When the Golden State Warriors return to these lands, they will not be as you know them. They will be whole, and they will presumably be better as a whole.
But they will be different as well. That’s all they’ve done this year -- be different.
After Monday’s 116-110 defeat of the Orlando Magic in which the Warriors were carried almost entirely by Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson, they will take to the skies for a five-game road trip in which they will morph again, waiting as they will for Stephen Curry and then Draymond Green to return from furlough.
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Durant was indeed Uber-Durant Monday, going for 49 points with six rebounds, nine assists, 13 free throws and two late-game blocks, and lamenting the one or two missed shots that caused him to “trip off a 50-piece.” Thompson burned 19 points into the fourth quarter closeout to wipe out the effects of minimal second and third quarters and finished with 29 on 23 shots.
In short, they seized a game in which they were being quasi-embarrassed and wiped out most of the effects of their four-game freefall that was hinting at trouble in Oaktown Flats. They are back to kind-of-top of the Western Conference (a half-game better than the Los Angeles Clippers but two percentage points behind because L.A. has three games in hand), and they like being them again.
So now they head to Toronto and the best team in the East, potentially with Curry and Green shortly thereafter, and in a month and change, there is a pretty firm belief that DeMarcus Cousins will finally be activated.
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In short, they will have shed four different layers of skin before the new year, and whether they are stronger or weaker for the effort, they will have made it nonetheless.
They’ve been the Curry-centric team, they’ve been the team of internal strife, and now they’ve been the Durant-centric team. They’ve played without Elite Thompson and with him. They’ve made the center position look like the A’s rotation.
And they will soon be the ensemble piece with three rings again, and then they will presumably have the consistent big man they have lacked to date.
And they will pass all these turns and reboots off as part of the greater whole of Warrior basketball, even though it’s been anything but. They have shown more ways to be a coherent version of themselves, and still haven’t seized on the best version.
They have not been the team that has found a consistent pace, or the team with the best adjusted offensive numbers, or more than a middle-of-the-pack defensive team, or the team that beats the opponent by the end of the third quarter so that their minutes are easier to regulate.
What they have done is adjust on the fly, and adjust again, and adjust yet again. And they have made the toughest adjustment of all by threatening their basic chemical makeup and reassembling it.
The Green-Durant mashup was the biggest threat to the unit’s long-term health, and it still may crop up come the offseason, but as head coach Steve Kerr said Monday night, “We’re past all that stuff.”
At least that’s the plan. The Warriors will soon be an ensemble again, which is also the plan, and then Cousins will get clearance to contribute and then that will be the plan. The Warriors, in sum, will be several teams at several times during the always interminable regular season, and then they’ll figure out who else they have to be come April.
Whether all these plot turns and chemical peels and clashed swords and elegant interchanges will make this the best championship (assuming such), the hardest championship or the weirdest championship remains to play out. But give them this – they are competing hard for the entertainment dollar we all thought was already theirs. They are now trying to become the first team in NBA history to be about five or six teams and still end up the last team.