Game 72: Warriors vs. Grizzlies recap
Steph Curry scoring on high volume and meh efficiency, Ja Morant's driving ability, and Andrew Wiggins coming up... big in the clutch?,
It’s official, the Golden State Warriors are on the better side of the play-in tournament and will play either the Los Angeles Lakers for a chance to clinch the 7th seed. That game will be on Wednesday night and Twitter will be hell, the narratives and discourses resulting from the game’s outcome will be reactive and poorly thought out, and I’ll have a pit in my stomach the entire game. But this post isn’t about that — I’ll do a more in-depth preview of that game in the next few days — it’s about their 113-101 victory against the Memphis Grizzlies. Franky, I’m still annoyed that the Warriors’ playoff chances were on the line in the final game of the season, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is that the Warriors won their game tonight and we got a preview of how Steve Kerr intends to coach this team in the playoffs.
The Memphis Grizzlies were an interesting opponent for this Warriors team as both teams play a very different brand of basketball. The Grizzlies’ best player, Ja Morant, is a super explosive guard who struggles to shoot the ball, but the Grizzlies score oodles of points in the paint, have about 10 players who can provide solid minutes, and they crush other teams on the offensive glass. You can imagine some of the potential issues in a do-or-die game — Jonas Valicunas feasts on offensive rebounds and limits the Warriors’ ability to get out in transition, Steph Curry gets cold, and the Grizzlies take advantage of their aggressively competent rotation to build up a cushion of points in non-Steph minutes.
I found two things very encouraging about today’s game — the Warriors managed to survive their minutes without Steph tonight (at least in the first half) and I really don’t think he played that well even with 46 points and the dagger buckets in the fourth quarter. I’d actually written about half of a game recap before I remembered that Steph took a career high 36 shot attempts today. Nuts. When Steph takes a huge amount of shots, it never feels like chucking because really, there is no bad shot for Steph. Chuckers take bad shots, therefore Steph cannot chuck.
But even though Steph finished with 46 points, he wasn’t freakishly efficient in the way that he typically is in his high scoring barrages. 46 points was merely the logical endpoint of 36 shot attempts, 22 of which came from beyond the arc. Early in the game, I was actually concerned that Steph might have a cold night. I missed the first four minutes of the first quarter and when I turned on the game, the Warriors were down 17-8. I noted several moments in that first quarter where Steph Curry struggled to get the ball because the Grizzlies did a good job of sagging off of Draymond Green and denying Steph. This was/is a big fear of mine for the Warriors in a one-game playoff — the offball stuff doesn’t work and the Warriors dig too big of a hole before Steve Kerr lets Steph cook. It wasn’t until 3:45 mark that Steph scored his first points on a reverse layup and he didn’t make a three until the 2:48 mark when he made a stepback over Valanciunas out of a pick and roll, which I noted was, “the first shot Steph I’ve counted where he initiates.”
Thankfully, that first made three by Steph seemed to mark a turning point in the game and the Warriors were much more aggressive after that about getting into PNR’s and DHO sets that brought Valanciunas or Jaren Jackson Jr. out of the paint. The Warriors also began using the Grizzlies’ defensive aggression to their advantage when Dillon Brooks or DeAnthony Melton “top-locked” and denied Steph the ball at the three point line, at which point Steph would simply cut to the hoop to receive a pass. I also want to note a nice play from Jordan Poole who did a great job initiating and creating clean looks in the second quarter. Watch below as Poole drives to the right right off of a Looney DHO/screen and just as he looks to take a floater, two defenders jump at him and he dumps it off to an undefended Kevon Looney for an easy dunk.
The Warriors took a six point lead into halftime, but even with Poole’s scoring in the 2nd quarter and Curry’s adjustments to the Grizzlies’ toplocking, the Grizzlies still scared me. Jonas Valanciunas had 15 points in 11 rebounds in the first half and generally looked dominant against the undersized Warriors. Part of it was his four offensive rebounds, but I don’t think you can talk about Valanciunas performance without talking about Ja Morant’s driving and passing ability. Ja’s explosiveness is well documented and praised, but I think I’m more impressed by his decision making and the way he can get very deep into the paint before he commits to passing or shooting. Watch the play below; it’s one of many instances I noted today where Ja got deep into the paint and dragged defenders to him only to make a brilliant last minute pass to a very open Valanciunas.
The third quarter had the brief effect of making me feel (unreasonably) comfortable that the Warriors would win this game by a good margin. Steph Curry’s 17 points in the quarter came on a very sustainable diet of PNR’s where he dragged Jonas Valancuinas into the action and got a clean look beyond the arc or scurried into the lane relatively unencumbered. That’s pretty much the ideal game plan for Steph against Valancuinas or any of the relatively slow footed C’s in the west, as Rudy Gobert and DeAndre Ayton can attest.
But the third quarter (and the game more broadly) cannot be discussed without mentioning Andrew Wiggins, who probably merits more attention than I’ve given him up until this point. Wiggins hit several well-timed shots in the third quarter, a key block on a Dillon Brooks drive, and generally showed a sense of the moment that I didn’t really think he had in him. At the end of the quarter, the Warriors led 76-59 and I wrote down, somewhat incredulously, “Can’t believe I’m writing this but this quarter is a lot closer without Wiggins. Hustle plays and rebounds really allowed Warriors to pull away every time things got close.”
Of course, all those warm fuzzy feelings from the third quarter dissipated real quick as the Warriors let the Grizzlies go on a big run to start the fourth quarter. Juan Toscano-Anderson briefly left the game after he fell in a weird way on his foot and things got out of hand shortly after as Dillon Brooks, who’d been cold all night, started making shots. Kelenna Azubuike noted on the Warriors’ broadcast that Brooks was not someone you wanted to get hot. This is of course, exactly what happened and that 17 point lead got whittled to double digits real quick, at which point Steve Kerr called a timeout and... Steph Curry checked in at the 9:26 mark and played the rest of the game for a grand total of 39 minutes and 57 seconds. After the game, Kerr indicated that heavy minutes from Steph is something we’d see more in the playoffs, should the Warriors advance that far.
Steph Curry checking back into the game wasn’t exactly a cure-all. Dillon Brooks stayed hot, Jordan Poole had a brief injury scare and subsequent limp, the Warriors made several dumb turnovers and my notes are littered with complaints about dumb and/or soft fouls when the Grizzlies got into the paint. When Draymond Green got Dillon Brooks to foul out on a rather egregious flop, the game was tied at 91-91 with 6:12 left. The Grizzlies actually took a 95-93 lead at the 5:28 mark on a Ja Morant floater, but things turned when Jordan Poole cut hard into the right corner off of a Steph Curry drive and hit his 19th corner three all year (31 attempts, 61% on the year).
The Warriors put the clamps on the Grizzlies over the course of the final four and a half minutes and outscored them 15-4. I’m not going to spend much time on those final minutes other than to note how crazy it is that the Warriors are closing meaningful games with Jordan fucking Poole and Andrew fucking Wiggins. I’m reluctant to articulate and project any expectations onto Andrew Wiggins for fear of him letting me down as he has so many of his ex-fans, but today, I think I started to believe he’s turned a corner in a real and sustainable way. Now, I’ll leave you with some Steph highlights and a beautiful redemption sequence from Andrew Wiggins, without whom the Warriors don’t win this game.