In the late third quarter, Stephen Curry laughed and waved his hands in an exaggerated mock celebration after he hit a three pointer, finally taking the lid off of what had been, up to that point, a 1-13 night. While Curry was frustrated with his own rough shooting against the undermanned Pelicans, he likely was elated with how his teammates handled it. No Thompson? Little scoring from Curry? No problem, with Harrison Barnes picking up where he left off with his efficiency (9-13), Marreese Speights re-entering MoBuckets mode (13 points in 17 minutes), Leandro Barbosa slicing and dicing the soft interior of the Brow-less New Orleans defense, and Andre Iguodala driving it all forward with relentless pressure. As has been the trend of late, the starters delivered a fairly humdrum performance and the reserves blew open the game. The Warriors may have been down one superstar and getting limited contributions from another, but they’ve never looked more cohesive as a team.
While the Pelicans without Anthony Davis, Jrue Holiday, Omer Asik and a fully healthy Tyreke Evans are hardly a formidable opponent, the way the Warriors handled losing Thompson and Curry’s scoring contributions would have been encouraging under any circumstances. The offense didn’t grind to a halt and the team didn’t waver from the fundamental principles Steve Kerr has preached all season. Push the tempo, move the ball, find the open man. The Warriors did all three things — repeatedly — and saw a comfortable first half lead expand into a dominant one by the end of the third quarter. Curry and Green led the team with light-work 27-minute evenings. Curry did an excellent job balancing calling his own number in an attempt to get his shot going and working the ball around to his teammates to keep them engaged. While Curry gets obvious credit for how he’s grown into a dominant scorer and steady defender, he doesn’t get enough credit for his feel for the game as a floor leader. Putting aside the occasional errant pass, he’s developed a veteran’s instinct for the game’s trickiest judgments — when to feed his teammates (11 assists) and when to look for his own shots. Friday was a classic example of how effortlessly he now balances his dual essential roles of lead scorer and offense initiator. So while Curry likely would describe his performance against the Pelicans as one of his worst games of the season, it comes with a significant silver lining.
Green likewise has a “quiet” box score game — 3-6 shooting for 6 points — but my guess is the Pelican players that had to match-up with him in the trenches would describe it in different terms. Like Curry, Green didn’t need his own offense to be rolling to enable his teammates. Green was relentless on the glass, his defense was excellent as usual, and he joined Iguodala in pushing the Warriors down the court off even made baskets, keeping the New Orleans’ defense on its heals. The little things Green does apart from scoring — tapping out rebounds, deflecting passes, stripping opponents on penetration — create opportunities for his teammates to have easy fast-break baskets.
Curry and Green deserve full credit for enabling their teammates, but Friday’s match-up would have been a much tighter game had those teammates not risen to the challenge of filling their scoring void.
- Harrison Barnes is having another one of those stretches where he looks like a completely different player. We’ve seen this before — like during the 12-13 playoffs — but it’s still a bit shocking. On Friday, he scored on slashes, pull-ups and spin-moves. He was purposeful, under-control and supremely confident. The Warriors kept feeding his hot hand early in the second half, and Barnes kept on pouring in the points. Scoring 22 points on 9-13 shooting is impressive enough, but doing it in only 20 minutes rattles the foundations of the conventional wisdom on Barnes. If Kerr can find a way to harness the aggressive, take-no-prisoners Barnes when Thompson returns, the Warriors’ offense will go from “very hard to defend” to “existential-crisis inducing.”
- Andre Iguodala is a predator once again, looking for lanes to exploit so he can pay the rim a face-to-face visit. But while his aggressiveness scoring makes for good highlights, the way it is playing out in the other areas of his game is equally important. The second unit has been blowing open leads because Iguodala drives them harder than the first unit. They’re rarely walking the ball up, but making quick up-court passes looking for holes in the unset defense. When Iguodala is paired with a gifted slasher like Leandro Barbosa and a knock-down trailing shooter like Marreese Speights, it’s a lethal combination. The Warriors push, probe, regroup and reset. There’s a beautiful cascade effect to the way they punish defenses — Iguodala will push ahead looking for a lane to the basket; if nothing is available, he’ll look for a cutting Barbosa to feed with a pass; if that option isn’t open, he’ll see if he can dump the ball back to Speights while the defense is sagging; and if all else fails, Livingston is ready to post-up a smaller guard or hit other cutters slashing once the ball changes hands. It all ran with drill-like efficiency during the second and third quarters when the Iguodala-led bench crew inflicted most of their damage.
- Marreese Speights loves knocking down jumpers. The Oracle crowd loves when Speights shows how much he loves knocking down jumpers. Speights loves when the Oracle crowd shows him how much they love him knocking down jumpers. And so the cycle (Mo-mentum?) continues, and the Warriors’ lead grows. Speights was automatic against the Pelicans and took full advantage of their slower back-up big men. He would have faced tougher challenges if Davis was playing, but you can’t fault him for making the most of New Orleans’ misfortune. However this season ends, one of my lasting memories will be the smiles on Speights’ face and bounce in his step when he gets going — because he looks like he feels the same giddy excitement that fans feel when this team is playing at its best.
You could write similar odes to the other Warriors reserves who found ways to contribute — Livingston’s backboard alley-oop pass to Festus Ezeli stands out as particularly worthy of a rhapsody — but I’ll save those for another night, because there likely will be an opportunity coming soon for me to sing their praises. While it’s still too early to tell, I hope what we’re witnessing in Thompson’s absence is the Warriors’ transition from an collection of individually gifted players working unselfishly together, to an even more deeply integrated system where the absolutely buy-in and constant execution make the pieces nearly interchangeable. That’s the level the Spurs teams hit when they’d bench their starters and still blow out talented Warriors teams. There are signs in the minutia — like the embarrassed frustration the end-of-the-bench players showed after giving up an easy second-chance basket, up by 20+ in the final minute of garbage time — and writ large — like the Warriors’ once-again growing point differential for the season — that we’re witnessing a still evolving beast. Cut off a leg, an arm, or even the head — and it just grows another and keeps on charging.
