SAN ANTONIO -– The playoffs are underway for the Warriors. They arrived late last Tuesday night, when a stunning loss to Minnesota at Oracle Arena stole their margin for error.
The Warriors then had to win all four of their final four games of the regular season to reach a record 73 wins, and they are halfway there after beating the Spurs on Thursday and the Grizzlies on Saturday.
And now that they are in San Antonio, the Warriors can only hope the copious amounts of sweat they left on the floor in Memphis on Saturday doesn’t cause them to slip and fall here on Sunday.
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“We’ll be fine,” Steph Curry said. “It’ll be a big game for us to come out and play aggressive, play smart and overcome the schedule.”
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Playing with intensity for 48 minutes always is difficult, and sometimes still not enough. The Warriors arrive in San Antonio in the wake of a comeback win in Memphis that required coach Steve Kerr to play some of his key players a few more minutes than he would have liked.
Curry played 34 minutes. Klay Thompson and Draymond Green each played 35. Andre Iguodala, coming off the bench, played 27 minutes. All of the effort was needed for the Warriors to pull out a 100-99 win over the Grizzlies.
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How much will the Warriors have left?
And will the motivation to get to 73 wins generate enough spirit and stamina to beat the Spurs, who own the second-best record in the league and is expected to be without only one rotation player, forward Boris Diaw?
Green, who never seems to run short of energy, believes the Warriors will recover, partly because Kerr insisted on limiting minutes in the first half against the Grizzlies.
“It wasn’t like we were killing ourselves the whole game, number one, the way were playing,” he said in Memphis. “Number two, maybe coach Kerr’s decision was good. Now I won’t feel as tired as I normally would after a game. We’ll be fine.”
This game comes roughly 17 hours after the Warriors arrived at their San Antonio hotel. The Spurs, by contrast, have not played since Friday -– a loss at Denver in which coach Gregg Popovich rested four starters.
Those starters will be back Sunday as the Spurs continue their own pursuit of becoming the first team to go undefeated at home. Popovich says there is no emphasis on that, and Tim Duncan echoes that sentiment.
Neither says it wouldn’t be nice to get.
The Warriors, in addition to getting past the highest remaining hurdle to 73, also would like to shed their 33-game losing streak in San Antonio.
“We’re all excited,” Thompson said. “Obviously, we’ve got that regular season streak on our minds. We haven’t won there since, I think, Tim Duncan was a rookie or even before that, so it would be nice to snap that. It’s a dark cloud hanging over the history of the Warriors’ regular season. It would be a nice cherry on top of this road trip.”
When the Warriors last won in San Antonio, Duncan was finishing his collegiate career at Wake Forest. He’ll turn 40 later this month. Yes, it’s been that long.
So there is much at stake in the last meeting of the season between the Warriors and the Spurs. Each previous meeting was described as epic, given the records of the teams. This one is no different, with both teams also staring history in its face.