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Consecutive wins for the Warriors over the Suns thanks to a 35-22 edge in the fourth quarter Friday. Warriors find themselves in middle of ‘soap opera’ with offcourt issues.
TEMPE, Ariz. — The Warriors are keenly aware that the NBA is a soap opera with games serving as commercial breaks. Thanks to its three championships in four years and a roster loaded with All-Stars in their prime, Golden State is the show’s protagonist.
“There’s so much interest in things that go way beyond the basketball court,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said after shootaround Friday at Arizona State. “It used to be you just had to talk about basketball. We’re all actors in a soap opera. We really are. We have to deal with that part of it.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy. The All-Star break is a week away, but Golden State already has been at the center of two of the NBA season’s biggest nonbasketball stories: Draymond Green’s mid-November spat with teammate Kevin Durant, and Durant’s decision to call out the media during his postgame news conference Wednesday.
Since then, sports talk radio, ESPN and social media have focused on Durant’s frustrations with coverage of his pending free agency this summer. Seemingly lost amid all the chatter is the fact that the Warriors went into Friday’s game having won 13 of their past 14 games.
“There’s only a select few that have the experiences that (Durant) has, that I have where anything you say, anything you do — body language, the look on your face, all of that stuff — is just picked apart left and right, especially when certain narratives have been created in terms of where you are in your career,” said guard Stephen Curry, who perhaps understands the microscope Durant is under better than anyone not named LeBron James. “So, there’s a level of awareness of kind of how that is on the day-to-day, the toll it could take and especially when you’re committed to playing basketball at the highest level.
“Because that’s what makes all of this happen to begin with. If you’re not good, if you’re not consistently great and in conversations of being the best player in the league … nobody cares about what you have to say or what you’re doing. There’s some give-andtake. But again, it’s all about what you do on the floor that matters.”
The most recent wave of Durant-related media coverage came as no big surprise to the Warriors, who have been a focal point of the NBA circus for a half-decade. The team’s approach won’t change. Just as they did when Green’s oncourt argument with Durant dominated the news cycle for more than a week, the Warriors will keep the focus on what they can control.
Kerr dismissed Durant’s contentious news conference as “blowing off some steam” before telling media to “give him a pass.” Curry, for his part, has little doubt that Golden State will move past its latest distraction.
“We attack everything as business as usual in terms of winning games,” Curry said. “Nobody on this team needs to be babysat. It’s just a matter of, ‘Let’s continue to move forward and focus on what matters to us as a team.’ That’s doing our job on the floor, continuing to have each others’ backs, communicate on and off the court. That’s again what we can control. That’s the only thing that matters to us. Everything has to be funneled into winning a championship.
“I know KD is committed to that mission, and everyone else on the team is as well. No distraction, nothing that doesn’t happen on that floor is going to derail our focus. I’m proud of the way our whole team has handled this whole season. There’s a lot that’s been going on.”
“It had used to talk to be about you just basketball. (Now) we’re all actors in a soap opera.”
Steve Kerr, Warriors head coach