Kings force anybody but Curry to beat them, anybody but Curry crushes Kings 130-104

Curry makes history with 4000th three!

On a night where Curry made his 4000th 3-pointer, the Kings’ aggressive defense made the actual story of the game Draymond Green, Quinten Post, and especially Jonathan Kuminga.

All the all-time greats get to have some lore surrounding their early years. Hack writers like myself love that sort of stuff. Entire books get written about Jordan’s college years. You think about Lebron’s high school and you think about national reporters from the biggest publications in the world filling up a high school gymnasium to watch a 15 year old play, hoping in a decade or two they can cite “the moment they knew he was special”.

Part of being a great is that people try to find anecdotes that could fit into your superhero origin story. One of my favorite pieces of Steph Curry lore that gets repeated every now and then is the Davidson game versus Loyola back in 2008.

Loyola’s coaches, faced with stopping one of the most dominant college basketball players of all time and the nations’ current leading scorer, decided that if they were going to go down, it would be to Anybody But Steph. You might have heard of the Box-and-One defense. Loyola ran the Triangle-and-Two defense the entire time Steph was on the floor – two defenders glued to Steph at all time, even if he’s just sitting in the corner taking a breather, while the rest of the team plays three on four.

It may have been the moment Curry started to realize the power of gravity – he decided that it would be best for the team if he just stood in the corner soaking up all the attention while his teammates pummeled the understaffed Loyola defense. Steph was held scoreless, but Davidson still beat Loyola by 30. Selling out shamelessly on Steph doesn’t tend to be a great strategy to actually win a game. Of course, the Loyola coach, Jimmy Patsos, bragged about how in twenty years what they’d remember about the game was that they held Steph scoreless, and you know what? I guess you’re vindicated on that.

I think about that specific game every time I’ve had to watch the Kings play defense against Steph over the past three years or so. Every team does their best to stop Steph at all costs, he’s Steph, that’s what happens. Again, when people cite gravity, that’s what that is. I don’t think there’s another team out there that fully commits to selling out on Steph quite as much. The Kings are constantly top-locking him, sending two if he looks even slightly threatening.

Frankly, it used to be a pretty good strategy for dealing with the Warriors, back when their only other playmaker was Podziemski on an island and the role players would look confused and abandoned without the comforting presence of Steph. But the running theme of this little hot stretch has been that the things that used to work against the Warriors don’t work anymore.

The Warriors started out Thursday’s game extremely hot. Draymond opened the game with back-to-back threes, never a good sign for the opponent. As the Warriors got off to a 25-11 lead, most of the damage was done by Draymond, Quinten Post (starting and looking generally excellent on both offense and defense), and the Warriors’ gnarly defense. Butler, Green, and Moody is such a gnarly wing rotation for other teams to deal with, smart and tough and long, and Sacramento looked unable to deal with the flying limbs and grabbing hands.

The most important news of the night was the return of Jonathan Kuminga to that gnarly wing rotation. After a seriously nasty ankle sprain on January 4th, the Warriors have been keeping him out of game action until he was 100% recovered and game fit, so he would be as easy to integrate into a rolling team as possible. During the first half, Kuminga was quiet but looked like a natural cog on the team. The first hint of “oh, now Kuminga’s back” was this bully-ball drive on Keon Ellis.

Things started to get a little hairy towards the end of the half, when the Kings’ defense tightened up (especially thanks to outstanding activity by Trey Lyles and Keon Ellis, who both looked awesome at certain points. Hey, Trey Lyles, good for you!). The Warriors looked unable to solve the new defensive wrinkles, turned the ball over again and again, and ended the half with a 23-point lead cut to 10. The defensive activity kept up in the third quarter, and after a couple more turnovers and transition buckets, the Warriors seemed like they were well on their way to blowing a lead against the Kings for the 45th time in three seasons.

But the thing about that level of defensive intensity is that, if it doesn’t come naturally to the personnel, you can usually see it fade after a few minutes. The Kings are not capable of maintaining a lockdown defense. If they were, they wouldn’t be the 19th ranked defense. Q.E.D. After weathering the storm, the Kings went right back to their ways. Hield hit a couple threes to put the Kings back at arms’ length and they would end the third quarter comfortably in command of the game.

What really ended up blowing the game wide open, though, was the fourth quarter stint for the Steph/Moody/Kuminga/Santos/Draymond lineup. I’m assuming in tighter games, Santos’s position will be taken by Butler III (he would sit most of the fourth quarter), but Santos is a very interesting piece to fit in there with his defense and some surprising playmaking (or at least, if not playmaking, the ability to make the right pass to a cutter). With that lineup, after getting warmed back up, Kuminga started dominating. He looked like the fastest and most athletic player on the court again, and the combination of his athleticism and some very smart cutting led to three dunks in ninety seconds of game time.

A lot has been made about the ability for Kuminga to fit onto this team as it rolls towards the playoffs. Stretches like the fourth quarter remind us that, hey, don’t forget, Kuminga’s very clearly one of the four best players on the team. He can do things no one else on this squad can do.

More than that, despite the whinging, he fits with the veteran core in an impressive way. Finding a spot of him is clearly a good problem. Gui Santos, Bradin Podziemski, Quinten Post, and Moses Moody are all awesome developing young players. Buddy Hield and Gary Payton II are excellent role players. And yet, Kuminga shaving their minutes down makes the ceiling of this team significantly higher.

As everyone has noted, since the arrival of Jimmy Butler III, everyone’s roles make sense. No one’s being asked to do too much, to put the franchise on his back and be the mythical Second Star to Steph. That’s covered, now you can just play your game. I’m so excited to see how this simplification helps Kuminga. If he can excel in his role – on ball defense, rebounding, getting to the rim and destroying people, this is a team that can do anything.

Stray Observations:

• Steph got to his 4000th three pointer! I’m a bit of a curmudgeon about this. It’s always fun to throw Steph a party, but also every three point shot he hits has been a record for like three years now. 4000’s a nice round number, but… not that nice. He does have a chance to get to 5000, which I think would genuinely be pretty nuts.

• After being the scapegoat for the fanbase for so long, I really feel the need to underline every single great Buddy Hield game. Buddy was great tonight, especially in terms of defensive activity. Sometimes he can really turn on the jets and ambush guys for steals, it’s an aspect of his game I didn’t really expect coming into this season.

• Quiet game for Jimmy – seven points, five field goal attempts in 28 minutes. He looked like he was taking a backseat for most of the game, very passive. Not a big deal at all when you’re winning and trying to reintegrate a key player.

• Thanks to some hot shooting from three and the defense selling out on Steph, Draymond Green actually led the Warriors in scoring. The last time Draymond Green led a regular season game in scoring was on April 23, 2016. The last time he led the team in scoring in any game? Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals, of course.