Focus found at the right time
OAKLAND >> For seven months, we watched the Warriors jog through the 2017-18 season.
At times they kicked it into a higher gear, sure — a few quarters here, a few games there — but on the whole, we saw a team that was disinterested, unengaged, and generally bored by the whole concept of the NBA regular season.
The Warriors took ‘er easy all the way to Game 82, stalling and then coasting through the final month.
The explanations behind the far-less-than-stellar play all season (which still resulted in 58 wins, third-best in the NBA) were bizarre and everchanging: The Warriors were both tired and conserving energy, confident and yet concerned.
So heading into Saturday’s playoff opener against the Spurs, no one really knew what to expect from the Warriors.
Could they “flip” the proverbial switch? Would we see the Warriors in their full, domineering glory now that the “real season” was starting?
It only took a few possessions for a verdict to be rendered: The Warriors knew exactly where the switch was, and they had no problem flipping it as often as they wanted.
The Warriors’ Game 1 performance was both incredible and commonplace. It was a complete domination of the Spurs — the kind they’ve handed out so many times over the last four years — but at the same time, it was a big, in-your-face reminder to the world that the Warriors can still do that.
These guys had been holding out on us — save for a few games in December and one in February — since October! They sandbagged us. They might have sandbagged the entire league. The Spurs certainly didn’t see that version of the Warriors coming in Game 1.
“They had more grunt. They had more physicality,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said after the game. “We looked like deer in the headlights.”
“I think we focused in on just trying to win every possession on the defensive side of the ball,” Kevin Durant said.
For this Warriors team, success — at least against the vast majority of playoff teams — is that simple. All they had to do was care.
The Warriors’ defense was nearly impeccable from the onset of Game 1. That was the “championship-level” effort the Warriors failed to display over the last month without Steph Curry in the lineup. Warriors coach Steve Kerr started JaVale McGee at center and Andre Iguodala at point guard in surprise moves — he put his best defensive team on the floor to start — that
worked to perfection.
Golden State dictated the terms of engagement with the Spurs from the opening tip. San Antonio shot 40 percent from the floor in Game 1, made only 32 field goals, and was dominated on the glass — if not for a few miracle 3-pointers, Rudy Gay’s play off the bench, and the kind of mercy only great friends (Popovich and Kerr) can understand, the Warriors would have won the contest by 40.
“We finally got back to defending the way we have, the way this team has, for many years,” Kerr said. “We had to bring the effort on the defensive end because that’s the only way you can have success in the playoffs. That’s the reason this is a championship team.”
Game 1 performances aren’t supposed to matter much — NBA history has told us to read into them at your own peril — but against the behest of the basketball gods, I’d advocate that you remember Saturday’s. In 48 minutes, the Warriors re-established a dominance that they spent the better part of seven months avoiding. San Antonio will try to adjust before Monday’s Game 2, but the Warriors looked so much better than them on Saturday, I have a hard time believing that the Spurs stand much of a chance to win a game in this series. Any Spurs victory will likely be hand-delivered by a Warriors team that takes its foot off the pedal. (Don’t put it past them, they’ve gotten really good at that this season.)
Nothing worked for the Spurs and there’s no reason to believe that anything will start working in Game 2 or beyond. The Warriors beat the Spurs at their own game Saturday — San Antonio got the half-court, grindit-out
game it wanted, but the Warriors flipped (sorry...) every advantage the Spurs thought they had.
You don’t simply come back from something like that.
The Spurs tried to double-team Durant on Saturday. That failed. Durant still scored 24 points on 53 percent shooting, and he also dished out seven assists.
The Spurs tried to stay glued to Klay Thompson off the ball, too. That failed as well. After a slow start, Thompson caught fire in the second half, scoring 18 points on 7-of-8 shooting.
The Spurs also tried to run their offense through big man LaMarcus Aldridge. Boy did that fail. The Warriors doubleteamed Aldridge nearly every time he touched the ball to start a possession, daring anyone else on the Spurs to beat them. More often than not, Aldridge’s teammates would pass on the opportunity and would simply give the ball back to Aldridge, who, by then, was 18 feet from the basket. Aldridge didn’t make a shot in the lane all game and made only five shots in the contest.
Kerr said last month that the Warriors can beat anyone in the league, even without Curry in the lineup. At the time, it rightly raised eyebrows.
Those eyebrows aren’t up anymore. And if they are, they’re raised for a different reason. Without their best player — the NBA’s one-man offensive revolution — the Warriors turned in a performance that could, indeed, beat any team in the league.
There’s a long, long way to go — we’re one game in — but if the Warriors can make that kind of effort a habit, perhaps this postseason won’t be so difficult for them after all.