Will Warriors rebound after comeuppance?

The Washington Post

OAKLAND, Calif. — Ever since Kevin Durant signed with the Golden State Warriors in July, the overwhelming expectation inside and out of the NBA is that it will be a mere formality that this team will lift the Larry O’Brien Trophy as NBA champions in June.

Then came Tuesday night, and Golden State’s season-opening game against the San Antonio Spurs in front of a sellout crowd at Oracle Arena.

Facing a Spurs team missing starting guard Danny Green, out for the first few weeks of the season with a quad strain, this was expected to be a celebration of a comprehensive victory and a harbinger of the destruction the Warriors would bring to their future opponents.

Instead, the Warriors received comprehensive buttwhooping, as the Spurs came away with a 129-100 victory in front of a shellshocked crowd that began filing out of the arena with several minutes left in the game.

As the Warriors walked the first steps down the path of the 2016-17, they quickly learned they would not be striding down easy street.

“It’s a slap in the face,” Durant said. “It woke us up a bit.”

It’s always dangerous to overreact to one game, and particularly the opening game of an 82-game regular season that spans six months. At the same time, dismissing a loss that illuminated all the Warriors’ potential weaknesses would be equally foolish.

Those potential weaknesses — defense, rebounding and bench production — were exploited by the Spurs to great effect Tuesday night, and all the other teams will try to replicate the blueprint the Spurs provided.

Most teams, however, don’t have two players like Kawhi Leonard and LaMarcus Aldridge.

Leonard has been a popular MVP pick heading into this season and looked every bit of one Tuesday night in scoring 35 points while shooting 15 for 15 from the free-throw line to go with 5 rebounds, 3 assists and 4 steals.

Aldridge, meanwhile, looked like a man among boys inside, scoring 26 points and grabbing 14 rebounds — including an absurd eight offensive rebounds, which equaled Golden State’s team total.

Similarly, there won’t be many nights where the Warriors will be outscored by 15 points from the 3-point line.

What can be replicated against the Warriors, though, is attacking the glass at both ends, and attacking them both at the rim and in transition.

Make no mistake: Golden State would trade Andrew Bogut and Harrison Barnes for Kevin Durant and Zaza Pachulia — which is essentially what Golden State did this summer — 100 times out of 100.

But what’s equally true is that Pachulia isn’t the same level of player as Bogut at center.

At times, it looked as if Golden State expected this game go its way — the players expected shots to fall, rebounds to come to them, and the Spurs to miss shots.

But against a good team like San Antonio, expecting results isn’t good enough.