The Warriors fall apart in the second half and get blown out by the Knicks in a 94-132 loss.
The Knicks shoot the lights out from three in the first half and out-muscle the Warriors while the Warriors' vets have an off night and the Warriors' youth get punked in garbage time on national TV
Just 90 seconds into the fourth quarter, Steve Kerr pulled the plug on the Warriors’ veteran players after a 19-point Knicks lead ballooned into 29 points. The rest of the fourth quarter was some of the ugliest Warriors’ garbage time of recent memory. As the Warriors’ All-Draft lineup mustered just 6 points in the final 7-ish minutes of the game. To add insult to injury, this game was on national TV — TNT’s announcers made genuine exclamations of excitement when James Wiseman grabbed a rebound and that was pretty much the only praise they offered the Warriors in the fourth quarter (you’ll read much more about Wiseman later on in this piece).
Forget the 9 points in 90 seconds that convinced Steve Kerr to wave the white flag at the start of the fourth quarter — the vibes in this game were bad from the beginning. The Warriors fell behind 0-8 before they scored a single point and the Knicks shot the ball absurdly well for most of the first half. The Warriors trailed by just four points when Steve Kerr made his first subs of the game late in the first quarter and trailed by 8 at the end of the period, but the Warriors came out hot to start the second quarter and made four threes in the first four minutes of the period. Unfortunately, the Knicks missed just five jumpers in the second quarter and managed to turn a 7-point lead into a 15-point lead against Steve Kerr’s closing unit in a little more than two minutes.
When the Warriors trimmed the Knicks’ lead to single digits late in the first half, foul trouble bit them, as it has many times this year, and a questionable flagrant foul by Ty Jerome turned helped the Knicks push their lead back to double-digits to end the half. In the third quarter, the Warriors lost control of the game again when they committed a pair of turnovers and gave up 7 points in 61 seconds, pushing a Knicks lead from 10 points to 17 points. James Wiseman and Ty Jerome subbed in shortly after, but the Knicks shot 10 free throws in the final six minutes of the period and as more young Warriors came into the game — Moses Moody subbed in for Jordan Poole at the 3:27 mark, for example — the team started to lose contact with the Knicks before the blowout truly and finally began in the fourth quarter.
If you sat through tonight’s fourth quarter, I commend you. I think. Maybe I should pity you. I watched all of the fourth quarter tonight and it was deeply depressing and has probably colored my view of other things that happened tonight.
The Warriors getting clowned in the fourth quarter while TNT’s announcers joked about Isaiah Hartenstein being the East Coast version of Nikola Jokic was hard to stomach. I hope it was nauseating to the Warriors’ decision-makers — if they were watching that broadcast. The absences of Steph Curry, Andrew Wiggins, Donte DiVincenzo, and JaMychal Green made it likely that tonight’s game was a loss. I think there’s a chance things aren’t as ugly if DiVincenzo had played tonight if only because he’s an adult who has played NBA basketball in high-leverage moments. The rest cannot be said for much of the Warriors’ roster that was healthy tonight.
Yes, the Warriors absolutely needed more from Klay Thompson and Draymond Green tonight. But as they both age, it’s reasonable to expect that there will be more off-nights than was the case in the glorious highs of the Warriors’ young dynasty days. It’s also reasonable to expect that the Warriors’ young players like James Wiseman and Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody will not be able to bring it each and every night. So what you’re looking at is this: the oldest and most accomplished players on the Warriors’ roster are proven winners, but they’re getting old and are prone to the ravages of age, which come in the form of inconsistency and injury while the youngest and least accomplished players on the Warriors’ roster are unproven, occasionally intriguing, and generally inconsistent performers.
The two extremes of the roster — aging legends and the Warriors’ young core — both need protection to varying degrees and for different reasons. On last season’s roster, the Warriors at least had three veterans without injury concerns that could be relied upon in a pinch to play hard and execute, to the best of their ability, Steve Kerr’s gameplan: Damion Lee, Juan Toscano-Anderson, and Nemanja Bjelica. Neither one of those players are starters in the NBA or better than a 9th or 10th man on a good team, but they brought reliable energy and knew how to be role players in the NBA. The same cannot be said for Patrick Baldwin Jr. or Ryan Rollins, both of whom have been put in the unfortunate position of being DNP fodder at the start of their career and blocking one or two roster spots that should to an NBA veteran.
