It’s one game, but opening loss can’t be brushed off
SAN FRANCISCO >> We didn’t learn anything in the Warriors’ season-opening loss that, deep down, we didn’t already know.
Yes, all that preseason wishful thinking, all those happy thoughts of the Dubs’ dynasty continuing on into 2019-20 season, and all the wonder of this first season in San Francisco were dealt a blow of harsh reality Thursday night.
The Warriors’ 141-122 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers was a reckoning, an epiphany of the worst kind, a display of worstcase scenarios for the Dubs.
Of the countless things that went wrong in the season opener, two key things stood out: The Warriors played an elite team and Stephen Curry wasn’t elite himself.
Yes, the season started with a double-whammy.
No one looks good making mountains out of molehills, but
I’m hard-pressed to say that the issues the Warriors displayed Thursday were molehills.
They seemed more like characteristics.
The team that was embarrassed on national television Thursday was the team everyone should have reasonably expected. And juxtaposed against the Warriors’ teams that we’ve
seen the last five years, this one looked downright inept.
The Warriors of the recent past made defense their calling card. Yes, they could score points in bunches, but so much of that offense was created by a dynamic, switching, turnover-creating defense.
But these new Warriors were horrific on defense — the kind of bad that can get beaten with transition offense after a made basket.
Add in that they were disjointed and — at best — forced on offense, and you can understand why the Clippers had their way Thursday.
The Clippers team — which wasn’t even at full strength — made the Warriors look like a team that lacks depth, experience, and skill because, frankly, they are a team that lacks depth, experience, and skill.
Yes, Thursday was the worst-case scenario, and I can’t tell you that things will be appreciably better moving forward — that the Warriors we saw Thursday won’t show frequently over the next 81 games.
Neither can Steve Kerr, for what it’s worth.
“This is not a one-off,” Kerr said. “There’s going to be nights like this, this year.”
Nights where they had their doors blown off. Nights where they looked like amateurs playing the pros.
Nights where the defense turns in a losing effort.
For weeks, I’ve been saying that “this is how the other 29 teams have lived” — Kerr even tapped the line, in his own way, Thursday. But I was wrong — the majority of those other teams had better defenses.
The fear that the Warriors lacked perimeter defense is real. The Clippers shot 56 percent — fifty-six percent! — from beyond the arc, needing only a head fake and a pass to get open looks and one more pass to get wide-open shots.
The Warriors’ lack of rim effective rim protection was exposed, too. The Clippers made 80 percent — eighty percent! — of their 36 shots in the paint.
The Clippers could have scored 160 points if they had wanted. They toyed with the Warriors and still posted an effective field goal percentage of 73.8 percent.
For reference, there have been only 11 games in the last 36 years of the NBA where a team has posted a higher EFG.
The Warriors’ five-man defensive performance — no matter which five-man unit was on the court — was the kind of hapless effort that rendered Draymond
Green useless. Arguably the greatest defender of a generation, Green was minus-35 in the game, the worst performance of his 534-game NBA career.
Perhaps things would have been better had Kevon Looney played a full game. He succumbed to an existing hamstring injury in the first half but was playing extremely well before that.
But what qualifies as better for the Warriors? Holding the Clippers under 60 percent field-goal shooting?
The hard truth is that Glenn Robinson III and D’Angelo Russell aren’t going to learn how to be competent defenders anytime soon and they are going to get serious minutes for this team.
Stops are simply not in the cards for this squad, and it’s really hard to win when you can’t stop anyone.
Not being able to score efficiently yourself makes it even harder.
You might look at the Warriors’ final points total and think everything is hunky-dory on that side of things, but you’d be mistaken.
Curry had a bad night. The Clippers blitzed him with two defenders time and time again and, instead of taking what the defense was giving, Curry opted to force things. He turned the ball over on 23 percent of his possessions.
Why was Curry forcing things? Perhaps it was rust — it’s hard to practice for Kawhi Leonard double-teaming you in practice or in preseason games.
But more likely, it was him not trusting his teammates to do the right thing. As the game progressed, there was example after example that justified his failure to trust them. Hesitations, clanked shots, turnovers.
Adding to the despair was the lack of cohesion between Curry and D’Angelo Russell, the new backcourt mates in the absence of Klay Thompson. Curry and Russell seemed to operate separate offenses, even when playing together. Outside of two transition looks, Curry and Russell did not display any two-man game Thursday.
Meanwhile, the duo’s supporting cast — outside of second-year wing Jacob Evans — underwhelmed with their opportunities. This squad has a long way to go before it’s remotely close to efficient.
Maybe things will look better Sunday in Oklahoma City. Perhaps, the Warriors ran into a buzzsaw in the Clippers and things will normalize after some film study and when they play a team that’s closer in talent
But what if that’s not the case? What if Thursday’s loss — like the preseason that preceded it — is a sign of things to come?
If that’s the case, Warriors fans take solace in the fact that it was going to be tough to trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo next summer without a really high draft pick.