Comeback follows Leonard’s injury
The most stunning scene in a game defined by the improbable came midway through the third quarter Sunday afternoon. With his team up big on the Warriors, San Antonio forward Kawhi Leonard trudged to the locker room with an apparent left ankle injury.
Even without the MVP candidate Leonard on the floor, the Warriors faced a daunting task: digging out of a 23-point, second-half hole against one of the only teams that has consistently given them problems in the Steve Kerr era.
“We didn’t come back to the bench all excited because Kawhi wasn’t out there,” Warriors forward Kevin Durant said after his team’s 113-111 triumph in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals. “We knew we had to go try to take this game no matter what.”
After largely breezing through the first two rounds of the playoffs, Golden State trailed in the first half Sunday by as many as 25 points, shooting 34.2 percent and making just 13 field goals, only two of them three-pointers.
The turning point came when, with 7:55 left in the third quarter, Leonard missed a
corner jumper and landed on awkwardly on the side of Zaza Pachulia’s foot, drawing a foulu but spraining the left ankle he had hurt in Game 5 of the Spurs’ series against the Rockets.
Leonard made his free throws, trudged to the visitors’ locker room, and in less than four minutes the Warriors cut the deficit from 23 points to five with an 18-0 run.
“We always know that, at some point, we can string some stops together and put the ball in the hole,” Draymond Green said. “That’s just the way we always feel.”
The Spurs had been handing the Warriors the sort of pummeling Golden State has doled out much of the season.
But Leonard, who had 26 points and eight rebounds in 24 minutes, didn’t return, and the Spurs began to lose track of Curry.
The reigning MVP poured in 19 of his game-high 40 points in the third quarter. The Warriors scored nearly as many points in those 12 minutes (39) as they had in the entire first half (42).
The Spurs wouldn’t go away after the Warriors’ 18-0 run, though, pulling back in front by 11 at the start of the fourth and holding the Warriors at bay until Durant took control midway through the final quarter, scoring 10 straight Golden State points to cut the deficit to three.
A Shaun Livingston dunk and fadeaway jumper, sandwiched around a Dejounte Murry jump shot, and a Durant layup gave the Warriors the lead with 4:09 remaining, their first since leading 8-7 midway through the first quarter.
Golden State would lose the lead a minute and a half later before regaining it on a Green drive and holding off San Antonio for a win that had seemed impossible less than an hour earlier.
Durant scored 12 of his 34 points in the fourth.
“I give our guys credit,” Golden State acting head coach Mike Brown said. “They stayed composed. Not one point in the game did our guys hang their heads.”
It was the largest comeback win in a conference-finals game since the Celtics overcame a 26-point deficit to beat the Nets in Game 3 of the 2002 East finals, and it was the second time in two months that the Warriors had weathered a major deficit to beat the Spurs. Golden State’s March 29 win in San Antonio, when it escaped an early 22-point hole, was its largest comeback win this season until Sunday.
“We never feel like we’re out of a game,” Green said.
The question now is whether Leonard will return for Game 2 on Tuesday. Though San Antonio dominated the Rockets in his absence after losing the two-time Defensive Player of the Year for the last quarter and a half of Game 5 and all of Game 6 in the semifinals, his two-way dynamism was missed against the Warriors on Sunday.