Warriors need to help Curry win scoring title
What are the Warriors playing for?
Is it a shot at a title? Seeding in the play-in tournament? Respectability? Professional pride?
What about individual accolades?
The way I see it, the Warriors are in a peculiar spot. They’re too good to be truly bad and too bad to be truly good. The team’s .500 record and place in the standings reflect that.
So they might as well spend the rest of their regular-season days together going all-in on getting Steph Curry the scoring title.
No, it won’t salvage this season, but it will make it memorable in a positive way. And that’s likely the best the Warriors can do at this point.
Yes, you’ll have to forgive me for betting against Curry and Draymond Green — something I swore I’d never do — but the truth is undeniable: their supporting cast is too limited and Green has been too inconsistent this season to expect a surprise playoff run from these Dubs.
They’ll make their inclusion in the postseason respectable, no doubt. Their leaders are champions and the inexperienced Warriors are, at the very least, pros. Who knows, perhaps they even make a run at the second round. But I doubt that this Warriors season will result in anything deeply memorable.
Even the end of the regular season looks like it could be a dud.
Remember a few weeks ago when there was the expectation of drama and intrigue in the final few weeks of the season?
Yeah ... that’s not going to happen.
The Warriors have a three-game cushion on the New Orleans Pelicans for the final play-in spot with six games to play. Two of those games, tonight and Saturday, will come against the Oklahoma City Thunder, who could not be tanking any harder, having dropped 18 of their past 19 games.
And seeing as how the Warriors are two Lakers wins away from being mathematically eliminated from landing the No. 6 seed and a spot in the real playoffs, this team’s status is sealed.
So long as the Warriors can play average basketball, they’re in the play-in tournament. And so long as Tuesday night’s ranout-of-gas performance was a one-off and not the team running out gas for the full season, they should play average basketball, making the final week-plus of the season a perfunctory experience.
Yes, it would be nice if the Warriors could sneak in another home game (or two) from the play-in tournament, but is playing at the top of bottom of that bracket really important? A home game might be nice, but Green has already told us that the idea of being a No. 7 seed doesn’t get him out of bed in the morning.
So what’s left for the Warriors this season?
Momentum for next year? That’s hard to justify when James Wiseman is sidelined.
Plus, are we certain that Wiseman is going to be on this team next season? The NBA’s summer free-for-all has yet to start, and he could absolutely be swept up in the frenzy.
No, the best course of attack for the Warriors is to do whatever needs to be done to help Steph win that scoring title. As of Wednesday morning, he has a 0.6 point per game lead over Washington’s Bradley Beal.
Now if that gap closes and requires a David Robinson (71 points in the final game to win the 1994 scoring title), David Thompson, or George Gervin (Thompson scored 73 on the final day of the 1978 season; Gervin scored 63 later in the day to beat him) performance against Memphis on May 16 to claim the throne, so be it. Curry won’t win MVP because of the Warriors’ record, but no one can argue that Curry doesn’t deserve some sort of recognition for this tremendous season of his.
Curry, of course, has been carrying the Warriors all year. There’s not much impediment to letting him fill up the stat sheet, but a change in mindset — a deliberate attempt to have Curry score 50, 60, maybe even 70 is something that the Warriors have never done under Steve Kerr.
There’s nothing to be lost and something to be gained. Put the egalitarian basketball way for a few days and let the man who has done so much for this team and this region do something for himself: let the Chef cook to his heart’s content.