If you’re mad about Anthony Lamb and Ty Jerome playing big minutes on a night like tonight — and believe me, there are plenty of reasons to be mad about Lamb being on the Warriors’ roster — who you should be mad at is not Steve Kerr, Lamb, or Jerome. You should be mad at the Warriors’ front office for failing to provide Steve Kerr with players that he trusts to execute his game plan and provide consistent energy on each and every stint of NBA minutes.
Random thoughts and observations:
Jordan Poole had a fairly efficient 26 points on 8/18 shooting and shot 6/10 on two-point field goals tonight. He was a rare bright spot in tonight’s game, relatively speaking, and provided most of the feel-good highlight reel moments for the Warriors.
Klay Thompson was mostly invisible tonight and made just one three in 26 minutes. Klay shot 4/7 on two-point field goals, but took only two layups (he shot 1/2 on them) and threw the ball over 5 times.
Moses Moody got the start at shooting guard tonight in place of Donte DiVincenzo, who missed tonight’s game with a non-COVID illness. Moody made 3/6 of his threes tonight, didn’t commit a turnover, and looked competent when he had to defend Knicks’ star, Jalen Brunson.
Speaking of Brunson, he only scored 21 points tonight and was just 5/11 on two-point field goals, but it felt like he and many of his Knicks’ teammates hit every possible demoralizing step-back jumper tonight.
The Knicks’ second unit is a bizarre one that features a dual-center frontcourt of Isaiah Hartenstein and Jericho Sims. That frontcourt played a big role in holding off the Warriors in the second quarter as they bullied the Warriors in the interior and created good looks of offensive rebounds. Sims was the #58 overall pick in the 2021 draft and Hartenstein was signed this past summer for an MLE-level contract. Hartenstein was a rumored Warriors’ target in the 2021 offseason but went to the Clippers instead in search of more guaranteed paths to playing time.
Back to the Warriors — in Donte DiVincenzo’s absence, Ty Jerome got 24 minutes tonight and closed the first half. Jerome committed two turnovers against three assists and looked good creating his own offense, but he’s not a natural pick-and-roll point guard and he’s definitely being forced into more minutes than should be comfortable for the Warriors.
Anthony Lamb, the Warriors’ other two-way player, struggled tonight. After hitting two threes in the early second quarter, Lamb found himself on the receiving end of some dumb fouls, one of which was quite a bad call and I’ve linked to here, but he also bit on pump-fakes and struggled with the Knicks’ physicality.
Speaking of the Knicks’ physicality — Kevon Looney and Draymond Green both looked rather small and passive against the Knicks tonight. Looney played 20 minutes, grabbed 6 rebounds, dished out 4 assists, and took just one shot, while three of Green’s five field-goal attempts came from beyond the arc. Green grabbed 5 rebounds in his 26 minutes and neither he nor Looney shot any free throws tonight.
The Knicks, on the other hand, shot 32 free throws to the Warriors’ 13. This discrepancy felt like it matched up with the eyeball test. There were some calls that annoyed me on principle — plays where Knicks players Maggette’d their way into defenders whose only mistake was to get hit in the chest by a driving player — but the Knicks were the more physical team and earned most of their trips to the line with bruising drives and clever pump-fakes.
Rotation watch:
1st Q:
12:00 — Poole/Moody/Thompson/D. Green/Looney: 0-0, tie game.
3:39 — Poole/Jerome/Thompson/Kuminga/Wiseman: 17-21, Knicks lead.
Through the game's first two minutes, neither the Knicks nor the Warriors scored a field goal. The Knicks scored the first bucket of the game on a three by RJ Barrett, a 34.9% three-point shooter, followed by a three by Quintin Grimes Those threes followed a pair of free throws and put the Knicks up 8-0, but on the possession following, Klay Thompson scored a layup after he lost his defender, Grimes, in a split-action set. Thompson passed up a look from three on the next trip down and dished it to Kevon Looney and the ball eventually made its way to Moses Moody for an open three in the right corner that he swished, which got the score to a much more manageable 5-8. At the 7:49 mark, Jordan Poole scored his first bucket of the game on a combination of smooth off and on-ball movement:
Poole scored the next 8 points for the Warriors on a trip to the free-throw line after getting fouled on a three-point attempt, a made three assisted by a Kevon Looney DHO and a transition layup. Poole also unintentionally took one of the game’s referees out of the game when the official stepped on Poole’s foot running up the court. You can see that unusual play below:
After the stoppage that allowed the ref to come out of the game, the Knicks, who led 15-17, scored on a Jalen Brunson turnaround jumper and when the Warriors made their first subs of the game at the 3:39 mark, the Knicks led 17-21. The Knicks scored 12 points in the final minutes of the period, several of which came at James Wiseman’s expense as the Knicks drove right at him for floaters and forced him to contest shots and come off of his man. Wiseman did, however, block a shot and help free up Ty Jerome for a layup, only to give up one on the other end when he left his man trying to contest a shot:
2nd Q:
12:00 — Jerome/Moody/Lamb/Kuminga/D. Green: 25-33, Knicks lead.
