Belated Warriors vs. Grizzlies recap/funeral
Avoidable mistakes, Xavier Tillman, why this game doesn't bother me this much, and what's next for this newsletter
The last time I tried my hand at writing basketball in a semi professional capacity I was in college and the Warriors were falling behind in their playoff series against the Oklahoma City Thunder. I was supposed to write recaps as part of a vetting process for a possible role with the Fast Break Warriors blog. But when the Warriors kept losing, I got sad and I found it really difficult to muster up the energy to consume or engage with Warriors content. I never did finish those recaps and I never got the gig. I’m not even sure I submitted a full application.
Flashforward to today, May 24. It’s a Monday. The Warriors lost their play-in game to the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday night. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised they lost. I am angry for various reasons that I’ll lay out in excruciating detail in my season recap posts / player evaluations. What sucks is that this loss felt like a culmination of all the things that concerned the more skeptical segment of the Warriors fan base — which is to say, the Light Years podcast crowd. So when the Warriors lost and the bad takes started popping up and things played out almost exactly as they did in all my worst case scenarios I feared, I took two days off and chose not to write about the game until the feelings were a little less raw and a little more manageable. Besides, none of you are paying for my writing (yet) so it’s not like I have a fiduciary duty to crank out content the night of the loss.
So let’s get into it.
For the sake of thoroughness, let’s quickly recap the first half. The Warriors came out flat. Really flat. The box score claims that the Warriors only had 5 turnovers in the first quarter, which is nuts, because it felt like the number should have been at least twice as high; Steph Curry dropped easy passes, Draymond Green threw the ball into traffic, and the Warriors generally struggled to get good looks as the Grizzlies toplocked Steph around the three point line and clogged the paint, which made it harder for the Warriors to hit backdoor cutters. At one point, the Grizzlies were up 22-9 and their lead felt insurmountable, but Steph scored 7 points in the final two and a half minutes of the first quarter. The Warriors, improbably, cut the Grizzlies’ lead to 30-29 by the end of the period. I also want to note that Jonas Valancuinas got two quick fouls and sat down at the 7:50 mark of the first quarter. The Warriors outscored the Grizzlies 22-12 from that point on. Remember that later.
I’m not sure what the Grizzlies' typical substitution patterns are, but I’d hazard a guess to say that their coach, Taylor Jenkins, made a point to steal some more minutes for Jonas Valanciunas with Steph Curry off of the floor at the beginning of the 2nd quarter. Valancuinas delivered with a three pointer, three rebounds and an assist before he picked up his third foul and sat down again at the 7:37 mark with the Grizzlies up 43-38. But unlike the first quarter where Valancuinas’ absence led to a Warriors run, the Grizzlies proceeded to panse the Warriors in their minutes without their big center. What changed? At the 6:25 mark, the Grizzlies subbed out Jaren Jackson Jr. and inserted rookie big man, Xavier Tillman.
Xavier Tillman proceeded to spend the next six minutes fucking up the Warriors offense and generally looking the part of a heady 10 year vet. He was the 35th pick in the 2020 draft from Michigan State, thrust into the most important game of his NBA career, and he delivered. Sound familiar? Sound like someone the Warriors could have used? In six minutes or so 2nd quarter minutes, Tillman racked up 3 steals, thoroughly outplayed Draymond Green, and made high level reads on defense over and over again. In less than four minutes, the Grizzlies with Tillman at the center spot pushed their lead up to 17 points. I wrote in my notes, “this is over,” and I’m sure I’m not the only Warrior fan who had the same thought. The Warriors managed to cut the Grizzlies’ lead down to 13 points, but things felt bleak.
At halftime, I paced around my house and pondered one of the things I find most impressive about Steph Curry’s career; the Warriors have never gotten their ass kicked in an elimination game. Not once. Seriously — go look it up! The closest thing you’ll find to a white flag waving is game 6 of the 2013 WCSF against the Spurs when Steph Curry misses a three with 44 seconds left and when the Spurs get the ball back, the Warriors foul and Mark Jackson subs out Steph, Klay Thompson, and Jarrett Jack for Kent Bazemore, Festus Ezeli, and Scot Machado with 37 seconds left. That’s the biggest loss Steph Curry’s Warriors have ever had in an elimination game. Game 7 of the 2014 series against the Clippers went down to the final possessions, as did game 7 of the 2016 Finals, and game 6 of the 2019 Finals.
Now, down 13 to the Grizzlies, I feared that the Warriors might finally get their ass kicked and have to wave a white flag in the 4th quarter; over the last month, Steve Kerr had run an 8-man rotation as healthy Warriors dropped like flies — it was not unreasonable to think that this team had finally run out of gas. I’m still not sure how they did it, but the Warriors managed to claw out of a double digit deficit and pull the game within 5 points by the end of the third quarter. The Warriors got 9 absolutely necessary points from Steph Curry in that third quarter, 7 points from Andrew Wiggins, and an insane 8 rebounds from Draymond Green. It was exactly what I wanted to see — a team with championship tested Hall of Famers deciding they wouldn’t go down without a fight.
Steve Kerr came to that same conclusion; Steph Curry and started the 4th quarter alongside Jordan Poole, who checked into the game earlier about half way through the 3rd quarter. Neither player would sit again. Draymond Green played nearly 15 minutes straight from the moment he checked in during the fourth quarter until the end of overtime. Think about that again, Steve Kerr chased a win and played Steph Curry 29 minutes without rest, Jordan Poole 22 minutes without rest, and Draymond Green nearly 15 minutes without rest with the Warriors’ season on the line. When was the last time Steve Kerr did something so dramatic with his rotation? Probably game 7 against the Cavs in the 2016 Finals when Draymond Green played 46 minutes.
