The Warriors struggle to score and fall apart in crunch time in a loss to the Magic.
A ugly first quarter, a glorious third quarter, and a brutal meltdown by the Warriors' offense and Klay Thompson in crunch time.
Silly, naive me looked forward to tonight’s game against the Orlando Magic. “It’s the Orlando Magic,” I said to myself, “what’s the worst that can happen?”
You know the answer to that now.
The Warriors, now in the midst of their most difficult chunk of the calendar this season, had a chance to win one of the few winnable games before the end of the regular season. They did not win tonight, dear reader. In fact, they lost 94-90 to a team that had lost 53 games prior to tonight’s bullying of a Warriors team that is increasingly looking like a paper tiger.
The Warriors scored just 17 points in the first quarter of tonight’s game against a very bad Magic team. They scored only 16 points in the fourth quarter, after exploding for 36 points and 7 made threes the quarter before. That’s the story of tonight’s game in a nutshell — a self-styled contender couldn’t even muster a JV quantity of points in the first and last quarters of the game against one of the NBA’s most JV of teams.
Some things happened in between then, sure; Gary Payton II returned from injury, Otto Porter Jr. had another double-double with 14 points and 15 huge rebounds, Jordan Poole scored over 20 points for the 10th straight game, and Jonathan Kuminga carried the Warriors’ offense in a physically imposing second-quarter stint.
But none of that is as important as the fact that the Warriors without Steph Curry are apparently the Keystone Cops of crunch-time basketball and struggle to score the ball unless they get a nuclear shooting performance from one of — excuse me! — their only lead guard. Turns out that signing a 38-year-old Andre Iguodala to be your third-string point guard is quite the risky bet on the body of a 38-year-old. Who knew?!
The Warriors play the Miami Heat tomorrow night on a back-to-back, but after burning 36 minutes of Andrew Wiggins, 32 minutes of Klay Thompson, 39 minutes of Jordan Poole, nearly 30 minutes of Draymond Green, and 26 minutes of Otto Porter Jr., the Warriors might feel the need to rest their veteran players. A week ago I would have seen the merit of that idea, and I still mostly do, but at this point, I doubt that resting any of their key players will actually make them more competitive for a road game on Friday against the Atlanta Hawks, who by virtue of having several players who can capably dribble and shoot, should also embarrass this shell of a Warriors’ team.
This is all to say, tonight’s embarrassing loss could well be the high-point of a road trip that includes tomorrow night’s game against the Heat, Friday’s matchup with the Hawks, a Sunday night game against a bad Wizards’ team, and a back-to-back with a young and confident Grizzlies team.
Joy (in buckets lol).
Rotation watch:
1st Q:
12:00 — Poole/Thompson/Wiggins/Green/Looney: 0-0, tie game:
6:45 — Poole/Thompson/Wiggins/OPJ/Green: 4-12, Magic lead.
5:09 — Poole/GPII/Wiggins/OPJ/Bjelica: 9-16, Magic lead.
2:41 — Poole/GPII/Thompson/OPJ/Bjelica: 12-25, Magic lead.
2:05 — GPII/Thompson/OPJ/Green/Bjelica: 15-25, Magic lead.
1:16 — Green/Thompson/OPJ/Kuminga/Bjelica: 17-25, Magic lead.
Before Steve Kerr made a single substitution, a bad Magic team had outscored the Warriors 12-4 in the first five minutes of the game. Jordan Poole seemed intent on playing within himself and the team concept in the early minutes of the game and didn’t really seek out his own shot. This play, which ends in a missed Kevon Looney layup, is a good example of the type of offensive looks that simply weren’t going down for the Warriors in the first quarter:
Less than a minute later, Poole decided to simply... attack the hoop, and lo and behold, good things happened:
But as far as good things go, that was pretty much it for the Warriors in the first quarter. Poole ended up not scoring a single point in the quarter and the Warriors missed all 7 of their three-point attempts. They did, however, find something faintly resembling momentum when Otto Porter Jr. subbed in for Kevon Looney. Soon after, Gary Payton II checked in for the first time in 8 games. Nemanja Bjelica checked in alongside him, as was often the case early in the season, but that duo was -4 in its brief stint together.
Towards the end of the quarter, Jordan Poole got subbed out of the game, and the Warriors tried to survive the final two minutes of the period without a primary ball-handler. Klay Thompson scored a layup in this stint without Poole or... Chris Chiozza and the Warriors entered the second quarter down 17-25.
2nd Q:
12:00 — Chiozza/Thompson/OPJ/Kuminga/Bjelica: 17-25, Magic lead.
10:07 — Chiozza/Lee/Thompson/Kuminga/Bjelica: 21-27, Magic lead.
7:58 — Poole/Lee/Wiggins/Kuminga/Bjelica: 25-34, Magic lead.
5:49 — Poole/Lee/Wiggins/Kuminga/Green: 30-35, Magic lead.
1:55 — Poole/Thompson/Wiggins/Kuminga/Green: 36-41, Magic lead.
1:34 — Poole/Thompson/Wiggins/OPJ/Green: 36-42, Magic lead.
