Crucial part of Warriors’ season is approaching
OAKLAND >> Despite the drama, despite the injuries, and despite big-time changes to the roster, the Warriors are exactly where everyone presumed they would be as the NBA enters its homestretch this week: they sit in first place in the Western Conference as the overwhelming favorites to win a third straight NBA title.
The first 57 games of the Warriors’ regular season were anything but ho-hum. The final 25 should — in theory — be smoother.
That’s not to say that there won’t be challenges, though. The Warriors will need to strike a delicate balance in the coming weeks to maintain their favorite status.
After five days away from the team facility, the Warriors scrimmaged Wednesday — a rarity amid a jam-packed regular season schedule — ahead of today’s game against the Sacramento Kings. The team looked and sounded fresh.
The Warriors would love to carry that renewed zeal into April and the start of the NBA playoffs — the real season — but that’s wishful thinking. The AllStar Game was only a small reprieve from the grind, which resumes — full-bore — next week, when Golden State embarks on a week-long East Coast trip.
That’s not to say the break was enjoyed in vain. The positive energy on display Wednesday can be channeled.
At the same time, the Warriors are not a fully actualized squad — there are still things they need to put into action before the playoffs start.
The grand challenge for both the Warriors’ coaching staff and players is to manage the seemingly contrasting goals of gearing up for playoff basketball — which they know as well as anyone is a different beast — while also ensuring that they are sufficiently fresh for the tournament.
The keystone: getting the big man as close to 100 percent as possible.
If DeMarcus Cousins looks
like the DeMarcus Cousins of the Pelicans and Kings heading into the playoffs, the Warriors will have too much firepower to be properly challenged in a seven-game series.
That said, Boogie is coming off a catastrophic injury that could very well prevent him from regaining his former form this season (or ever).
For now, conditioning is the issue.
Cousins ran out of gas in the final few games before the All-Star Game. He’s played 11 games so far this season, but in his six most recent games, he’s shot 36 percent and only 15 percent from beyond the arc — all while playing matador-style defense.
It’s not surprising that Cousins hit a wall — despite his impressive performances in his first few games with the Dubs, it would have been ridiculous to expect him to be in midseason shape.
But if Cousins finds his wind and that matador defense remains, the Warriors have a big problem — as we saw in the final few games before the AllStar Game, teams are targeting Cousins on defense with ruthlessly repetitive pick-and-rolls, and the Warriors, even with Draymond Green and Klay Thompson on the court, struggled to compensate. The Warriors’ new starting lineup
— with Cousins at center — has a zero net rating in nine games together. That cannot be the case heading into the playoffs.
Warriors coach Steve Kerr said Wednesday that Cousins will not be on a minutes limit for the rest of the season — an important note, because the Warriors need Cousins to summit that conditioning hill ASAP to find out what his defensive ceiling is.
Until he does, the Dubs are in a holding pattern — that’s because the Warriors’ other goal for the remainder of the regular season is to lock down on the defensive end.
It’s not surprising that the Warriors’ defensive rating is in the lower half of the NBA with 25 games to play — after four straight NBA Finals, they’re coasting more and more in the regular season — but both Kerr and Green acknowledged Wednesday that such form leaves Golden State susceptible in the postseason.
The Warriors have shown flashes of elite-level defense in recent weeks, but now it’s go-time. We’re about to find out if 25 games are enough to establish (or re-establish) a habit — because while the Warriors might be able to outscore anyone, offense is generally unreliable. Defense, on the other hand, is a tried-and-true formula for postseason success, as the Warriors have proven the past four years.
As talented as they might be, the Dubs need
to start melding excellence on both ends — they called it “flipping the switch” last season — ahead of the spring tournament.
Green will quarterback that effort on the court (and try to win a second Defensive Player of the Year Award in the process), but the Warriors coaches (and Green himself) need to be hyper-cognizant of workload in the coming weeks, lest he not be physically capable of carrying the Dubs’ defense in the postseason.
Rest days will likely become normal occurrences in the final eight weeks of the season, not just for Green (whose cacophony of injuries requires them as much as anyone) but for all Warriors’ veterans. Kerr said health, like last year, is the top priority of the final stretch — No. 1 seed be damned.
Oh, and while the Warriors walk this tightrope of rest and full activation the team might add another player — a wing or (if Cousins’ body doesn’t cooperate) a center. Just another thing to factor.
And to think, so many people believe that Kerr’s job is easy.
It might look that way in the long run, but the Warriors can’t waste any time in getting down to business. Twenty-five games might seem like an eternity, but it’ll go in a flash, and how the Warriors handle this stretch — the most important stretch of their peculiar campaign — will likely dictate how the postseason unfolds.