Warriors' desperate comeback bid falls short in Porzingis' GSW debut vs Celtics

A dreary box score belies a spirited effort from a Golden State team that has a lotta fight in them despite not having a lot of firepower with Curry and Butler sidelined with injury.

Always a magnet for discourse, the NBA has been subject to an even stronger winter storm of takes in sports media lately. With the end of the NFL season, the arrival of the NBA All-Star Game and the recent actions of some tanking franchises, journalists and content creators have been eager to fill the conversation void with existential discussions about the health and future of basketball.

While pundits and fans alike argue incessantly over these topics, the most important element missing from all of those debates is the recognition of the critical role of expectations.

Tanking is only a problem if you have the reasonable expectation that each game means something, whether it be for the enjoyment of watching a competitive contest, for meaningful analysis to better understand the sport or to affect the standings which affect the championship. Player participation, load management, and rest are indicators of the softness of modern players—but only if you don’t understand how much the geometry of the game has changed and you expect everyone to play every single night like it’s the ‘90s.

Your mileage from the All-Star Game and Dunk Contest will vary depending on how seriously you expect the participants to take those exhibitions and how much you expect to be entertained by those events.

This even affects postseason awards and the rookie draft. James Wiseman is a bust, Jonathan Kuminga is a source of frustration and Quinten Post is a massive success because of the different levels of expectations that accompanied their arrival to the NBA. The Coach and Executive of the Year awards are only ever awarded relative to preseason expectations. In all honesty, they should be renamed the “Outperformed Vegas Over-Unders Most Dramatically” awards. Almost everything about the NBA becomes easier to understand once you properly include the context of presumption.

Just as with the wider NBA landscape, how you feel about last night’s loss to the Boston Celtics depends entirely on your expectations. If you saw the news from earlier yesterday that Stephen Curry’s runner’s knee will keep him out an additional 10 days at minimum, you probably did not expect the Warriors to have any hope against the team currently second in the Eastern Conference.

But if the first quarter shooting performance by Will Richardson and recent scrappy victories against the Suns and Grizzlies made you think the Warriors might actually have a chance to win this game, then the final 121-110 score was a big letdown.

If Brandin Podziemski taking and making an early three-pointer off the dribble made you think we might see the rare aggressive, forceful Podz while the game was in the balance, the return of passive Podz who misses the rim completely during a second-quarter disaster run by the Dubs might have had you kicking yourself for ever believing in the first place.

As a devoted Warriors fan, it would have at least seemed reasonable to expect Draymond Green to have more professional pride than he showed last night, but perhaps that is a silly notion given the way he loafed through the 2021-22 season following Steph’s hand injury (except for one of the greatest regular season wins of the past few years, the Christmas Day defeat of the Houston Rockets).

If you remember the way Jaylen Brown’s suspect handle hamstrung the Celtics during the Finals matchup the following year, you would be impressed and maybe exasperated that nobody on the Warriors could stop him from getting to the rim.

But if you were expecting the Celtics to blow out the Dubs because Brown scored 30, then the loss feels even worse because it was the absurd shooting of Sam Hauser and Payton Pritchard (a combined 10-for-16 from three) that created separation for Boston and stomped out any Warriors comeback chances down the stretch.

At least, if you expect Gui Santos to be a starting-caliber NBA player who reads the game very well, you were not surprised but still delighted when he made this simple yet beautiful assist.

If you believe in Gui’s other skills too, you have come to expect the kind of 17-point, five-three-pointer, two-steal, “+8 in a 10-point loss,” “only starter with a positive +/-” performance that he submitted last night. His energy and ability to create loose balls is a given at this point, but his all-around impact, shooting and shot creation should be as well.

Now if you were expecting Kristaps Porzingis to change the trajectory of the franchise instantaneously, the way Jimmy Butler did last year, you were probably pretty disappointed with the first-half minutes of his debut. Even if you tempered your expectations because of his injury history, minutes restriction and unfamiliarity with the scheme, seeing him look like a fish out of water in his first stint was still disappointing. And if you remember the early-career “Unicorn” hype for Kristaps that KD codified with the nickname, and you were expecting a more adept perimeter player and ball handler to arrive in Golden State, then seeing his transition into a full-time center who is best in drop coverage and shouldn’t be following shooters might leave you wanting.

Yet setting aside the most extreme expectations, the vision of what Kristaps can do for this roster was still evident. His first basket was a dunk, something the team has been sorely lacking. He created multiple “nopes” from drivers who decided against even looking at the rim once they reached the paint. He whipped passes from multiple unique delivery angles, showcasing the vision and touch to flourish as a low or high post hub in a Steve Kerr/Stephen Curry offense.

He hit multiple deep threes, scored from the midrange and fit into the team’s existing structure seamlessly. It takes little imagination to see him amplifying the gravity and abilities of Steph Curry and Jimmy Butler if the Warriors can retain him. Defensively, things were a little sticky. In the first half for some reason, he was not always matched up against Nikola Vučević, which meant he was often tasked with closing out to shooters instead of walling off the paint. This was much less of an issue down the stretch, and he should only get more comfortable as the coaching staff figures out the right way to deploy him.

Most significantly, Kristaps was a major reason for the best part of this game. If you were steeling yourself to write an article about another listless blowout loss featuring poor defensive rebounding, lack of shot creation and one more abysmal Draymond Green performance, then the 38-19 second quarter was still devastating but completely expected. The 84 first-half Boston points would be grimly comedic, but only in the sense that it affirmed your pessimistic priors.

In that situation, you might have thought your lede would have centered around the way seemingly every single late-clock grenade for Boston found twine, or how this ridiculously lucky play encapsulates the night for each respective franchise:

And realistically, you were probably expecting to write another treatise on the meaning of basketball without stars, the struggle to find joy in individual plays or rooting for individual players and the cap situation for next year. But that just meant you weren’t expecting the fourth quarter.

In the fourth, the Warriors put together an electric 15-0 run by pressuring the Celtics’ ball handlers 94 feet from the basket, creating turnovers and finally hitting their shots. As Brent Barry astutely noted on the broadcast, it was an impressive, professional use of ball pressure. Golden State wasn’t looking to force turnovers instantaneously, but rather used backcourt traps to steal precious seconds from the Celtics’ shot clock, speeding up their process once they finally reached halfcourt and provoking poor decisions and missed shots. They cut a 30-point lead all the way down to 11 points, forcing Jaylen Brown to check back into the game, and only letting Boston off the hook when Al Horford missed some great looks from three.

It was an exciting, joyful 10 minutes of basketball, which was worth investing the rest of your evening just to experience. If the Warriors had managed to pull off a win it would’ve been a triumph. Instead it was merely a blast. Chase Center was positively rocking, and for a brief second it was just like the good old days watching Golden State chase down some stunned opponent at Oracle. Once any realistic expectation of winning evaporated before halftime, anything interesting or memorable about the rest of the game was gravy. And the Dubs delivered in excess.

Our fearless founder Eric Apricot is fond of labeling “fake” Golden State Warriors comebacks as “Always Close Enough To Hurt™.” A game like last night hurts, but only if you have any sort of expectation about winning or competing for something bigger this season. If expectations are properly calibrated, then it is another testament to the spirit and fight of our depleted Dubs, a showcase of what role players can do with nothing to lose and a reminder that something happens every night to be worth your time. We can’t say for sure what the team will look like next year or what reasonable expectations will be, but we can expect a few more nights like this in the meantime, and as veterans of Bay Area basketball fandom can surely tell us, it could be so much worse.