Spurs 129, Warriors 100: Lessons to be learned, lessons to be forgotten
By Jeff Siegel
The San Antonio Spurs came to Oracle and did what they do best: rain all over someone else’s parade. Game 1 of the regular season was supposed to be a pre-coronation party for these Golden State Warriors; instead, it was the Red Wedding in basketball form. However, those claiming the King in the West has been slain should know better. It’s a long season, and by May and June, the Warriors will have had time to work out the kinks on both sides of the court. There are real lessons to be learned for the Warriors from this game, and there are false narratives a plenty.
Draymond Green has been the talk of the Warriors for the past week-plus. Between ESPN’s Ethan Sherwood Strauss dropping an article about Green’s on- and off-court antics, to the in-game clip of Kerr yelling at Green to get back on defense against the Spurs, to Mama Babers-Green getting after it on Twitter, it may seem to some that his fiery, bordering-on-detrimental personality may have run its course in the Bay Area. Green is still the heartbeat of this team and the most important component to unlocking the Warriors’ full potential on both ends. While Mama Green might have a point about her son’s role in the offense, I think head coach Steve Kerr and his staff have earned their trust and the benefit of the doubt that they’ll find a way to work it out.
Outside of a couple of plays, Green was his normal self on the defensive end, so whatever impact his new offensive role is having on his mentality has not affected the other side of the ball yet. Green was a focal point of the Warriors’ offense last season and while his role will certainly change with the addition of Kevin Durant, he will continue to get his opportunities as Kerr tinkers with rotations and different sets he wants to run with his new team. He may not like what changes will be made, but Green is a proven winner at every stage of his basketball career; he’s not going to let a change in his offensive role influence his effort in all the other parts of the game.
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In terms of tangible, on-court flaws, the Warriors defense will certainly be a point of criticism today. With the addition of Durant, Golden State was not only supposed to be the best offensive team in the league, they were also supposed to contend for the best defense in the league. The Spurs may have thrown that out in the window in some people’s minds, but neither the Warriors nor any other defense would have been able to stop the Spurs last night. San Antonio got the shots they normally get against a good defense; they just happened to hit almost every single one of them. Between Kawhi Leonard and Jonathon Simmons, the Spurs were able to get an unsustainable amount of guarded jumpers to go down, a trend almost certainly will not continue for the Spurs nor for Warriors’ opponents.
However, there are some truths that we can take away from this game. The biggest one that should worry the Warriors: Zaza Pachulia is not Andrew Bogut. He’s not even a poor man’s Andrew Bogut. There truly was NOTHING EASY about Pachulia’s game on Tuesday night; he struggled on both ends and generally looked a step-and-a-half too slow. When he needed to get into somebody’s back and push them around, he was able to do so, but as soon as things started moving around him, he was consistently left flat-footed and behind the play. The hyper-aggressiveness of the Warriors’ perimeter defenders worked so well the last two years because Bogut and Ezeli (when he was healthy) were always manning the paint to clean up any messes left behind by that aggressiveness. Pachulia, from the tip, was unable to fill that role against the Spurs. Whether this blip is due to the learning curve for him in this new system or a season-long trend will be worth watching.
On the other end, Pachulia wasn’t a ton better. The Warriors loved to use Bogut in their updated version of the Triangle offense, letting him hold the ball in the mid-post while Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson wrecked havoc on opposing defenders with split cuts and screens for one another. Golden State tried to do the same thing against the Spurs with Pachulia in the Bogut role and Durant and Curry screening for one another. When the pass was simple, Pachulia was able to get the ball where it needed to go; the Warriors’ first points of the season came on this exact action, netting Durant an isolation at the free-throw line against Tony Parker.
However, when it came time to make the Bogut-like pass to Curry cutting down the lane, Pachulia missed him, resulting in a live-ball turnover going the other way. Bogut made his living completing that pass to the cutting Curry or Thompson; if Pachulia doesn’t develop that skill quickly, that could take away one of their options in the Triangle and make that action easier to defend. Of course, if Pachulia continues to struggle to make that pass, then Kerr will be forced to change things up. Having Kerr throw Durant into the mid-post and let Curry and Thompson cut off of him, using his height and length to make those difficult passes while maintaining a real scoring threat with the ball, seems like a no-brainer solution.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom for the Warriors. The trio of Curry, Thompson, and Durant all screening for one another has already shown itself to be a major problem for their opponents. The three of them will all congregate on the opposite side of the floor from the ball and then everybody breaks in a different direction, leaving it up to the ball-handler to find the right pass. More often that not, that will be Green’s responsibility, as he has already shown that he’s a very smart, very capable passer. They’re not necessarily looking for an open look immediately; if they all come together and then break apart with different defenders on them, Durant can go to work in the post or Curry can take a big man off the dribble.
Speaking of Curry, the biggest takeaway for the Warriors in this game is that he looks like the two-time MVP once again. The knee injury that sapped his explosiveness in the playoffs and forced him off the U.S. Olympic team seems to be a thing of the past. He glided past defenders and finished in the myriad of ways around the rim that only a few players in the league are able to do.
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The Warriors certainly have some kinks to work out, but they’re no more or less than any other team that replaced a lot of its core components over the summer break. The expectations are higher than any team in NBA history, but that doesn’t mean that an early season loss is a referendum on what they’ve done. They just happened to run into a Spurs buzzsaw that couldn’t miss on Tuesday.