Full disclosure, in case you haven’t seen it: the Golden State Warriors played with two legitimately excellent teams to open their 2020-21 season at Brooklyn Nets and Milwaukee Bucks. Furthermore, Draymond Green, who will directly address two of the Warriors’ most desperate needs, played no part in any of the defeats. Weigh these factors however you want.
Having established that, it would be almost impossible to overstate how bad the Warriors looked at losing their first two games by 65 points combined – the second most uneven start in NBA history, for example. ESPN Stats and Info, second only to the 1987-88 Clippers, who ended in 17-65.
“We didn’t do much,” said Steve Kerr after Golden State’s 138-99 defeat in Milwaukee at Christmas. “It was just scattered and disorganized. I am disappointed in this and I have to take the blame for it.”
Scattered and disorganized is a way of describing it. Another would be to put a graphic warning in the game’s movie, because nobody should enter this type of material without a fair warning. In two games, Kelly Oubre Jr., whom Golden State spent more than $ 40 million, including tax penalties, to acquire after Klay Thompson’s end-of-season injury, has served a bagel from beyond the bow so far.
Zero by 11.
He is 4 out of 24 in the field overall.
Most of Oubre’s shots didn’t even come close. He had three points at Christmas. And it doesn’t get much better from there. Andrew Wiggins is an insignificant 2 out of 10 on 3-point ground, while shooting 29 percent overall, and sometimes making dribbling difficult. Even Steph Curry is laying bricks 4 by 20 out and 34 percent overall. He was open to catch and shoot at Christmas, and he threw a ball in the air.
A familiar frustration is already arising about whether Curry should be handling the ball more and trying to create a pick and roll attack. Tell me among the contingent that you believe he should be in, as the Warriors no longer have the types of passers needed to maximize their off-ball effect, or secondary breeders capable enough to break the defense when Curry’s movement is interrupted , which often does with a few simple switches off the ball.
But there are layers to this debate, namely, what is the ceiling in an individual show and whether Curry still has the ability to consistently create and sink superhuman photos. He hung 47 points in the Raptors in game 3 of the 2019 finals with Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson off the pitch, proof that he still has hero ball in his bag. But he is 32 years old. He has been hurt in recent years. It doesn’t seem to have the same type of explosion in small spaces.
There is also a rhythm factor. Look at Damian Lillard, who basically spent most of last year in a pick-and-roll shooting zone, from which he can only see an edge that looks as wide as the ocean. Curry was in that type of zone once, picking and rolling 29 percent of his possessions in 2014-15, when he won his first MVP, and 26 percent of his possessions the following season, when he won his second MVP and dropped a 402-point league record of 3 points.
In Curry’s last healthy regular season, he chose and rolls just 21% of his assets, synergistically. Forget the proximity of a Lillard or Trae Young, guys who have full authority over their crimes; Curry’s pick-and-roll frequency in 2018-19 was almost 20% less than that of his brother Seth.
There’s something to be said for not having the same kind of creative feeling in dribbling when you haven’t had to play like that in a long time. Curry spent three seasons becoming an out-of-the-ball killer while creating space for Kevin Durant to master whatever isolation possessions the Warriors distributed, and maybe you can’t just go back in time four or five years because suddenly the Warriors need you to be who you used to be.
Even though Curry may still be that player, Kerr doesn’t want him to be. He believes in inclusion as strongly as Mark Jackson believed in the isolation of incompatibility, and there is no evidence of any of the technicians backing down on his principles. Kerr was much more successful with his principles than Jackson. He is resting on this record and believes that the Warriors, particularly Oubre and Wiggins, will recover.
“Kelly will be fine. Andrew will be fine,” said Kerr after the Christmas beating. “It will shake with time.”
Perhaps this is true. Maybe Green will come back and Curry will have a functional dowel at the top of the attack. Perhaps the defense, which needs to be in the top 10 for the Warriors to have any chance of competing for a place in the playoffs, but instead looks more like an expressway in two games, take a magical turn. It’s better, because so far the terrible numbers somehow don’t even capture how truly terrible the Warriors were.