold shooting beyond the arc, to Kevin Durant rolling his right ankle, plenty went wrong for the Warriors on Sunday after an impressive first quarter. To make matters worse, a couple scenes from their latest collapse were familiar -- specifically coming undone with turnovers.
After committing nine through three quarters, leading to nine points for Phoenix, the Warriors committed seven in the fourth quarter, providing the Suns with 14 of the 36 points they rung up in the quarter. Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Shaun Livingston each accounted for two of the giveaways, with Durant being charged with the other while turning his right ankle.
“Yeah, it wasn’t pretty,” Thompson said. “Probably the worst loss of the season, unfortunately.”
It’s hard to argue that. The Warriors had beaten the Suns 18 consecutive times, including three times this season by an average of 17.7 points. Phoenix was coming off a game Saturday night in Portland, while the Warriors hadn’t played since Friday.
Yet it was the Warriors who bungled and fumbled and stumbled to the finish, with Suns guard Devin Booker scoring 17 of his game-high 37 points over the final 12 minutes.
“Booker got going, and he had it rolling,” Kerr said immediately afterward. “We had our chances and we fought back at the end, but obviously not a great defensive performance for us the whole game. That’s really been the bottom line.”
The defense was terrific in the first quarter, during which the Warriors led by as much as 16, limiting Phoenix to 30.4 percent shooting from the field, including 1 of 8 from beyond the arc.
The defense was atrocious in the second quarter, when the Suns shot 71.4 percent (62.5 percent from beyond the arc) in outscoring the Warriors 40-28.
“(We had) lackluster energy and too many ups and downs throughout the whole game,” Thompson said. “Three-point shooting was ugly. We got great looks in the second half, great looks we make more than half of the time.”
After making four his five shots in the first quarter, Thompson was 6 of 17 the rest of the night. Curry was 6 of 20 for the game. Each was 4 of 15 from deep. The Warriors were 10 of 43 beyond the arc, 5 of 24 in the second half.
“It was just one of those nights where we shoot a very low percentage, but we still had a chance to win the game,” Thompson said.
The Warriors missed out on winning the game. But they still have a chance to save their hopes for the season.
Can they? Will a viral video threaten everything this team has built?
Kerr and Green have been known to squabble on a regular basis, mostly because both are stubborn and can be volatile. If the lip-readers are accurate, this can’t be ignored.
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The Warriors have lost six of their last 10 games. They haven’t won back-to-back games in nearly four weeks. They have 16 games to stitch themselves together and get what they want.
This night was not filled with false alarms. Problems exist. They are real. If the Warriors can’t fix them, they won’t like where this season ends.