G-League Warriors continue death march to the tenth seed, lose to Atlanta

Kuminga’s revenge game was a dud, and the Warriors dropped another one on their final East Coast road trip.

Over the past month I’ve been rereading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in, say, 15 years. I revisit the movies every now and then, which evens out to probably 10+ rewatches, but I’ve never gone back for the books after finishing them for the first time. The movies are an easy comfort – the journey gets tough, but you’re at the epilogue two nights later and it’s all worth it. They go down smooth.

The books are wonderful, obviously, but it’s a much different experience than throwing on the movies. Mainly because they’re about 1,300 pages altogether – at the pace I read, I’m spending weeks and weeks with those tomes, really making them a part of my life. Which is fantastic, but the problem is that you’re spending just about all your leisure time with some miserable-ass hobbits. Instead of getting through the hard parts of the journey in a few hours, passively sitting on your couch, you’re really locked in on dirty, scared, hungry hobbits trudging around Mordor. You get through a couple of chapters, and the next night you’re right back there as things have gotten worse and more miserable. Gollum’s still being a little creep. The hobbits have run out of food. They have to deal with a giant spider. Sam’s alone.

I’m so familiar with these stories that there’s no suspense in how it’s going to end, the Ring’s going to end up in the lava, I know, but before you get there, things get worse and worse and worse. And every night, you’re going to be right back there with Sam and Frodo, increasingly haggard, wandering around the ends of the Earth.

And when I’m not reading, as a respite from that grueling journey, I have to watch the 2025-26 Warriors.

At this point of the season, with the Warriors stuck with a G-League roster, led by Gui Santos and Draymond Green, I’m starting to feel the crushing repetition of these games. I was in no way mentally prepared to tank before the season started – I was an unreasonable optimist about this team. Of course, if this team were to fail, it was always going to be this way: stacking the team with injury-prone legends in the twilight of their careers leaves you wide open to the Season From Hell. I guess I knew that coming in. But having to live with it as a part of my life for months is wearing on me.

Once the injury report came out and Porzingis was listed as out, I really had no hope for yesterday’s game against the Hawks – Atlanta is one of the hottest teams in the league, having won 13 of their last 15. I haven’t been paying them close attention this season, but they’ve come out of their mediocre years with a roster stacked with interesting, athletic NBA talent. Even when their star, Jalen Johnson, isn’t playing, I see an army of athletic scoring wings that can jump over any player left on the Warriors roster. The Warriors have nearly run out of NBA players. But here we are, and the games still have to be played.

For the first half of the game, the Warriors managed to stay tight with the surging Hawks, playing energetic defense and knocking down their shots. Dyson Daniels looked too athletic for anyone on the team to keep up with, but generally when Dyson Daniels is the leading scoring threat you’re in a good place. But coming out of halftime, the Hawks starting lineup started taking the game seriously for approximately six minutes, popping off a 25-5 run that effectively ended the game.

This is a pretty common pattern for bad teams – you need maximum effort to stick with a better team, and even a momentary lapse in focus can end the game. The Warriors’ effort lapsed, the Hawks took advantage, and they got away with playing six minutes of high-intensity basketball on a Saturday night.

Part of the skill that you have to develop when faced with a Season From Hell is finding reasons to watch, pieces of the game that you can zero in on and say, “hey, we may be losing by 30 but this specific thing is giving me hope and providing me with entertainment”. I’ve found the two things that get me through are narrative and scouting. Narrative: is there an interesting storyline here? Scouting: will these overlooked players who wouldn’t be given a chance otherwise find a place on a more normal team?

There was a very clear and interesting national narrative for this game, at least: the revenge of Jonathan Kuminga after the trade deadline. That’s not a fun narrative for me. In fact, I was actively dreading it – either Kuminga would go off, and we’d have to see a million repetitive headlines about how stupid Steve Kerr is, or he wouldn’t and people would laugh at Kuminga, a good dude who I bear no ill will towards. We ended up with the second option, as Kuminga would go 1-9 with two points and a -6 +/-. The Hawks looked dominant when he was off the floor, and evenly matched with this bad team when he was subbed in.

What I should have seen coming with this narrative is that it turns out… nobody seems to care. The Warriors, especially without Steph, are so far away from the center of NBA discourse that the lack of a Kuminga Revenge Game didn’t even seem to register.

I’ve gotten so used to the Warriors being national media darlings over the past decade that I’m surprised how much they’ve dropped off of the radar, even though that makes perfect sense given the quality of the team. It’s just sickos like us who are paying attention at this point. And the Kuminga discourse has been so overplayed over the past four years, people are sick of it and want it to go away. It’s old news.

There’s one old Simpsons joke I keep coming back to whenever this Warriors team manages to get national headlines or flukes into a national TV game: Lenny in his disgusting single-room apartment, in his underwear, pleading “please don’t tell anyone how I live”. The good news is that apparently, hey, we’re so irrelevant no one cares about how we live. It’s freeing!

So, the other reason to turn on the TV is more important: scouting. And I’m pretty happy with the level of under-the-radar talent this team has managed to find. Gui Santos, of course, is the crown jewel, but he had a very quiet game (he may be running out of energy – being thrust from the deep bench to a 36-minute-per-game ball-dominant starter is a hard ask, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts hitting a version of the rookie wall as he reaches the limits of his conditioning). But I’ve been really impressed with the two-way guys brought up from the G-League – particularly LJ Cryer and Nate Williams.

As anyone who watched March Madness last year knows, Cryer has a legitimate elite NBA skill in his shooting. He’s managed to translate that to the NBA, and combined with him not being a terrible defender, he should get a career in the league. He’s not quite the level of threat Jared McCain is off-ball, but Jared McCain on the Thunder is a good comp for what his role could be – good teams need a guy who can run around, get relatively open, and reliably knock down a three. Cryer can do that. I hope that good team will be the Warriors, because they’ve needed that badly.

I’m very intrigued by Nate Williams. Similar to Gui Santos, he strikes me as a guy who can do a little bit of everything without being elite at any one skill – he can dribble a little, knock down an open shot, defend with intensity and effort, cut at the right time. Those guys can be very useful but get easily overlooked. At 6’5”, he’s a little undersized for a wing but I haven’t seen him get physically dominated by bigger wings. He’s already 27 and has bounced around the league for years, so I assume the consistency has been a problem, but he now has a runway to make the case for himself as a real NBA contributor. He would score a career-high 19 points on near-perfect 8-9 shooting and excellent defense, the best player on the court for the Warriors.

So, the death march that is this season will continue on for another 11 games. Steph Curry is looking like he’ll be back for Wednesday’s game against the Nets, so at least the low point of the season is likely over soon. With Steph, even as the 10th seed there’s always a possibility of a light at the end of the tunnel and a couple of good play-in (or playoff??) moments. But in the meantime, I’m starting to get very sick of trudging up the mountain.