Preview: Shifted expectations, another Play-in
Golden State eeks into post-season - first must-win game vs. Clippers and Kawhi
The Golden State Warriors came into this season with high hopes, but an uneasy path built on a bunch of old legs and contingency plans. The season has not played out as the best case scenario, and yet despite all the injuries and setbacks, the Warriors have a shot. It’s a long shot, but it is a shot.
The Warriors will need to win two do-or-die games to advance into the first round of the playoffs. Should they win, they’ll get the honor of facing the OKC Thunder.
On the flip side, a loss wouldn’t sit all that poorly with most. The Warriors have endured a cursed injury-ridden season that only compares to the disastrous playoff run that included catastrophic injuries to both Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson. What survives is a skeleton crew full of literal replacement-level players, even making the play-in is a victory of sorts.
“I think it is fair to wonder organizationally whether it’s better for them to lose,” [Anthony] Slater continued, noting the Dallas Mavericks loss in the play-in tournament last year, which landed them the No. 1 pick and Cooper Flagg. “If the Warriors lose, they keep their lottery odds — 9.4 percent chance to jump into the top four [picks] this draft.”
Given the season, it’s not completely defeatist to begin looking towards the off-season, rather than what may come to pass if the Warriors are able to get through today with a win.
That’s not what anyone is here for, but it’s a nice silver lining.
Anyways, the path would have to go through the Clippers, and then the Portland Trail Blazers? Oh my God it’s the Phoenix Suns! What a wild pair of initial Play-in games! Anyways… step one: beat the Clippers, please.
GAME DETAILS
WHO: Golden State Warriors at Los Angeles Clippers
WHEN: Wednesday, April 15th; 7pm PST
WATCH: Amazon Prime
Embrace the uncertainty
There’s a lot about the world that is out of our control. When there are such enormous slides in fortune, expectations should also shift. Without Jimmy Butler, the Warriors may have been a plucky, dangerous playoff opponent. But after Moses Moody went down as well, it created an enormous hole in the roster (and our hearts). It’s ironic that now that Golden State finally has a couple of super talented bigs to pair with Steph Curry, they’ve lost almost all of their wing players. They’re missing their number two option on offense and a couple of primary defenders.
What defined success when the season started is no longer relevant. The targeted outcomes may not have shifted - get into the playoffs, give Curry a chance to shine again and carry the team - but the expectations sure have. Tenth seed is not good. As pointed out in that quote from Anthony Slater in the intro, there’s a valid argument that the team would be better off never having made the play-in, much less advancing past tonight’s game.
The Dynasty is crumbling. The outcome of this year isn’t the final chapter, but you can feel the end of the book coming. After achieving the greatest heights of success, Golden State is now a bottom dweller. Scrappy? Sure. But living at the bottom; or at least middle. Since the Tournament-happy Adam Silver implemented the Play-in format, the Warriors have found themselves scraping for a shot in four of the six possible seasons. I haven’t double checked, but that’s probably a record.
But Curry was sanguine about this scraping of the bottom of the barrel, especially after this season:
"This is such a unique year just because of the way it's gone. It's not like we've underperformed; we've just been hit with so many injuries that your expectation had to shift because of availability."
Expectations had to shift because of availability
This is Universal.
My wife’s company just laid off thousands. My day job just had another year of record-setting profits, soaring stock prices… and responded by cutting jobs and giving the CEO another $5million per year. This isn’t to draw any pity, we are all fine, but it’s hard not to notice how similar the post-contact reality is at our day jobs, and what the Warriors are going through.
How can you be expected to do the same work with less people?
Sure, bring in new folks, fill the vacant positions, but it will take time to rebuild capacity. In the interim, some pain is to be expected. That’s the cost of doing business, and businesses aren’t generally run by folks that are all that concerned about the people that work for them as much as they are concerned about maximizing extracted value.
