Walking out of Intuit Dome late Wednesday night after a play-in tournament victory over the Los Angeles Clippers, the Warriors felt such jubilation that not a soul among them would consider examining the musty underside of their triumph.
“Look, we finished 10th. We’re lucky to even be here,” coach Steve Kerr told reporters in Inglewood after extending their season with a 121-116 win over the Clippers. “If this were seven or eight years ago, we would be on vacation already.”
The glow of success was not the time for the Warriors to peek at their sloppy work. They overcame it, earning the right to smell the roses. Their most reliably prevalent flaw was highly visible but not fatal.
With an opportunity to extend their impaired season, the Warriors instead made a spirited effort to end it, failing only because of their overall resilience and the brilliance of veterans Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, Al Horford and Kristaps Porzingis.
After ceding numerous potential regular-season victories due to an astonishing number of turnovers, the Warriors reminded everyone that even as the stakes rise, the habit nags.
“We haven’t had our group together for a long enough time where you know how it’s going to go,” Curry said after the game. “In years past, you know kind of what to expect just based on the body of work that a team puts together. With this team, we don’t have that. So, we’re trying to piece it together on the fly.”
Golden State’s 20 turnovers fed numerous LA possessions, with the Clippers scoring a whopping 35 points – almost 30 percent of their total of 121 – with found money. The Warriors survived their most self-destructive habit largely because they stole more possessions than LA during the pivotal fourth quarter.
Los Angeles, through the first three quarters, scored 28 points off Golden State’s 17 turnovers. Seven of the eight Warriors who played had committed at least one giveaway, with Gui Santos (four) and Brandin Podziemski (three), Curry (three) and Green (three) leading the way. Their risky game didn’t so much keep the Clippers in the game as keep them ahead.
Then came a fourth quarter that the Warriors might not be able to replicate Friday night in Phoenix, where they face the Suns in the final NBA play-in tournament game. They got serious about winning, ringing up 43 points, shooting 75 percent from the field, including a preposterous 72.7 percent from deep. In a related issue, they committed three turnovers to give the Clippers seven points while scoring 11 points off six LA turnovers.
The Warriors won the fourth quarter by 11 points.
“We turned the ball over 18 times for 26 points,” Clippers coach Tyronn Lue said of his team’s game totals. “We talked about how we can’t do that, and then give up 43 points in the fourth quarter.”
Turnovers, in Lue’s mind, undid his team and ended its season.
Turnovers, in Kerr’s mind, have been the correctible shortcoming most responsible for Golden State being a sub-.500 team in the regular season. Couldn’t prevent injuries, but could prevent silly passes to the opponent.
The Warriors during the regular season studied hours upon hours of incriminating video, watching the damage they caused to themselves. They practiced incessantly in an honest effort to break a habit so consistently maddening that Kerr at one point decided he no longer would say the word “turnovers.”
The coach wasn’t asked about it Wednesday night, and neither he nor any of those who engineered the victory volunteered a comment. Golden State’s stinky corner closet was deodorized by the comeback victory.
The Warriors took their W and moved on, their season continuing in Phoenix, with the winner advancing to the first round of the playoffs, where they will be ticketed for Oklahoma City to face the No. 1 seed and defending champion Thunder.
“We’ve had coaches preparing for both Portland and Phoenix over the last week, so our game plan is all set,” Kerr said 45 hours before the scheduled tipoff at Mortgage Matchup Center. “We just have to present it to the players probably (Thursday) evening. We won’t have a practice, but we’ll go through the game plan and then shootaround Friday to walk through some things.
“We’ll be ready.”
The loser of Warriors vs. Suns immediately sinks into the offseason. The exploits of the four ringleaders — Curry, Green, Horford and Porzingis — on Wednesday were enough to indicate this is a very winnable game for Golden State.
Assuming, that is, the Warriors curtail their habit of inviting defeat and avoiding testing the law of averages.
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