7:00 — Poole/Thompson/Lamb/Kuminga/Looney: 43-48, Knicks lead.
4:49 — Poole/Jerome/Thompson/D. Green/Looney: 43-55, Knicks lead.
The Warriors opened the second quarter with an 8-point deficit and turned to a small-ball lineup — Jerome/Moody/Lamb/Kuminga/D. Green — that hadn’t played a single non-garbage time minute before tonight’s game. Anthony Lamb hit two threes early in the period and the Warriors got solid minutes out of Ty Jerome, who hit a floater and a pull-up three in his stint as the Warriors’ second-unit point guard. Jonathan Kuminga also had a nice stint that included this difficult pass thrown to Moses Moody, who hit his second three of the night to make the score 38-44. You can see that play below:
The Warriors might have had more traction in the second period if not for the shooting of the Knicks, who shot 3/4 from deep in the first six minutes of the period, and the bruising interior play of a jumbo-sized frontcourt of Isaiah Hartenstein and Jericho Sims, the latter of whom had two big dunks and created five points for the Knicks with his offensive rebounding. When Jordan Poole, Kevon Looney, and Klay Thompson subbed into the game at the 6:42 mark, the Warriors only trailed by five points. But after two Jonatyhna Kuminga drives that ended in a clumsy miss and a needless turnover, Jalen Brunson scored on both of the following possessions with a turnaround mid-range jumper and another three, the Knicks’ 10th of the night, which gave them 10/19 shooting from deep through the first 18 minutes of the game.
Steve Kerr called a timeout immediately after that Brunson three, which put the Knicks up 43-53. On the two following Warriors’ possessions, Klay Thompson air-balled a three and turned the ball over trying to pass on a drive. A few possessions later, the Warriors committed three fouls on one Knicks’ offensive possession, and with the Warriors at risk of losing control of the game, Jordan Poole drew a foul on a floater and made two free throws, which got the score to 45-57. Quintin Grimes and Draymond Green traded threes a few possessions later and then Klay Thompson hit his only three of the night at the 2:48 mark to cut the Knicks’ lead to 10 points.
On a normal night, the Warriors shooting 6/11 from three in a quarter would have helped them go on a run of sorts, but the Knicks shot 5/7 from deep and only missed five jumpers in the second quarter, not including a three that Quintin Grimes missed and drew a foul on when Ty Jerome closed out with his foot underneath Grimes’ landing spot.
That foul, which got the Knicks three free throws and a flagrant foul, happened right after Jerome made a smooth drive-and-dish assist to Kevon Looney for a dunk that put the score at 54-63. After Quintin Grimes shot and made just one of his two flagrant foul free throws, Julius Randle scored over Ty Jerome. On the next possession, RJ Barrett missed a jumper only for it to get tipped in by Mitchell Robinson, which pushed the Knicks’ lead to 15 points, but Jordan Poole hit a high-arcing mid-range jumper with 1 second left to make the score 56-69 at halftime.
3rd Q:
12:00 — Poole/Moody/Thompson/D. Green/Looney: 56-69, Knicks lead.
7:45 — Poole/Jerome/Thompson/D. Green/Looney: 63-80, Knicks lead.
6:31 — Poole/Jerome/Thompson/D. Green/Wiseman: 67-82, Knicks lead.
5:29 — Poole/Jerome/Lamb/Kuminga/Wiseman: 67-88, Knicks lead.
3:27 — Jerome/Moody/Lamb/Kuminga/Wiseman: 75-93, Knicks lead.
0:05 — Poole/Jerome/Moody/Thompson/Lamb: 79-98, Knicks lead.