And yet, these circumstances were obviously and tragically different. Steve Kerr had no option but to ride his best players to exhaustion against a young and deep Grizzlies team. Make no mistake, that was avoidable. The Warriors limped into this elimination game against the Grizzlies to lose a game they never should have had to play. Was it jarring to see Steph Curry’s incredible season end this way? Absolutely. Was it surprising? Not at all. It was not sustainable for the Warriors to ride an 8 man rotation for 20 games and a playoff run without them dropping some games along the way due to exhaustion.
Somehow, the Warriors managed to fight their way into overtime. With 3:36 left in the 4th quarter, the Grizzlies had a 10 point lead. Jordan Poole made big plays — the type of plays that make you believe a 21 year old can survive high leverage playoff minutes — and in the final minutes of the game made an and-1 lay up, got fouled shooting a three and sunk his free throws, and made one of the most creative lob passes I’ve ever seen on a seemingly doomed drive that tied the game with 33 seconds left.
Steph Curry also scored 11 points in the 4th quarter. Without him, the Warriors don’t even make this game competitive, but that goes without saying. But the 4th quarter offered as many frustrating moments as it did heroics. Draymond Green’s brick floater that would have been the game winner is an obvious example, but it’s also not all that surprising when you see how a well coached Grizzlies team managed to get the ball out of Steph Curry’s hands and ignore Juan Toscano-Anderson and Andrew Wiggins spotting up. Also, what in the world is Jordan Poole doing cutting baseline here instead of spotting up in the corner?
There was also, of course, Andrew Wiggins taking an inexplicable three pointer off of a DHO from JTA with 13 seconds left in the shot clock. Note Steph Curry in the bottom of the frame putting his arms out in (righteous) disbelief.
Wiggins also blew a bunny under the basket earlier in the fourth quarter. If that bunny goes in, well... you can imagine the rest. You can also imagine what might have happened if Steph Curry didn’t reach unnecessarily — and mind you, Steph really cut that dumb shit out of his game on defense this year — on a Kyle Anderson drive with 54 seconds left in the game. Or what happens if Jordan Poole doesn’t just... lose the ball in overtime on the left wing with 27 seconds left. None of that should have mattered because the Warriors should have played better all year to avoid the play-in game. None of that should have mattered because Steph and Draymond shouldn’t have made so many dumb mistakes in the first quarter.
But in the end all of those little mistakes mattered a great deal and the Grizzlies capitalized over and over again. Ja Morant hit tough floaters on good defenders who played him as well as they reasonably could, there’s not much the Warriors could have done about that other than to avoid putting themselves in a situation where Ja Morant can daggers on you. Xavier Tillman played excellent defense in his 2nd quarter stint, a stint that arguably gave the Grizzlies the cushion to withstand the Warriors’ late game surge, and then gave his team 5 excellent minutes and 5 much needed points in OT. The only way to avoid that might have been to buy a 2nd round pick in last year’s draft and take Tillman for themselves, but instead, the Warriors blew winnable games trying to integrate a wildly ineffective and green James Wiseman into their rotation. That too, was avoidable.
In the end, a Warriors team with no margin for error made a bunch of mistakes against the Grizzlies and in the months leading up to this game, a game they never should have needed to play. It’s the big picture that frustrates me most. A Jordan Poole turnover sucks, sure, but who expected the Warriors to absolutely need Jordan Poole to play 22 minutes without rest in an elimination game? The Draymond floater was shitty and frustrating, but was it not also entirely predictable with how opposing teams guard the Steph/Dray PNR and how little the Warriors’ organization prioritized shooting in their personnel decisions?
What sucks most about this game are not those moments, but the opportunities that were lost: a chance for Steph Curry to run Rudy Gobert off the court and upset the 1st seed Jazz; for veteran free agents to take the Warriors seriously again as contenders; for Jordan Poole and Juan Toscano-Anderson to test themselves at the highest level of competition; for Damion Lee to recover from his COVID-19 symptoms and play the playoff minutes he should have gotten in 2019; for Andrew Wiggins to, well, Wiggins; and for Steve Kerr to slowly integrate Kelly Oubre Jr. into his playoff rotation on merit alone.
Again, this was all avoidable. Frankly, it’s embarrassing that the Warriors lost these play-in games, not because of what happened during those games, but in the months leading up to it. The Warriors’ end-of-season run proved that they were a better team than they showed for most of the season. They could have been that team a long time ago, or at least a facsimile of it, but they didn’t for reasons that will get explored in further detail in my offseason posts.
So about those off-season posts. I’m going to sign off now, but I just want to give you all an idea of what comes next for this newsletter. I’m going to do season review posts and grades for the Warriors’ front office, coaching staff, and players and dive deep into lineup stats and shot charts. After the lottery, I’ll do some type of draft preview and look at the players who are in the Warriors’ draft pick(s) range and sort them into multiple posts by position. At some point there will be a free agency preview and a roundup of potential trade targets and once things get moving in the draft and free agency, there will be more posts.
My goal is to create enough good content this summer that you all enjoy reading so that I can put some articles behind a paywall when the 2021-2022 season starts. I’d like to make at least some pocket change writing about this team since I enjoy doing so and I think I’m not bad at it. The pie in the sky idea is to make a living off of this, but baby steps. In the meantime, I hope you all enjoyed my recent posts as I stepped into the baby pool(e) of sports writing and I look forward to writing more stuff for you all in the months to come.