1Golden State Warriors (69-8; last week: 1): It’s admittedly a little insane to suggest a team operating at this level might be struggling. And yet, watching the Warriors work last week — through the dominate-only-in-fits-and-starts win over the Washington Wizards, through the overtime white-knuckler over the Utah Jazz and, most notably, through the home loss to the Boston Celtics, snapping an record-setting 54-game regular-season unbeaten streak by the Bay — they did look a little run-down, a bit ragged.
Head coach Steve Kerr saw it, too, suggesting after the Boston loss that “maybe all the talk and all the focus on the record” — on trying to become the first NBA team ever to go a undefeated at home during a single season and, more broadly, on trying to topple the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls’ all-time wins record — “has gotten us away from the process of who we are.”
Well, they got back to who they are Sunday. Golden State shot a blistering 57 percent from the floor, dished 30 assists on 50 field goals and hung 136 points on the Portland Trail Blazers — who, you might remember, torched the Dubs after the All-Star break — behind characteristically monstrous performances from Stephen Curry (39 points in 35 minutes on 21 shots, 9-for-13 from 3-point range, seven assists, six rebounds, two steals, one block):
… and Draymond Green, who picked up his 13th triple-double of the season while once again proving his value as a small-ball center, changing the game with his two-way work at the five spot in downshifted lineups that outscored Portland by 24 points in about 14 minutes of floor time:
The win offered a bracing reminder of just how violently the Warriors bounce back after losses:
The Warriors are now 8-0 in the first game after their losses and they’ve won those bounce-back games by an average of 15 points.
— Ben Golliver (@BenGolliver) April 4, 2016
It also kept them one win ahead of the ‘95-’96 Bulls’ record-setting pace. The Warriors — who just got reserve center Festus Ezeli back (and in the nick of time, with starter Andrew Bogut out Sunday with a rib injury) and who could see Andre Iguodala return as soon as Tuesday — need four wins in their final five games to become legendary.
They’ll welcome the young and exciting but not-ready-for-prime-time Minnesota Timberwolves to Oracle Arena on Tuesday, and they’ve got two more coming against the Memphis Grizzlies, whose pets’ heads are falling off. Getting to 72, then, seems like it’s all over but the shoutin’. Reaching 73, though, will require at least one win in two tries against …
2San Antonio Spurs (64-12; LW: 8): … a team with its own patch of rarefied air to reach. If it’s interested in reaching it, that is.
Boston’s win over the Dubs cleared the path for San Antonio to become the first team ever to go 41-0 at home; all the Spurs need to do is win their last two games at AT&T Center. Those games, however, come against the Warriors and Oklahoma City Thunder — one vying for immortality, the other that might want to send a message about how dangerous it can be in a prospective second-round matchup. Nothing seems to come easy in the NBA, does it?
The $64,000 question, of course, is whether Gregg Popovich — whose team is all but locked into the No. 2 seed, has already proven it can beat Golden State this season, and has precious little to play for — decides to rest multiple key contributors rather than go for the glory. Tony Parker has said he thinks Pop will; he’s already begun sitting his big guns more frequently, as he did in last Saturday’s loss to OKC, and Parker’s been around long enough to know the way his coach thinks.
“I don’t think about trying to have a good regular season, or how many games we win,” Parker said last week, according to Jeff McDonald of the San Antonio Express-News. “It doesn’t matter, really. At the end of the day, the only thing you remember is how many championships you won.”
Parker’s probably right. Asked about Golden State’s loss to Boston, Pop said, “It’s got nothing to do with what we do.” What they do, as ever, is brutalize the competition on both ends of the floor while marching to the beat of their own drummer. In this instance, that probably means the Spurs and Warriors won’t really dance again until late May (provided they get that far, naturally), but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t holding out hope that Pop tells his band to pick up the tempo one more time before the playoffs.
3Los Angeles Clippers (48-28; LW: 12): We’ve been wondering for three months how the Clippers would look once Blake Griffin returned from his partially torn quadriceps tendon, broken shooting hand and four-game suspension. Well, now we know: they look like … y’know … the Clippers. (Kind of anticlimactic.)
We’ll need to see the Clips play better competition than the Wizards to get real answers, but what we did see in Blake’s first game since Christmas — the starters looking strong, L.A. outscoring Washington by 23 points in Griffin’s 24-plus minutes, Griffin impacting the game even without his All-NBA stuff — seemed like positive signs for a Clipper club that desperately needs his scoring, playmaking, athleticism and versatility to have a puncher’s chance (sorry) against the Warriors and Spurs in a seven-game series. Sunday was a start; how far he comes in the final two weeks could prompt rewrites to the expected Western script.
4Cleveland Cavaliers (55-22; LW: 7): All these things are true:
• The Cavaliers are 17-8 since the All-Star break, with the league’s second-most efficient offense and and a top-10 defense;
• They just handled the team with the East’s best record since the break, the Charlotte Hornets, without Kyrie Irving;
• They’ve already surpassed last year’s win total and own a 3 1/2-game lead over the Toronto Raptors for home-court advantage throughout the Eastern Conference playoffs with five games left.
All these things are also true:
• Cleveland hasn’t won more than three in a row post-All-Star, with every brief stretch of success seemingly short-circuited by an eyebrow-raising loss that prevents LeBron James and co. from separating themselves;
• The Cavaliers seem to be the least happy 55-win team in recent memory, with new reports of chemistry issues and confusing communication arising every other day;
• Cleveland must finish 5-0 for Tyronn Lue to post as good a record this season as David Blatt had before he got canned.
I note that last fact only as a reminder that, while it’s true that NBA fans shouldn’t call the Cavaliers disappointing for being really good rather than historically excellent, we’re not the ones putting that burden on the Cavs; LeBron is, and has been all season. He’s been playing like he’s ready to accept that responsibility, averaging a shade under 29 points, 10 assists and nine rebounds per game on 57/38/78 shooting splits over his last seven games. Now we’ll see if the rest of his teammates will join him to meet that challenge.
