Warriors win shell-shocked homecoming, Gui Santos continues to impress

Golden State played a low-energy game of basketball, but Santos' career night saves the day.

I’m never sure how much to read into body language on the basketball court. When people are constantly recorded and being watched, pretty standard movements and expressions can take on more meaning than they deserve. A moment of heated discussion between teammates turns into panicked “team chemistry in trouble??” headlines. There’s a fine line between being tired, disengaged, or simply going through the motions on a weekday night. The distinctions between these things do not show up reliably on television, shot from hundreds of feet away.

I know if you recorded me and analyzed every action I made on an average workday, there are a million things you could say about my behavior: “this morning Duncan stood in his kitchen for five minutes silently drinking coffee and staring at the wall… does he really care?”

So I do try to be careful when analyzing body language on the court. You really never know what’s going on. So take all this with a grain of salt when I say that the Warriors seem like they’re trying to get to the end of the season without any more tragedy. This has been the hardest season I’ve had to watch as a Warriors fan, maybe ever – I can’t remember the last time I’ve had expectations so thoroughly crushed, having to watch some of my favorite players suffer particularly brutal and random injuries. It’s been at least 15 years since some of those early Steph ankle injuries.

But even that was different: nothing feels quite as bad as expecting to be a contender in October and then, five months later, spending all your time really racking your brain to figure out a way this team can possibly move forward.

I know the players in the locker room feel the same. While they’re maybe more optimistic about this team moving forward into the play-in and the playoffs than I am, they’ve been dealt more crushing emotional blows than I have. They’re friends with Moses Moody and Jimmy Butler, I’m just a guy who watches them on TV.

They’re professional athletes, and thus are some of the best in the world at compartmentalizing and focusing up when the situation demands it. But surely some of that has to leak into your psyche, right? You have to remember that a beloved member of the team substantially altered his career on a random, routine dunk attempt during the final minutes of the previous game, right? Does none of that come into your head when you’re driving to the basket?

The early minutes of Wednesday’s game against the Nets made me think about that constantly, made me involuntarily enter the role of amateur non-credentialed body language expert. The Warriors looked tired, skittish, out of sorts for the entire first portion of the game. They had been the most turnover-prone team in the league since Jimmy Butler went down, and it’s gotten worse without Steph, but this was something else. The entire team looked like they were not on the same page, looking for cutters that weren’t there, distracted while dribbling.

Sometimes when a team really gets turnover-happy, it can be difficult to distinguish between good defense being played by the opposing team and terrible, misjudged offense. In this case, it was mostly the latter. The Brooklyn Nets are young, springy, and overplay the passing lanes, but the Warriors could not execute a simple pass. They played with low energy. The result was a season-high 26 turnovers.

This is what I mean when I say that I want to read into these things: could this just be a tired team without any great creators playing their first game after a long and difficult road trip? Of course! But I know if I were in their place, I’d still be shell-shocked and emotionally exhausted. It goes together. Everyone’s tired, physically and emotionally, for many very good reasons.

The saving grace for both the game and this season has been Gui Santos. I’ve never seen Gui Santos play a game where he looked particularly tired. On his lower-energy games, like during his mini-slump on the road trip, I could tell there was a drop in energy because he only looked slightly more energetic than everyone else. If I’m not seeing full Tasmanian Devil energy on the glass, something must be wrong.

Gui Santos becoming the centerpiece of the offense was not something I expected coming into the season, and it took a huge amount of tragedy to get here, but now that it’s here, it’s my single favorite part about watching the Warriors.

His coming into the league as an energy guy and rebounding specialist colored my impression of Gui’s ceiling, which I thought was, “fine bench role player.” But as Draymond said after the game (in a press conference I really recommend watching), he was that player because it got him on the court. Once he had that base of playing time, he could start showing off what else he could do. And as a result, his role has expanded into, uh, literally doing everything for this team.

I don’t think the Warriors expect this from him long term, and I don’t know if a team built around this would be any good, but Gui Santos’s “role” during this stretch reminds me of watching Deni Avdija on Portland this season. The team depends on him to initiate, drive, score inside, take open (or not-so-open) threes, pass to the open man, rebound. He brings the ball up the court. He does everything. It’s become a heliocentric team, and that star everything revolves around is Gui Santos.

Is Gui Santos the quality of player as Deni Avdija is right now? Of course not. But he is playing a superstar role right now. The entire team plays off of him when he’s on the court. The ball’s almost always in his hands.

He hasn’t been able to show off the scoring in a while, mainly concentrating on his drive-and-kick initiation – but against a fairly small Brooklyn team, his combination of strength and skill looked unstoppable. He would score 15 in the third quarter alone, ending up with 31 for the game.

After spending most of the game down 8-9 points amidst an extremely quiet Chase Center crowd, the team seemed like they found something left in the tank to sprint ahead of the Nets during the fourth quarter. It would be good for my narrative if I said they were inspired by Santos’s incredible quarter, but really I think it was mainly that, for everything that’s happened, the Warriors are still better than the Nets. Brandin Podziemski, Gui Santos, and Kristaps Porzingis are all probably better players than anyone on the Nets who played last night, and eventually that evened out.

The Nets would have a chance to take the lead on the final shot with the Warriors only up one, but Ben Saraf was unable to get a layup over De’Anthony Melton’s outstretched hands, ending the game.

The Warriors have at least 10 games left, nine regular-season games and the play-in. It’s unclear what the Warriors realistically expect to achieve, but I suppose that doesn’t matter. You get out of bed and go to work regardless. And I’ll be here as well, despite being emotionally scarred. If only to see Gui Santos ball out.