Warriors wrap bizarre regular season with a warm-up game against the Clippers

GSW closes the regular season with a glorified scrimmage at the Intuit Dome and a reminder that meaningful basketball can't come soon enough.

I don’t get to see the Warriors in person much these days. I live in Los Angeles, which is the city they play in second-most often, but since the dynasty days and especially since Chase Center opened, it’s just become prohibitively expensive to see them more than a couple times every couple of years. I love basketball more than most things, but when I was a kid basketball was more of a television sport than one you’d actually show up for (that space was taken up by ludicrously cheap A’s tickets). Then I moved away from the Bay, and for the better part of a decade the Warriors have lived on my television.

One of the silver linings, then, about the Warriors collapsing throughout 2026 is that those tickets have gotten cheaper and cheaper. On Sunday, I was able to snag pretty decent tickets at the fancy-schmancy Intuit Dome to watch the Warriors take one last run at getting themselves together before the games start to actually matter again. For what was essentially a fake basketball game, a surprisingly chippy scrimmage to get both teams warmed up for the main event Wednesday night, I had a great time out… with caveats.

I had never actually been to the Intuit Dome, which officially opened in 2024, so I was excited to check out the cutting edge of arenas. The Dome reportedly cost over $2 billion to construct and you can feel every cent. The singular adjective I kept thinking was “expensive” – this patio feels expensive, that jumbotron taking up roughly 70 percent of your field of vision feels expensive, those high framerate animations feel expensive, those bathrooms feel expensive (and, yes, plentiful). Sometimes that’s a compliment. But the overall experience of being at the Intuit Dome feels very smooth, in the sense that all the recognizable personality and rough edges that make events memorable have been sanded off, rendered blurry by the expense.

There is no variety in the concessions – there is one bar and one concession stand copy-pasted at regular lengths throughout the concourse. Every concession stand sells every option. It all comes from the Clippers, no local businesses or interesting bars. It is standardized and sterile.

Everything is run through the Clippers app, which is surprisingly glitchy given the expense poured into the Intuit Dome experience. Part of that is that the designers of the experience have decided to ask it to do the impossible. One of the hooks of the stadium is that everything is run through face recognition – you upload a selfie through the app, and you can just walk through security and concessions without pulling out your ticket or checking out your order. The most streamlined process possible to get your chicken tendies, all made possible through constant AI-powered surveillance.

In reality, you check in at the gate and the concessions by awkwardly leaning down and putting your face into a camera on a stand. There is about a 40% chance the camera will glitch out and reject you, and you will have to awkwardly stare into the camera for longer as a line forms behind you. This is all in service of minimizing the amount of human interactions you will have. The future!

Part of that is just the fact that it is the place where the Clippers play: a team that, despite 15 consecutive years of being above .500, an unmatched streak of competence (if not excellence), have never quite been able to create a personality for themselves. The Intuit Dome feels like they’re trying desperately to cover up that lack of personality and history with glass and technology and flash. Everything is an eternal present. The condition of the Los Angeles Clippers is that there’s not much fun to look back on. Might as well create The Stadium Of The Future.

Now, my team plays at the Chase Center, which is also guilty of being too expensive and flashy and personality-less for its own good. I have many complicated feelings about the middle class being priced out of live sports, having felt that squeeze myself. The Intuit Dome is much more accessibly priced than Chase Center, but that’s more of a consequence of the fact that the Clippers play at the Intuit Dome and the Warriors play at Chase Center.

The crowd was probably 60-40 Clippers fans to Warriors fans, which is much better for the Clippers than it used to be. But I did have one surreal moment waiting in line for the bathroom, when every single one of the eight urinals in front of me was occupied by a man wearing a Steph Curry jersey. The Warriors fanbase still shows out for these games and will as long as #30, the most popular player in basketball for a decade running, continues to suit up.

As he took his warmups, the stadium oohed and ahhed even as the warmup was slightly unimpressive by his standards – I’ve seen Steph blow through his warmups without missing a shot before, but he seemed a little rusty, sometimes missing a given shot three or four times. It didn’t matter to the crowd, who reacted all the same. I loved seeing Jimmy Butler make an unexpected surprise appearance, interrupting Steph’s routine by limping out and shooting a warmup three (airball, alas). His presence on the court and around the team has been sorely missed, and just seeing him crack up on the sidelines with Steph was the highlight of a (fairly good!) basketball game.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with these meaningless games since the Warriors got locked into the tenth seed. What should I care about? How much do the outcomes matter? I’ve basically come to the conclusion that literally nothing matters but making sure that the top seven players on the roster – Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Al Horford, Kristaps Porzingis, Brandin Podziemski, Gui Santos, De’Anthony Melton – can play together when the chips are down. Part of the problem with this stop-and-start, injury-ridden season is that the Warriors have not been able to build any chemistry as a coherent unit.

Sure, Steph and Draymond know how to play with each other, but Steph has played only a handful of games with Porzingis, fewer than you’d expect with Melton, and almost none with Gui in his leveled-up form. There’s no rhythm there yet, and Steve Kerr is clearly trying to force it as much as possible on this final regular season game.

The upshot was that the Warriors turned to, essentially, hockey rotations. Kerr has always made sure to construct his rotations in a way that leaves one of his high-end players on the floor at all times. He’s never going for full bench lineups unless he has to.

But Kerr was not chasing this win, so to speak. Vast swathes of the game were played by the Spencer/Seth Curry/Richard/Leons/Bassey lineup (with a little Nate Williams for variety). That’s a literal G-League lineup going up against the much more normal bench unit mix for the Clippers. The +/- tells the story perfectly – Steph was +12 in 28 minutes. Pat Spencer was -18.

But again, Kerr is forcing chemistry. He wants the top-end players to play together as much as possible. That means the end of the bench plays together as much as possible, too. This will hopefully not be an issue on Wednesday, as rotations tighten and those end-of-bench minutes get phased out.

This was an entertaining game with some moderate Steph Curry historics, but it was always going to be a scrimmage. The game that actually matters is on Wednesday. Kerr was not going to give the Clippers any extra information on his late game playbook, regardless of the game situation. With the Warriors making a push at the five-minute mark to cut the Clippers lead to 8, Kerr pulled the plug and cut the comeback off, subbing out all the starters at once. The sense of anticlimax was felt in the building – a shame that’s how these games can go, but that’s what you get into on the final game of the season.

As I left the arena, I felt a little bit ripped off. Steph always talks about the fun of meaningful basketball, but when you’re in the arena, a good game is meaningful regardless of context. It’s the reason you’re there, the drama and the entertainment. It sucks when it’s subordinated to bigger strategic concerns, even when it makes perfect sense. But damn it, I’m only on this Earth for so long and I want to maximize the Steph Curry dramatics I see.

We’ll have to wait until Wednesday to see that, to see Steph Curry being deployed in the pursuit of meaningful basketball. I’ll be at the Intuit Dome again, awkwardly shoving my face into a camera and sending all my biometrics to Steve Ballmer’s data centers. It’s worth it as long as I get to see this team unleashed, at least for one last time.