Warriors now playing against toughest opponent: Themselves

Share

OAKLAND -- The Golden State Warriors learned a valuable lesson Tuesday night – one they have learned before and will be forced to learn again.

Namely, that meeting the standard set by the idealized version of the Golden State Warriors is not child’s play.

The Warriors as they actually are toughed out a 115-110 victory over Toronto, their 12th win without rebuttal and one which will be neither be particularly noted nor remembered save for one thing:

Their opponents are slowly but surely getting better at the difficult art of hanging around, the first step toward eventually prevailing.

Sometimes, it’s poor shooting, though not Tuesday. Sometimes it’s because of bad help defense, which was certainly Tuesday. Often, it’s just looking the scoreboard, seeing an 18-point lead and expecting the beaten opponent to assume the position.

And maybe, in a small corner of their collective skull, it’s the burden of carrying 24 months of almost unabated national love. Sometimes the details get misplaced.

I mean, how do you disdain Stephen Curry’s standard 37-point, nine-assist game? Well, seven turnovers helps. How do you mock the 56 points the starting backcourt (with Klay Thompson) amassed? Well, when the Toronto guards, DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry, get 56 themselves. How do you forget their 18-point lead 16 seconds into the third quarter? By watching it turn into zero halfway through the fourth. How do you trivialize the defensive stops they got in the final minutes? By remembering how desperately necessary they were.

[INSTANT REPLAY: Warriors fend off Raptors, run record to 12-0]

Being outrebounded helps, too, and outscored in the paint, and allowing the Velociraptors to nearly negate a 15-point deficit in three-pointers by getting 12 more free throws does, too. In other words, as Draymond Green said after beating the flu, “I think at times we weren’t locked in during this game with silly turnovers. We made the simple plays dangerous.”

These are all small things, things that most folks drove home ignoring. But the Warriors are playing against their toughest opponents now – themselves. And the macro-narratives about 70 wins, and being in a class with the mid-‘90s Bulls (who won 258 games in three seasons), and threatening to reinvent the game as we know it – well, they are the equivalent of putting the cart four towns ahead of the stable.

That may explain why Luke Walton, The Coach Who Wasn’t There, was all grimaces and mopey faces, after Tuesday’s win. The Warriors did not play sufficiently like the Warriors, and for that they are denied the right to enjoy the satisfactions of a difficult win against an obstinate team that was as jobbed by the sketchy officiating as the Warriors.

That’s the one great loss in their early start, the one that began with wins of 16, 20, 14, 50, 15, 9, 14, 16 and 13 points – oh, and the four-point paint-scarper over the Los Angeles Clippers, against whom they play Thursday in the southland. They are being judged against their best work, when in fact teams trying to win repeat titles are educated more by wins like Tuesday’s than by wins like the two over Memphis, or the two over New Orleans.

In that way, they learned valuable lessons they can apply Thursday and thereafter. But in doing so, they have to confront the central truth of repeating: The second album is always much harder to ace.

The standard has been yanked upward for the Warriors, not only by teams anxious to teach them about gravity but by the fans and pundits who believe so desperately that gravity doesn’t actually apply to them. Joe Lacob has talked often about the thrill of the challenge, but he’s not the guy who has to keep track of DeMarre Carroll, or block out Jonas Valanciunas.

It must also be said that the Warriors might have performed better if their throwback “The CITY” uniforms had more faithfully recreated the original cable car on the back of the jersey, or included the headdress patch on the shorts. I mean, if you’re not to capture the thing in its totality, go shirts and skins.

But the marketing department has tough nights, too. Repeating is hard for everyone.

In short, Tuesday had its value. The hard wins are better in the long term, even if the easy ones prevent you from playing Curry 39:35 two nights after playing 43:44. And maybe some day, the fascination of “making the simple plays dangerous” will fade, and “degree of difficulty” will be something they can comfortably leave to figure skaters and ski jumpers.

Contact Us