Warriors:
Stephen Curry, No. 30 at left, scores 27 points as Golden State starts slowly but still stops Orlando 118-98.
ORLANDO — The team bus arrived at the Grand Bohemian Hotel in downtown Orlando at 9 a.m. Sunday. With a noon tip-off looming against the Magic, Warriors players grabbed a quick breakfast, threw on some warm-ups and headed to Amway Center.
“I think my bus was (leaving) at 9:30,” Draymond Green said. “That’s 6:30 West Coast time, and we’ve only been gone for two days. It was brutal.”
It took until the latter stages of the first half for Golden State to jolt out of its blearyeyed haze. Facing an Orlando team unlikely to reach the playoffs, the Warriors parlayed a dominant third quarter into a 118-98 rout.
Stephen Curry, whose gamehigh 27 points led six Golden State players in double figures,
was free to watch the final 12 minutes from the bench. It marked the fifth straight game in which the Warriors won by at least 17 points.
“For whatever reason, we’ve had a bunch of really good third quarters in the last couple of weeks,” said head coach Steve Kerr, whose team is riding an NBA-best seven-game winning streak. “That seems to be the key time for us these days.”
Speaking to reporters 90 minutes before tip-off, Kerr conceded that Golden State’s “preparation has not been very good.”
Flash flooding in the Houston area, where the Warriors had played Friday night, had prevented the Warriors from flying to Orlando that night as planned. They didn’t practice after arriving Saturday afternoon at their hotel, which was located blocks from Amway Center. The noon start Sunday, Golden State’s earliest tip-off in 22 years, prevented it from holding a morning shootaround or even a team meeting.
It was the makings for a lackadaisical start. Within the first six minutes, the Warriors piled up eight turnovers. JaVale McGee, who scored eight of his 13 points in the first quarter, offered a few highlights before Golden State went scoreless for the first 5 minutes, 15 seconds of the second quarter.
So out of sorts was the Warriors’ offense that, with less than four minutes left in the first half, McGee and Zaza Pachulia led the club in scoring. By halftime, a 17-6 Golden State rally had knotted the game 50-50. It was a prelude to yet another game-changing third quarter: With Curry’s 17 points leading the way, the Warriors blitzed the Magic 42-24 in those 12 minutes to take a 92-74 lead.
Golden State has outscored its opponents 358-232 in the third quarter over its past 11 games. In each of their past three, the Warriors have boasted a plus-minus of at least plus-15 in that period. Orlando, which was without leading scorer Evan Fournier (sore right foot), had little answer in its 10th loss in 13 games.
“Once we kind of woke up from the early tip-off, it was a solid effort,” Curry said. “We left our mark in the third quarter again.”
Less than four minutes into Kevin Durant’s postgame news conference Sunday, Warriors vice president of communications Raymond Ridder interjected: “That’s it. We’ve got to beat the weather out.” Most of the team already had boarded the bus in hopes of flying out before heavy thunderstorms arrived.
With the second game of a back-to-back set Monday night in Miami, Golden State wanted to get back on a somewhat normal schedule.