The Golden State Warriors are winning with nonsense
By Grant Hughes
I am not in the NBA for a whole mess of reasons, but one of the main ones is that I would have just quit if I were the Atlanta Hawks on Monday.
This kind of response to adversity isn’t ideal if you’re trying to overcome long odds to reach the league in the first place, and then have to contend every night with world-class athletes hellbent on embarrassing you.
“No fair!,” I would have cried. Had the ball been mine, I would have taken it, sulked, and gone home.
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Because when you execute a perfect looping pindown screen to free Kyle Korver, then use your best shooter as a decoy to liberate Dwight Howard for a perfectly thrown lob to go up by five points on the first play of the second half against the Golden State Warriors, you damn sure shouldn’t have to deal with some Harlem Globetrotters B.S. counting for the exact same amount of points on the ensuing play.
Perfect design and execution:
https://twitter.com/ATLHawks/status/803463325426192384
Player literally falling to the floor, standing up and scoring anyway:
And this inequity, this perfect example of the Warriors saying, “Hey, well done there, but please watch as we kick the ball around and break your executing-ass spirit with pure talent” is no isolated incident. Golden State counters precisely focused, dialed-in play with made-up nonsense all the time.
You’ve probably missed some of these sequences, but they100 percent happened. For real.
On October 28 against the New Orleans Pelicans, Tim Frazier perfectly navigated a ball screen on the right wing, scraping his left shoulder against Anthony Davis’ to seal the gap and erase a trailing Stephen Curry from the play. Upon turning the corner, Frazier looked off a defender feinting in to help from the strong-side corner, hesitated before powering toward the right block and firing a pinpoint pass to the opposite corner, where Buddy Hield sprang open thanks to a beautifully timed back screen. It was a hammer play conducted with the technical exactitude and flowing beauty of Beethoven’s Fifth.
A tribute to beautiful basketball.
On the ensuing play, Klay Thompson, wearing his shoes on his hands and balancing a half-full dixie cup of Gatorade on his head, flung in a 38-footer while falling out of bounds and sneezing.
Such is life as a Warriors opponent.
Three weeks later, on Nov. 18, the Boston Celtics ran a pristine pick-the-picker sideline out-of-bounds play with three decoy actions on the weak side and two separate counter-reads—all executed within the allotted five-second inbound time limit. The play yielded an uncontested 18-footer for Isaiah Thomas, who buried the shot. Brad Stevens’ wizardry had never looked more magical.
But in yet another spirit-sapping retort, Golden State answered on the very next possession.
This time, Kevin Durant, slipping on a banana peel at midcourt, tumbled into three consecutive somersaults while eating a turkey reuben, received the outlet pass (because a distracted Draymond Green, haggling with a vendor over a short-pour on a large popcorn, threw it inbounds without checking to see if Durant was paying attention/not eating/standing upright) and banked in a 42-footer.
To be clear, Durant’s forward somersault momentum inverted his equilibrium, and the bank came off the opposite backboard.
For some reason, video’s unavailable. But here’s the diagram I got when I emailed the NBA for a SportVu rendering:
If you’re the Celtics, why even try after that?
And if you’re the Indiana Pacers, who on Nov. 21 executed a textbook high trap on Curry, only to watch Green shout at the ball loudly enough to propel it (via sonic waves, obviously) to an open corner shooter, do you even bother showing up to the Dec. 5 rematch?
The Warriors do something like this every game. They watch, amused, as you quaintly draw up and employ actual basketball plays. They giggle internally at your effort.
And then they do blindfolded backflips while juggling flaming chainsaws.
No fair, man. No fair.