While it remains fashionable/required behavior in these parts for folks to worship the Golden State Warriors as the omnipotent gods they seem to be, something delightful is happening above and below them in the Western Conference.
Namely, that there are an increasing number of teams that are not only playing as postseason contenders do, but are not afraid of the Warriors’ power and might as they have been in past seasons.
This is, whether you like it or not, great fun in the making.
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SIGN UP HERE While you have been concentrating on Houston and its persistent refusal to give in to an allegedly brutal schedule, everything below the Warriors has become dramatically better. Portland hasn’t lost since before Valentine’s Day and is 16-5 since mid-January; Oklahoma City is 16-8 in the same space, and the only two losing teams that have beaten them are the red-hot Lakers, twice. New Orleans hasn’t lost since February 9 and 16-6 over the last two months. Utah is 15-2 since January 22, and Denver and the Los Angeles Clippers are 9-3 since the start of February. Only Minnesota without Jimmy Butler and San Antonio without Kawhi Leonard are not beating the field stupid.
In other words, nobody doesn’t have at least a puncher’s chance of giving the Warriors (and truthfully, Houston as well) some measure of playoff grief, which means that the Warriors will get the thing they keep indicating through word and deed that they need most of all.
A challenge.
This is not to say that they would be underdogs against any of these teams; if you go to Vegas, you’d get a far better price on Houston than Golden State. The Warriors are still regard as The Team That Will Deliver The Hammer At The Appropriate Time, and it is repeated as though it was carved on tablets – either stone or electronic.
But the Warriors don’t make as many people paralytic with fear and disbelief they way they used to. Houston certainly likes its chances against the Warriors, and so do Oklahoma City and Portland. Minnesota and New Orleans aren’t at that place, but they aren’t mortal locks to be swept either, and Denver still plays half its games at altitude.
In other words, just as the Warriors are likely to post their worst regular season record in the Steve Kerr Era (they have to go 19-0 to beat 67, and they know how useless a chore that is), they will have more to do this postseason to ring-and-’rade than in 2015, ’16 or ’17.
And that’s not a bad thing for the story arc.
The Warriors have forced the rest of the West to get better just to keep up, and the West has held up its bargain. Even the Lakers, the 11th-best team, is on pace to have its best season since 2013, and if you take their last 25 games as a guide, they could, amazingly, finish at .500.
These are all optimal guesses, presuming that no team will fall off their present pace. But the conference is better, which may not work for the Warriors as well as it works for the rest of us, but if you have a choice between the two, why wouldn’t you root for you?