WARRIORS SWEEP
Hardwood wizards of oohs and aahs
Stephen Curry scores 39 points to lead his team into the second round of the playoffs.
NEW ORLEANS — America’s team makes it look so easy and breezy. A sweep in the first round of the playoffs. The fat lady just squirted her tonsils.
From afar, from watching the Warriors-Pelicans on TV, or from in the grandstands at Smoothie King Center, it’s easy to miss the intensity of the playoffs.
Sometimes you can see it in little things. Stephen Curry makes a gesture after every three-point make, a chest thump and quick point into the air. After one three-pointer in the first half Saturday, Curry pounded himself in the heart twice, as though he was trying to revive a dead man.
After another, he let his shooting arm hang in the air, a “take-that” gesture, cousin to a home-run hitter’s bat flip
Curry wasn’t the only serious-as-a-heart-attack Warrior. After the midday shootaround, coach Steve Kerr gave his team a quiet but stern warning. He likes his players to be loose, but he felt maybe they were a little
too loose, and he told ’em to tighten up.
“We were a little loose early (in the day),” Shaun Livingston said. “By the time we got to the game, I think we understood what was at stake here.”
Again, from outside, hard to find things the Warriors need to worry about fixing.
How’s the running game, the one that’s supposed to stall in the playoffs?
The Warriors had 90 fastbreak points in four games, to 43 for the Pelicans. Saturday night it was 20-0.
Made three-pointers? The Warriors sank 47 in the series, the Pelicans 27.
On the menu today at the ESPN cafeteria: Curried Pelican.
The MVP-to-be scored 39 and averaged 33.8 for the series, exactly 10 over his season average. The Pelicans tried everything to stop him. They tried Anthony Davis on him, and Curry found a way over and around. The Pelicans tried everyone on Curry but Trombone Shorty.
After Curry’s crazy corner shot in Game 3, the fans here came Saturday to love him and hate him. They were enthralled. On a couple of his three-point shots, you could hear the Curry Sigh from the crowd, the “oh-my-god” expectation.
A couple times the crowd gasped at a wondrous War- riors’ play, as if they had just witnessed a terrible car accident.
And if you think the “Splash Brothers” are the most dangerous Warriors twosome (with Klay Thompson, they combined for 64 points), you might be wrong, that honor might go to Draymond Green and his mother, Mary Babers-Green, whose tweeting was en fuego.
When Andre Iguodala hit a nice shot, it was, “IGGY-DOLLA IGGY-DOLLA HOLLA.”
Green, who flirted with a triple-double, and who is about to be hailed as the NBA’s bust-out superstar, said his mom is so wound up after tweeting her son’s team to victory that she’s still tweeting him at 3 in the morning.
That’s all part of the fun. The Warriors will have their fun and unwind, and relax and heal up this week, as they await the second round of the playoffs.
Now the Warriors come home and get ready.
Kerr said he’s going to give himself a brief breather before he starts scouting the next foe, although when he said he was going to fly to Cabo for a week and rejoin the team in time for the playoffs, I think he was kidding.
He did say he would watch Game 4 on the flight home.
It may have looked easy, a sweep of the No. 8 seed Pelicans, but the Warriors never for a second conceded victory to themselves. Way too much at stake. The best team in basketball has something to live up to.
They celebrated big plays, they enjoyed the win, but there was none of the fun, schoolyard type celebrating you saw at times in the regular season.
Nobody comes to New Orleans for business, but the Warriors did. It will be fun and loose on the plane ride home, but while they were here, they were as wild and crazy as insurance salesmen sweating out commissions.
Now the focus of the hoops world is about to zero in on your Warriors. You know all about them, but they’re still newcomers, who are about to get the full star treatment.
They’ll enjoy it, but you don’t have to worry about them kissing off the opportunity of a lifetime because they don’t realize what’s at the end of the rainbow, and how hard it will be to get there.
The fans here came Saturday to love him and hate him. ... You could hear the Curry Sigh from the crowd, the “oh-my-god” expectation.