What we are seeing in Golden State is what we’d refer to at my day job as “minimum viable outcome.” The season went sideways. Plans went awry, were replaced by other contingencies, and then those also fell through.1 And somehow, the Warriors still find themselves with a decent shot at the post-season. Success has been redefined. But the plane ain’t going down just yet! There wouldn’t be a word for “skeleton crew” if those same crews weren’t able to sail.
The Specifics
So let’s take a look at what’s left here for the Warriors, because despite the setbacks and challenges, this is a winnable game. But looking at the team’s stance right now, it’s not a do-or-die so much as a win-or-go-home vibe.
On Sunday, coach Steve Kerr came right out and said it: Curry, Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford will all play fewer than 40 minutes in the “must-win” game.2 If this season is to be saved by a miracle, the Warriors refuse to overextend themselves to meet it. That’s the lovely thing about these crazy single-elimination games: anything can happen. What if the Warriors get red hot from deep? Or the Clippers go cold? Odds and chances matter a little less when it’s just a single stab into the ether.
At the top, Curry and Green carry a ton of credentials, and both have shown that they can still be impactful. Curry, in particular, has aged well, and defenses still struggle to stop him - frequently choosing instead to slow him down at the cost of other sacrifices.
Green historically has been the center fulcrum that this pivot has swung around, but his lack of shooting (41.8% overall, 32.6% from deep, 71% at the line) has hampered his effectiveness this season. Actually, Green’s downward trend extends well beyond the current season, and has contributed to the strong showing of Podziemski, among others. Instead, Golden State is going to be looking around their roster for others to create advantages around Curry.
I was talking to a coworker today about Kuminga. He’s thriving in Atlanta, but it’s a bench role - the exact same situation the Warriors had been asking Kuminga to occupy here. These decisions frequently go beyond just how good a player is at basketball, and the fit around Curry - and how he works within Kerr’s system - has been a make-or-break decision point for a lot of players that have passed through the franchise.
The Warriors have been shouting from rooftops about Podz playing all 82 games; one of only 18 players in the NBA to do so. If everything starts with Curry, then Podz seems to be one of the critical X-Factor players. If he thrives against the Clippers, it bodes well. Over the course of the season, he averaged around 14 points, 5 rebounds, and 4 assists per game. That’s solid enough, and more importantly, reliable.
We’ve seen the Clippers and coach Tyronn Lue often enough to know what’s coming. The top priority of the defense will be to take away shots from Curry. It’s not so much about playing tight defense, but moreso that they want to over-index on Curry so much that it creates an imperative for Warriors’ offense to look elsewhere. Finding the ball in Green’s hands in these situations, historically, has been mixed. As often as Green’s been able to break down the defense, he’s recently found himself more and more sticky. With no threat of a shot, and no shooting or shot creation around him, it became all too easy to predict where the ball was going to go next.
Not so much anymore. Of course Green will play a large role in tonight’s game, but watch for the Warriors to leverage their dynamic dribblers to take advantage of the windows that the defense is offering. So look for Podz, and Pat Spencer and De’Anthony Melton to play heavy minutes - if they can stay on the floor.
That’s because size is going to be the other main dynamic to watch for this evening. Basketball is a fascinating sport to watch sometimes because there’s a truly dynamic play between playing big and playing fast. Ideally, you’d like to have a freakish team where every position can do both, but most rosters have to compromise.
On paper, the Clippers are the bigger team.3 But squint closer and maybe they’re not that far apart after all.
Editor’s note: Ugh, damnit. I checked. Clippers aren’t necessarily going to be playing bigger, Zubac got traded:
Now, the Clippers traditionally start Lopez at center, who is 7-foot-1, but only averages 3.6 rebounds per game and spends most of his time behind the 3-point line. He’s flanked by Leonard, Derrick Jones Jr., Kris Dunn and Darius Garland. That’s a smaller but faster and more athletic group than Golden State.
On Sunday, Kerr started Melton and Podz alongside Curry, with Green and Porzingis in the front court. That game had the luxury of no Kawhi, and Kerr even admitted that the team was intentionally not going to make certain adjustments if they’d reveal tactical game plan details.