The Knicks’ lead got up to 17 points by the 7:45 mark in just a matter of seconds after the Warriors got within 10 points early in the third quarter. Jordan Poole opened the second-half scoring for the Warriors with a three and for a few minutes, the Warriors and Knicks traded shots to stay within 10-12 points of each other. But after a Jalen Brunson mid-range step back at the 8:28 mark, Draymond Green threw the ball away on an overly ambitious pass from the middle of the lane, which turned into a Quintin Grimes transition three. On the next possession. Jordan Poole drove to the hoop, lost the ball, and then as the Warriors dawdled their back on defense, RJ Barrett ran the court and got an easy layup, which got Steve Kerr off of the bench to call a timeout.
James Wiseman and Ty Jerome were Steve Kerr’s first subs of the half and while the Warriors did briefly cut the Knicks’ lead down to 15 points, the Warriors entered the fourth quarter down 18 points. The first few minutes of James Wiseman’s third-quarter stint went ok, all things considered — the Knicks had some success attacking Wiseman, driving into his chest, and pushing him around in the interior. But Wiseman did have a nice defensive play and grabbed a contested rebound, which let the Warriors get out in transition and get within 15 points, the closest they got in the final minutes of the period.
The Knicks called time out after that bucket and things went south shortly after as the Knicks repeatedly got to the free-throw line and the Warriors struggled to convert easy looks in the interior. The play of Kuminga and Wiseman was particularly uneven. While Kuminga did assist a Wiseman dunk in the interior and throw down a huge dunk off of an offensive rebound, he made a terrible pass late that went flying into the stands and committed several needless fouls on defense. Wiseman, on the other hand, bobbled a pass that should have turned into a dunk out of the pick-and-roll, and missed a pair of fading shots in the paint.
4th Q:
12:00 — Poole/Thompson/Lamb/D. Green/Wiseman: 81-100, Knicks lead.
10:38 — Jerome/Moody/Lamb/Kuminga/Wiseman: 81-108, Knicks lead.
7:40 — Rollins/Moody/PBJ/Kuminga/Wiseman: 88-113, Knicks lead.
Steve Kerr started the fourth quarter with a lineup that featured three starters alongside Anthony Lamb and James Wiseman. Less than 90 seconds into the quarter, the Knicks pushed their lead to 27 points and Steve Kerr called a timeout to sub in his garbage-time players. What was most notable about subsequent minutes was a collection of garbage-time low-lights, most of which occurred at James Wiseman or Ryan Rollins’ expense. In the final 7:40 minutes of the game, all five of the Warriors’ most recent draft picks were on the court and the Warriors managed just six points in those minutes while the Knicks poured on another 19 points.
James Wiseman watch:
In his most extended NBA minutes in quite some time, James Wiseman slowly came undone, as is often the case when he gets extended minutes or gets to play over a large sample size. Wiseman scored just four points and made just one field goal tonight. That doesn’t bother me much as how his body language became increasingly sullen over his 22 minutes. In the first half, Wiseman made a screen for Ty Jerome. That was a positive moment and you can see it below:
There were a few other good Wiseman moments from tonight:
When Wiseman came into the game in the third quarter, the Warriors still had a chance to make a push. At one point, the Warriors got within 15 points of the Knicks thanks to the high point of Wiseman’s night when contested a floater and then grabbed a contested defensive rebound — this should be a mundane play, but for Wiseman, that’s notable growth.
From that point on, things got ugly. Wiseman’s bad hands took away what should have been an easy bucket in the pick-and-roll:
Later in the period, he took one of the most fundamentally unsound hook shots I ever remember seeing:
When fourth-quarter garbage time ensued, Wiseman did this:
The general ugliness of garbage time certainly did not do Wiseman any favor as the Warriors’ offense devolved into a half-assed drive-and-kicks with little organization. But Wiseman’s mopey disposition seems to bleed into his play. As the Knicks’ lead grew in garbage time, Wiseman became visibly dispirited. After Isaiah Hartenstein brutalized him on an offensive rebound and poster dunk put-back, Wiseman sulked, and then later in the quarter, Wiseman looked only mildly engaged as smaller Knicks players outworked and outmuscled him for rebounds.
James Wiseman’s stats tonight:
4 points, 3 rebounds, 1 steal, 2 blocks, 2 turnovers, and 5 fouls on 1/4 FG, 0/1 3P, and 2/2 FT’s.