YOU LOSE THE FRESHNESS OF THE FIRST YEAR OR TWO.

latest attempt to find meaning in a season that increasingly has had none for a team that has now spent 18 months with virtually no one thinking it has a chance of being beaten.

“I think it’s exactly what I expected,” Kerr said of the challenge of keeping his team engaged. “Just having had the experience as a player in Chicago, the three years in a row (in the NBA final) ... I’ve talked about it a lot. You lose the freshness of the first year or two. It’s emotionally draining for these guys to play night after night, people coming after them. and won its first title. Then came the doubters who said they only won because Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving were hurt — causing Golden State to come back with a vengeance in the second season, winning a record-setting 73 games before losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA final. That, of course, led to Kevin Durant joining the Warriors for last season and another 67-win regular season followed by a 161 romp through the playoffs to a second title in three seasons.

This year, though? The Warriors haven’t had that thing to keep them locked in on a nightly basis, to give them something to play for during these dog days of the season. That’s why the Warriors — while still leading the league with both a 44-13 record and in outscoring their opponents by 10.3 points per 100 possessions — have already come close to matching last season’s 15 losses with 25 games remaining on the schedule.

“For whatever reason,” Curry said, “we obviously haven’t been great, by any stretch of the imagination, for the last month.”

While the Warriors have been waiting around for the playoffs to start, the rest of the league has spent the past year gearing up to take them down. The Houston Rockets overhauled their roster this summer — trading for Chris Paul and signing P.J. Tucker and Luc Mbah a Moute — before landing Gerald Green, Joe Johnson and Brandan Wright during the season. The Cavaliers just traded half their team to shake things up after a horrific slide over the past month. The Oklahoma City Thunder traded for Paul George and Carmelo Anthony.

The Warriors, on the other hand, have largely stood pat.

If Golden State stays healthy, it is going to enter the postseason as an overwhelming favourite to win a second straight championship, its third in four years. The players know that. The coaches know that. The rest of the league knows that.