No one on planet earth is playing better basketball than Steph Curry right now. It’s early in the season, yes, but he’s making a strong case to win his third NBA MVP.
Curry has been immense for the Warriors, who have righted the ship after a 3-7 start to the season. They’re now .500, winners of three of their last four games (the loss coming in a game they tanked), and while outside the playoff seeds, they were three games back of first place in the Western Conference following a win over the Jazz Friday night.
The Warriors look like the Warriors once again.
It’s beautiful basketball. It’s team basketball. It’s winning basketball.
“We are stabilized. We’re starting to play our brand of basketball on both ends of the floor,” Draymond Greens said Friday.
And while yes, this turnaround is in large part Curry’s doing, it’s also Green’s. It’s Klay Thompson’s and Steve Kerr’s, too.
It’s almost as if — and hear me out here — that group of four know what they’re doing in this league.
The Warriors might not be a dominant force anymore. Those days are behind them. But the fact remains that no one has beaten those four in a Western Conference playoff matchup.
If those three players are on the floor and playing and Kerr is the head coach of the team — even if he’s not on the sideline — no one in the West has beaten them in a seven-game series. There are six Western Conference championships and four title banners in the rafters of Chase Center to prove it.
Dominance like that is no fluke. It’s a testament to ability, longevity, an elite mentality, and a whole lot of intelligence.
Curry has been the stalwart for the Warriors this season. He’s had his A game since Game 1. His dynastic compatriots took a while to round into form. The delays were understandable, but they also brought about a whole lot of losses.
But Green, Thompson and Kerr have found their grooves. Pair that with Curry and a roster that is unquestionably talented you have yourself a team that’s in the thick of it in a mucky Western Conference.
It’s almost as if the first quarter of the season didn’t matter. It’s hard to argue the Warriors did any significant damage to their title hopes during that stretch.
The turnaround — like so much else with the Warriors — started with Green.
The Warriors’ “heartbeat” was feint during the start of the season and he has no one to blame but himself for that. His punch of Jordan Poole in the preseason undercut everything the Warriors were trying to do in the ramp-up to the regular season. We all heard Kerr pretend like the punch wasn’t a distraction, but for a few weeks, at least, it permeated everything the Warriors did. How could it not? The leader of the team sucker-punched a teammate in practice. You saw the video. It was shocking to outsiders. To pretend that those on the inside weren’t stunned — that they could so easily forget and move on — is ridiculous.
Green might have done a dumb thing — a very dumb thing — but he’s no idiot. He has an option on his contract at the end of this season. The Warriors did not make a serious effort to re-sign him this past offseason. Then he did something that landed him and the Warriors not just on KNBR and ESPN, but on TMZ — that’s a whole different beast of an acronym.
Green laid low as the aftermath played out in grievance airing and trade rumors. He wasn’t his typical, vocal self. He has done one podcast this season. One! But Green was right that he was not in a position to be handing out his typical brand of accountability. The irony was that the Warriors — young and old — needed that tough love at the beginning of the season.
So as much as the Warriors’ team meeting on Nov. 18 was about addressing Thompson’s out-of-character play and calling out young players for mental lapses, it was also about Green. He held himself to account — not just for his play, but also for his lack of leadership.
“At the end of the day, what is most important on the team and being successful is knowing their role and can play their role,” Green said of the meeting.
The Warriors are 4-1 since that come-to-Jesus moment. And, again, the only loss came in a game where all five starters rested.
Thompson clearly needed that meeting. He’s stopped forcing shots and is playing in the flow of the offense. The result is 24 points per game over his last four contests on a blistering 52% shooting from the floor and 54% shooting from beyond the arc. It’s a chicken-egg scenario, but do the Warriors look like their old selves because Thompson looks like his old self, or vice versa? We’ll never really know, because to date we’ve never seen one phenomenon without the other.
Either way, the ball is moving, the Splash Brothers are raining 3-pointers, and Green is directing everything — including the second unit.
Kerr deserved blame for the Warriors’ 3-7 start, and he deserves praise for the team’s 7-3 stretch. So let’s give it to him. It took a while and a whole lot of tinkering, but he appears to have found a solution to the Warriors’ biggest issue: the minutes with Curry off the floor.
Against Houston last Sunday, Kerr played Green with the second unit — led by Donte DiVincenzo and Jordan Poole. Green, playing center, provided critically-needed organization on both offense and defense. The issue with that solution, of course, is that it limited the number of minutes Green and Curry played together.
I didn’t think Kerr would do it, but he did, and it’s working: he’s staggering Curry and Green.
Green was on the floor without Curry for eight minutes Friday night. Curry was on the floor for roughly eight minutes without Green.
A third of the game without the dynamic duo playing together was something that would have been considered unimaginable a few days ago.
But Kerr made a bet with his new rotations that while Curry’s lineups without Green might give up a bit more and score a bit less — Kerr would need to trust Jonathan Kuminga and JaMychal Green for those stretches — No. 30 would ensure they were still strong minutes.
Meanwhile, Green playing with the second unit would ensure that the Warriors would move the ball, play decent defense (if for no other reason than Green was in the middle, barking orders), and at least tread water in the minutes Curry was off the floor.
Kerr looks right. He, like his champion players, might be good at his job, folks.
Yes, Curry’s cooking, Thompson is clicking, Green is his old, unabashed self, and Kerr has found the right combinations with this strange brew of a roster.
The Warriors have something here. It’s new, but familiar.
The winning machine looks fully operational once again.
