Best thing to come from trip isn’t Curry hot streak

Stephen Curry was on the roll of a lifetime — a stretch that was borderline incomprehensible, even for one of the greatest players in the history of the NBA.

For two weeks, it was like Curry could not miss. He was singlehandedly fulfilling the Splash Brothers’ quota for 3-pointers made per game.

The run was enough that he boosted himself back into the MVP conversation and the Warriors into contention for a “real” playoff spot. After years of fans and haters wondering how he would perform if he had “no help,” he was answering the question: He’d play out-of-thisworld.

But a funny thing happened Wednesday night in Washington. The Human Torch’s flame extinguished. He scored 18 points on 28% shooting, turning the ball over six times.

Even the immortals have off days. But that wasn’t the funny part.

No, the peculiarity came in the fact that the Warriors almost won against the Wizards. In fact, they should have won. They choked away a late doubledigit lead and squandered a game-tying layup in the final seconds of the game.

After weeks — no, a season — of a binary relationship between Curry’s play and the Warriors looking respectable, Wednesday looks like an anomaly. But I don’t think it is. And that’s the best thing the Warriors can take away

from this recent 3-2 trip.

The Warriors no doubt Curry’s team and that relationship between his success and the team’s is anything but tenuous, but while the Human Torch was capturing our attention with his nowpaused thermonuclear run, the other, forgotten Warriors were upping their games too.

The loss of the team’s sole 7-footer, rookie center James Wiseman, forced the Warriors to adapt their style of play — whatever the heck that was — to their shorter personnel over the last two weeks.

The Warriors found their identity as a small-ball team. Pace-and-space is the new gospel, and whichever handful of Warriors are healthy on any given night makes a zealous congregation.

There’s no longer an inherent conflict to the team’s sets, there are no ulterior motives, and perhaps most importantly, there’s no time for any of the Warriors’ role players to think. And those role players are thriving in the new environment.

Curry is like a Maserati that was stuck in stop-and-go 880 traffic but recently hit that stretch of I-5 outside Coalinga where there are no cops — and the Warriors’ bench players are showing that they are hardly beaters. There’s something under those hoods, and they’re allowed to push the pedal to the metal, too.

Because of injuries, the Warriors have been forced to fiddle with rotations for the last two weeks, but the three mostused Curry-free lineups all have positive net ratings.

In fact, the second units have been totally awesome. Remember when secondunit minutes were the reason the Warriors would lose games? Those days appear over.

It’s a small sample size, sure, and you have to take into account the level of competition, which has varied mightily, but the lineup of Kent Bazemore, Andrew Wiggins, Kevon Looney, Jordan Poole, and Juan Toscano Anderson has a net rating (points per 100 possessions) of21.

Take out Toscano-Anderson and put in Damion Lee, and the net rating jumps to plus-54 points per 100 possessions. That’s silliness. But the net rating is almost identical if JTA is replaced by KOJ — Kelly Oubre Jr.

There’s been more aggression from Wiggins. Poole — never one to lack confidence — is finding moments to take over games. Lee, Bazemore, and Oubre are doing good things more often than bad things (for the vast majority of the season, that trend was reversed.) And Toscano-Anderson has shown to be the kind of glue guy that always affects winning in a positive way.

It’s a funny and beautiful thing, role players understanding their roles.

Now, will this bench stack up with the Clippers, Suns, Jazz, or (I guess) the Lakers — the best teams in the Western Conference? Probably not.

But Curry isn’t going to fade away over these final weeks of the season — Wednesday night was just a blip — and, contrary to popular (aka uninformed) belief, he has a respectable crew behind him.

I don’t think that’s good enough to compete for a title. But it is sure good enough to seriously annoy all those teams that are. And perhaps to print up some We Believe shirts, too.