As the Golden State Warriors ready themselves for Monday’s room-temperature showdown with the New Orleans Pelicans, they are much-belabored league leaders in any number of categories.
Points per game? Check. Points per 100 possessions? Check. Points per 36 minutes? Check. Three-point shooting percentage? Check. Two-point shooting percentage? Check. Effective shooting percentage? Check. Total shooting percentage? Check. Defensive rating? Seventh after a terrible start. Pace? Fifth and climbing with a bullet. Best road attendance based on number of attendees over listed capacity? Well, uhhh, no; LeBron James still has that one. Try harder, lads.
But they also are the crankiest team in the NBA, which means that tonight’s officiating crew of Derrick Stafford, Matt Boland and J.T. Orr cannot sleep on the Warriors in their eagerness to police Demarcus Cousins.
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The Warriors lead the league in technical fouls, with 17. They also lead in ejections, with five. Draymond Green has six technical, which is to be expected, and Kevin Durant has been tossed twice, which is one more than he has in his entire pro experience before this year.
And, though there is no metric for this, the Warriors also lead the league in agonized looks when fouls are called against them, from Green’s defiant shouts to Andre Iguodala’s Jim Boeheim-level pleadings. This may help explain why they lead in T’s and E’s – in a shallow world, optics matter.
But this may also be a measure of their willingness to seem tougher and less nice-guy-ish amid an army of the skeptically envious – namely, their contemporaries within the league. They rank third in fines this year with $126,000, and unlike Portland (which has a one-game suspension for C.J. McCollum) and Washington (which rolled up their total in the brawl in Oakland October 29), theirs are a measure of their consistency in dispute.
This isn’t a judgment on the legitimacy of their complaints, mind you. The time to break down their 115 technicals and 10 ejections in the Steve Kerr Era is not now, and not for me. But they are on pace (I know, I know, “on pace” is the last argument of the intellectually feeble) to get T’d up 60 times and tossed 18 times, a Rasheed Wallace level of dissent.
In other words, for good or ill, they’re spoiling for an argument as often as not, and tonight is as good a night as any to strut their stuff against the team with the man who has seemingly perfected the T.
And if you’re going to lead the league in nearly everything else, why not try to run the table, one magic word at a time?