Which is where the diamond in the rough of this season’s team comes in. Gui Santos. He’s been phenomenal and exceeded expectations all season, but this will be his first real test of reliability. WHO is going to cover Kawhi?
Presumably, Green will get the initial assignment. But it’s not at all clear that the Warriors are going to be able to really contain Kawhi Leonard - who’s been central to the resurgence of the Clippers. So if the concession here is going to be a constant swivel and pivot defense by committee, the dearth of wings means that Golden State is likely going to want Santos to play a big role in these games.
The moveable elements for Golden State - Horford, Gary Payton, Spencer perhaps even Will Richard - will be used to adjust to what’s working or not… or be a final gamble if the team begins to lose contact with a very hot Clippers squad.
In the end, basketball is a pretty simple sport, and the matchups and individual performances should be epic. This isn’t just about the Warriors. Both of these teams feature a cool parallel story about the line between riding what works, and pivoting to what’s new.
The Warriors spent the first half of this season locked into the plan. Wait for Melton and Horford (and then Seth Curry too4). Eventually, everything fell apart. Butler’s injury caused a shockwave, but Kuminga’s situation was demanding a trade regardless. Porzingis arriving injured was the first transition, and then the Moody injury further deepened the trench.
Golden State has had to dig in deep, but they’ve found a tough core interior here, that they believe can work - even at the highest level of competition.
If you missed it, the Clippers season was also defined by a pivot as they tried to stick with building around Kawhi, even through his injuries.
It was a super weird season in LA, as the team started off slow (6-21), then got super hot (15-3) and then decided to trade James Harden. They did it to secure Darius Garland (and perhaps to avoid the playoff curse that walks in James Harden’s shoes). Garland has been worth every penny and more, giving the Clippers a legit scoring punch and elite shooting that’s opened up the floor. He’s slid right in as one of their main offensive guards, putting up 20+ a night, hitting over 50% from the floor, and becoming a replacement centerpiece.
This is what it all funnels into. Not the version of the season anyone drew up back in October, but the one they’ve been forced to live through - stripped down, reshaped, and redefined on the fly. The injuries didn’t just take players off the floor, they dragged expectations down with them, piece by piece, until “contender” quietly became “survivor.” And yet, here they are anyway. A franchise caught between timelines, with the old pillars still standing and just enough new pieces trying to prove they belong in whatever comes next.
It’s messy. It’s incomplete. It’s probably not sustainable. But I can’t wait to watch it. One game, maybe two, to justify the grind of a season that refused to cooperate. And then all bets are off.
Whether this is a last gasp of something fading or the early flicker of something being rebuilt5 almost doesn’t matter tonight. All of it; the chaos, the recalibration, the stubborn refusal to fold - collapses into this single moment, where the only thing left to do is play and see what’s still there.
Prediction(s)
Start with the obvious: this only works if Steph bends the game.
Everything the Clippers want to do defensively is built around loading up on him early, top-locking, blitzing, forcing the ball out of his hands and living with the consequences. So what goes right for the Warriors isn’t just Steph scoring 35, it’s Steph breaking the coverage structure. That means quick decisions, deep range leveraging his absurd range to warp the geometry of the floor; and most critically, eviscerating doubles before they can fully coalesce. If he’s decisive, the Clippers’ “take Steph away” plan turns into a chain reaction of rotations they have to survive for 48 minutes. Well, no more than 40 minutes, per the coach. But if it works, you live with whatever happens in those other 8 minutes.
The Clippers are going to tilt everything toward Steph, which means guys like Podz, Melton, Spencer, Porzingis (or whoever is out there) have to win the math battle. Hit open threes, keep the ball moving, and most importantly, punish closeouts with ruthlessly efficient outcomes.
It’s hard. Not impossible. Dubs in one.
I do find myself missing Buddy Hield.
You see why we are just calling this one “win or go home”?
I’ve done absolutely no research to back this statement up, but it feels right.
Though he proved much less impactful, Seth Curry still represented a plan roster spot for most of the season.
Adam Silver, we humbly ask for that top pick!