* Straight from today’s Merc website (MY VERSION)/
MEMPHIS—Many, many others before the Warriors have blown off steam and gobbled up barbecue on Beale St., so maybe this moment wasn’t so compelling.
Maybe Draymond Green, David Lee, Festus Ezeli and—most notably—Stephen Curry gathering for a late-night meal in the middle of this rowdy entertainment district will mean nothing, in the long run.
Maybe it was just dinner, in the hours after Saturday’s killer Game 3 loss, as the Warriors set their sights on Monday’s gargantuan Game 4.
But if you consider what had just happened (Curry struggling, the Warriors falling perilously behind 2-1 in the series) and what was ahead (no practice on Sunday in favor of a long film review session), the Warriors’ Blues City Café bull session seems particularly well-timed.
“I was already there and I texted (Curry), said ‘What are you doing?’” Green recounted on Sunday. “‘Nothing, sitting in the room.’ I said come meet us here and just relax.
“You know, everybody’s up in flames, everybody’s panicked. Just come, sit, have dinner, relax. And it was good. We had a good time.”
Green confirmed that it isn’t always easy to get Curry out of his hotel room, and said yes, of course, Curry received a lot of attention from fans while the Warriors’ early-morning dinner progressed.
But the Warriors aren’t going to be at their best if they’re sequestered in Memphis. It probably was good for everybody involved—especially Curry—to move around, laugh a little, spend some time with his teammates and partially wash away Game 3.
Because there just aren’t that many sublime strategic adjustments left to be made in this series.
This hasn’t been a strategic series; it has been a power series.
The Warriors, as coach Steve Kerr repeatedly points out, won 67 regular-season games doing it one way, and it would be panicky to dramatically change that now that they’ve hit their first serious patch of trouble.
Memphis has displayed an unsurprising and quite successful determination to keep hounding Curry from all angles, but that’s hardly a strategic revelation; the Grizzlies mostly have been stronger and more disciplined.
Meanwhile, it is Kerr’s normal habit to give his players a light work day immediately after a game, so Kerr kept to that Sunday.
He led a long film session with the entire team then it was time for optional workout—in between, only Green and Kerr were available to the media.
“We didn’t need to be on the court,” Kerr said. “This was a day to really just strategize and look at the film.”
Are there adjustments to be made? Certainly.
After the game Curry spoke about using his dribble more to beat the Memphis double-teams and Green on Sunday talked about getting the ball into the post to initiate the Warriors’ offensive action.
But it’s not Kerr’s style to make changes for change’s sake—to perform look-at-me coaching stunts to show the world he can be viewed as a clipboard whirlwind or a practice-day impresario.
Frankly, if he did any of that now, his players would probably think he’d gone insane.
“Stick to the plan,” Green said when I asked if he understood why there was no practice. “You know, we’ve had a plan this entire year. Kind of a schedule we’ve stuck to.
“Just because we’re down 2-1, no need to change and panic now. Continue to stick to what we do.”
The Warriors got some open shots to start in Game 3; they happened to miss most of them, which put them in a hole they could not fully escape.
For Kerr, the key is to make sure his players trust in what they’ve done all season, and trust in each other and keep passing the ball.
Then somebody has to make a few shots, and everybody has to play tighter defense.
“It was grim,” Kerr said of the film session. “We lost, it’s no fun to lose; they took it to us. And we needed to see why and what and how…
“We’ve presented them with some thoughts and a plan and we wanted to hear what they had to say. It was a good meeting; you need to have those.”
It’s a silly over-simplification to say that anybody is out-coaching anybody, but that will be said about any series, specifically when the favored team is losing.
The man who played for Phil Jackson, Lute Olson and Gregg Popovich said he doesn’t care what people are saying now about his duel with Memphis’ Dave Joerger.
“That’s not anything that we talk about as a team, that’s not anything I ever thought about as a player,” Kerr said.
“When you’re on a team, you’re together and you figure it out together. You just move on. The other stuff is just judgment from everyone else and that’s just part of the job.”
It’s part of the playoffs, it’s part of coming in as the overall No. 1 seed, on a historic run, and losing Games 2 and 3.
It’s how this Warriors team will be measured—maybe it all started on Beale St., or maybe that was just part of the bitter end.