Although Gary Payton II spent his first few years in the NBA bouncing around as a non-shooting point guard, he’s operated almost entirely as a rim-rolling, cutting guard ala Bruce Brown for the Warriors. I held out some faint hope that GPII might reprise his ball-handling duties tonight in the Warriors’ non-Jordan Poole minutes, but alas, Chris Chiozza started the second quarter. The Warriors were — improbably — only -1 in Chiozza’s minutes, but that number obscures just how bad he was in those minutes. These two drives, which ended in turnovers, sum up those minutes:
But in the final two possessions of the Chris Chioza experience, Jonathan Kuminga made two buckets and through the rest of his minutes, his scoring helped the Warriors get back into the game. Save for Otto Porter Jr.’s three early in the quarter and an acrobatic, buzzer-beating floater inside the three-point line by Klay Thompson towards the end of the quarter, Jonathan Kuminga and Jordan Poole scored every Warriors’ field goal in the second quarter. Kuminga scored in a variety of ways, almost entirely in the interior. Draymond Green found him on cuts to the hoop, Andrew Wiggins set screens for him off-ball, and on one impressive instance, Kuminga cooked Mo Bamba in isolation by dribbling him down into the post:
3rd Q:
12:00 — Poole/Thompson/Wiggins/OPJ/Bjelica: 38-46, Magic lead.
5:22 — Poole/Thompson/Wiggins/Kuminga/Green: 58-57, Warriors lead.
4:12 — Poole/Lee/Wiggins/Kuminga/Green: 61-60, Warriors lead.
2:33 — Poole/Lee/Thompson/Kuminga/Green; 70-63, Warriors lead.
2:16 — Green/Lee/Moody/Thompson/Kuminga: 70-63, Warriors lead.
0:04 — Poole/Lee/Moody/Thompson/Kuminga: 74-65, Warriors lead.
When the third quarter began and Draymond Green was not on the court, I felt a sense of impending doom and went to go check Anthony Slater’s Twitter account for news of a potential nerve injury re-aggravation. That was not, thankfully, the case — Slater tweeted that Green’s absence was likely tied to his minutes’ restriction and Steve Kerr’s desire to get more closing minutes for him. This turned out to be a wise decision.
A balanced scoring attack of Jordan Poole, Klay Thompson, and Otto Porter Jr. gave the Warriors’ their first lead of the night before Green finally checked in at the 5:22 mark. In the minutes following, the Kuminga/Green frontcourt gave the Magic fits. The Warriors repeatedly put the ball in Jordan Poole’s hands in the final minutes of the quarter with either of Green or Kuminga operating as Poole’s partner-in-crime. You can two such possessions below:
Another downstream effect of Draymond Green’s reconfigured rotations — neither Nemanja Bjelica nor Gary Payton II checked played any minutes in the quarter. And when Jordan Poole finally sat around the two-minute mark, Steve Kerr turned to a very intriguing jumbo-wing lineup of Green/Lee/Moody/Thompson/Kuminga. That lineup generated a layup for Draymond Green and two trips to the free-throw line for Jonathan Kuminga in its two-minute stint.
4th Q:
12:00 — Poole/Lee/Moody/Kuminga/Bjelica: 74-65, Warriors lead.
9:21 — Poole/Lee/Wiggins/OPJ/Green: 79-73, Warriors lead.
8:32 — Poole/GPII/Wiggins/OPJ/Green: 79-75, Warriors lead.
6:29 — Poole/Thompson/Wiggins/OPJ/Green: 79-78, Warriors lead.
The Warriors opened the fourth quarter with Jordan Poole handling the ball alongside what can only be categorized as a bench unit. The decision to not play Chris Chiozza was merciful, but Steve Kerr seemed so determined to, erhm, chase wins, that Poole played the entirety of the fourth quarter. The Warriors also only scored 16 points in the fourth quarter. I’m not saying that those two things are directly related, but it was, nonetheless, jarring to see an exhausted Warriors team look so utterly deflated on offense for a 12-minute period after just having doubled their first-half scoring output in the third quarter.
The early minutes of the fourth quarter were rather disjointed, due in part to several long stoppages of play that may have played a role in the Warriors’ halted momentum coming out of the third quarter. But the Warriors had plenty of other self-inflicted wounds — they committed four turnovers in about as many minutes of play to open the quarter, they missed three shots in a row on a possession with multiple offensive rebounds and went between the 10:56 mark and 6:00 mark without scoring a single field goal. That field goal at the 6-minute mark was a putback, for the record, by which point only led by three points.
For a minute, it seemed like Andrew Wiggins would redeem himself after blowing the Spurs’ game on Sunday night in such brutal fashion; Wiggins scored on a post mismatch at the 3:55 mark and then put the Warriors back in the lead with a clutch corner three assisted by Klay Thompson with a little over a minute left in the game.
But Klay Thompson played the role of Andrew Wiggins in tonight’s clutch time meltdown and all but handed the Magic their 20th win of the season when he fouled Franz Wagner shooting a three with the Magic up by a point with 13.2 seconds left in the game and... 0.1 seconds left on the shot clock. You can see that play, if you can stand to do so, below:
The Warriors got one more chance to perhaps get the game to overtime after Jordan Poole scored a layup to get the game within two points. The Magic called timeout after the Poole layup and set up for a sideline out-of-bounds play, which ended in Klay Thompson overplaying Franz Wagner at the three-point line, getting burned for a backdoor layup that put the Magic up four points, and then taking the ball out of bounds and promptly throwing it back to the Warriors’ opponents.
You will not forget this game, for as much as you might want to. With this loss, the Warriors are now 2-6 in games without Steph Curry this season. Two of those losses have come in the last few days and in humiliating and utterly avoidable fashion just as the Warriors start to freefall within the standings of the NBA’s western conference. If — and perhaps, when — the Warriors have to face a tough opponent, perhaps as a road underdog, in the first round of the playoffs, you will remember this game. For tomorrow night’s sake, I hope the Warriors do too.