Shorthanded Warriors almost upset the Heat, but throw it away

This is not what Dub Nation wanted. But is it what the Warriors needed?

Editor’s note: After the Warriors suffering back-to-back Florida losses, it’s time summon the beast himself, Duncan Morrow. This DNHQ sophomore returns back to our lands to pontificate on the current state of your Golden State Warriors. Let ‘em know Duncan!

Every few games I force myself to consider how difficult it must be to be a young player on this Warriors team. Not in terms of basketball – Steph Curry and now Jimmy Butler make things easy on their teammates, via drawing historic defensive attention and sometimes-annoying levels of unselfishness, respectively. But you are always a satellite orbiting a planet, and everyone expects that orbit to be as consistent and reliable and unsurprising as possible.

When you’re playing with them, your young career isn’t about you anymore, it’s about maximizing them. The standard you are held to is “what did you do for Steph Curry today?”, and it’s hard to find the balance between finding yourself as a basketball player and being forced in a box for the sake of a 37 year old who will already live in the annals of basketball history until the sun burns out.

This is good and right for the sake of playing Good Winning Basketball, but I understand why certain players, Kuminga and Podziemski, chafe against those expectations. But I also consider how the players who accept the role of “connector who does the little things” – Moody, Richard, Post, Santos, also Podziemski – don’t have the experience to scale up when they can’t count on that gravitation pull. The Warriors’ young players are expected to wait for shots to be created for them. What happens when there’s no one around to create the shot? Do you just wait in a corner, waiting for a drive and kick that will never come? Are you expected to suddenly be the guy driving and kicking?

I was thinking about that a lot during the game against Orlando, when basically all the players forced into the complementary box failed to show up against a team full of young players who had been given the studio space to explore their game and figure out who they are. The Orlando players had been given the permission to lose for the sake of development, and are still in the middle of a long runway where losing would not be the end of the world. They had an opportunity to try to extend their games, and if it didn’t work, no one really cared that much.

Does that change who you are as a player? If Moses Moody, a usually-excellent (tonight excluded) complementary player and fifth starter, had that same freedom, would he be a different player today?

In the first quarter of Wednesday’s game against the Heat, I was sure that would be the story of the game. Without any of the Warriors’ all-stars available, Kerr was forced to run lineups full of guys who are only expected to be, at best, the fourth option. Quality players all, but that’s casting a lot of people whose usual gameplan is either “pass to Steph Curry and run around” or “pass to Jimmy Butler and space out” into the wilderness.

The result was a team that looked categorically unable to score on their own. While they played good defense, the Warriors started a staggering 6-28 on field goals. Kerr’s patented motion offense devolved down into passing around the perimeter aimlesslessly until, oh jeez, it’s been 20 seconds, someone please take a shot. The Warriors had punted this game by sitting all the vets, so this was to be expected, but awful basketball to watch. The saving grace was that defense was good. Also as to be expected when you’re starting five players whose primary role on a real NBA team is to defend.

Something shifted in the second quarter, though. The Warriors didn’t really get any better on offense, but a few of those late-shot clock heaves started to go in and the defense tightened up further. The Heat, almost fully healthy, just minus Tyler Herro, almost seemed a little stunned that a team so short-handed was actually playing with energy and competitiveness. We’ve been on the other side of that plenty of times, but it’s fun when it happens to someone else. Primary credit for that, of course, goes to Pat Spencer – a man so competitive that I’ve never seen him play more than 15 minutes in a game without sparking a fight. He must be saying some absolutely heinous stuff.

Spencer is a very flawed player, which is why he’s on a two-way contract and drives a 2012 Honda CRV, but he is also a real shot creator. In absence of Steph and Jimmy, just having that skillset on the floor is enough to get the offense into first gear. He’s not a fifth starter who “does the little things right” and “plays his role” – he is aggressive and ball-dominant. The bar for being an aggressive and ball-dominant NBA player is very high and he doesn’t play much for a reason. But you can feel the energy shift when he comes onto a floor full of guys who would clearly prefer to sit in the corner and occasionally cut.

The miracle continued into the third quarter, as Quintin Post started to shake out of the funk he’s been in and make shots. Post would go 4-4 in the quarter, making two threes and continuing to play increasingly solid defense. Suddenly the Warriors were in the lead, and the audible crowd noise shifted into the sort of tenor that happens when fans are concerned they’re about to watch an extremely embarrassing loss. The Warriors pushed the lead to 5 by the end of the 3rd quarter.

But, of course, it all came crashing down at once. The Heat defense tightened up and started running a zone defense and this motley collection of fifth starters did not know how to deal with it at all. The players began throwing the ball around the gym, turning over the ball like crazy on what should have been simple passes – an intercepted casual pass from Buddy Hield in the backcourt, overthrowing skip-passes to the corner into the crowd, missing a cutter by eight feet.

Quintin Post has been trying to do this point-center hub role on offense, Jokic-lite, and while it’s been awesome at times, he racked up three turnovers in six minutes in the fourth and got benched for his trouble. Generally, the solution for the Warriors when they start turning the ball over like this is to put Butler in and let him calm the game down. With no Butler available, the Warriors never calmed down.

The Heat were able to turn on the jets and run away with the game, and the Warriors had no jets left to turn on. Frankly, the Warriors just had no business winning a game where they shot 35% from the field. The lack of reliable creation and shot-making doomed them from the start, and the high-effort play was encouraging but unsustainable. Such is what happens when you punt the second end of a back-to-back.

In the end, the story of the game was that, while role players are great and important, you can’t build the entire plane out of role players. The Warriors end their road trip 3-3, and will (finally!) return to a five game homestand starting Friday, hopefully as a more complete team.