Defending without Durant

HOUSTON — Though many analysts wondered how the Warriors would replace Kevin Durant’s scoring, head coach Steve Kerr was just as concerned with whether his team could fill Durant’s void defensively.

Before sustaining a left knee injury Feb. 28 at Washington, Durant was the biggest reason Golden State’s interior defense hadn’t regressed without Andrew Bogut and Festus Ezeli. Durant, who was swatting a career-best 1.6 shots per game, led a defense that led the league in blocks.

Now, with Durant set to be re-evaluated Thursday, the Warriors are averaging 6.9 blocks per game during their current seven-game winning streak, slightly above their NBA-best season average of 6.6.

“The activity level defensively has been really high,” Kerr said. “I just feel like, when you’re scrambling and you’re rotating, you’re putting teams in vulnerable positions late in the shot clock, trying to get a shot off.”

The Warriors had eight blocks in recent wins over both Oklahoma City and Sacramento, nine blocks March 16 against Orlando and 11 blocks March 14 against Philadelphia. In that swat-happy win over the 76ers, Draymond Green accounted for six blocks.

Green’s average of 1.3 blocks over the past seven games are a bit shy of his season average. In 13.9 minutes in that span, David West has averaged 1.4 blocks.

“When the whole team is defending well, I just think we’re more likely to get those random blocks that wouldn’t otherwise come if we didn’t have the activity level where it needs to be,” Kerr said. MVP discussion: After Stephen Curry’s response to a question about whom he would choose for NBA MVP resulted in Russell Westbrook saying of Curry, “Who’s he?” Kerr had some thoughts on avoiding the situation. In a radio interview this month with Dan Patrick, Curry picked Houston’s James Harden.

“Steph knows that, whenever you answer something, people are going to run with it,” Kerr said after practice Monday night at the Toyota Center, where the Warriors will face the Rockets on Tuesday. “I thought that was a very innocent answer that was sort of flipped into something controversial, which it shouldn’t have been. That’s how it is. That’s why you end up getting a lot of vanilla answers, so that people don’t incriminate anybody or put themselves in a position where their answer is spun into something.”

Kerr declined to reveal who he thinks should be MVP. No rest: Kerr doesn’t plan to rest any of his core players at Houston on Tuesday or at San Antonio the following night.