Did Warriors prove regular season is one big warmup or is this their true selves?

Jim Barnett said an unusual thing at the end of Tuesday’s Warriors-Jazz defenestro-rama, and it was that he was glad the regular season was over. Better still, his voice oozed pain and disgust, as though the Warriors had monumentally failed the pre-test by not studying and might not be ready for the real thing.
 
And he might be right. He might also be wrong, because as the NBA is showing us over and over again, the regular season serves only to greatly diminish the concept of the warmup act.
 
In other words, Barnett grew up in an era in which the regular season was damned important, and these Warriors just completed the process of proving how small the regular season actually is.
 
That is, of course, if they win the title. If not, their disappointing 58-win regular season will be part of the proof of why they died. After all, when you’ve amassed the winningest season ever and the 10th and 11th winningest seasons ever in three successive seasons, people are going to notice when you drop the 97th winningest season ever and draw the requisite dire conclusions.
 
And the Utah game, in which the Warriors overachieved to lose by 40, was the final knee for folks who think the regular season is a direct link to the postseason, which is the very thing the Warriors worked so hard this year to disprove. In a season in which the final few days of the regular season have dripped drama, the Warriors left one last glob of spit on theirs because:
 
A. They didn’t have Stephen Curry.
 
B. They spent the entire year winning enough games while not meeting their internal standard, thus making 58 wins seem more like 38.
 
And C. The coaches and players prioritized rest and regeneration under the mantra “We’ll Be Fine When It Matters.”
 
Only nobody could truly agree on “when it matters” begins. Outsiders thought the deadline was the last 10 to 15 regular season games, the coaches figured five to 10, while the players pretty much decided on zero.
 
So now we’ll find out who was right – Jim Barnett, or the players he watches for money. And maybe that’s why he sounded so done with this regular season Tuesday night – because it either explained so little about the Warriors’ true selves, so revealed more than he, or anyone else, wanted to know.