Warriors ready for what should be ‘go time’ after winning road trip originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
Four days after posting a statement win against the defending champion Celtics in Boston, the Warriors completed a feat that was even more important:
A ‘statement’ road trip.
Which just happens to be sprinkled with serendipitous timing.
Their 127-116 win over the Thunder on Sunday in Oklahoma City capped off a fantastic ten days that signaled to the NBA that the Warriors are serious about flying. They don’t just want to challenge the league’s elite. They strive to join it.
They left the Bay Area on November 1 for their most impressive early-season trip, taking on the solid Houston Rockets and lowly Washington Wizards before taking on three legitimate title contenders in the defending champion Celtics, the undefeated Cleveland Cavaliers and staring down the 8-1 Thunder. .
Winning three out of five would have been a good trip. Winning all five would have been enough for the Warriors to float home without boarding a jetliner. Their 4-1 mark, even with an ugly loss to the Cavaliers, is validation.
“A great journey,” coach Steve Kerr told reporters at Paycom Center. “Great way to start the season, winning eight of our first ten, including a couple of away wins against two of the best teams in the league. I feel like our team is in a good place.
“But this is just the beginning of a long season. We have to keep working.”
The Warriors realize they are far from perfect, with the downside being a confusing tendency to mislead big leads. The lead resurfaced when a 30-point lead dropped to six in the final seconds of the third quarter with 4:46 remaining.
Stephen Curry secured the victory and lulled the Thunder by destroying them with eight of his game-high 36 points in the final 3:23, including a dagger 3-ball that pushed the lead to 10 with 1:13 remaining.
“These two nights are good for us to look at what we’re doing wrong to give up leads,” Kerr said. “On the other hand, it’s the modern NBA. No pipe is safe. … It just feels like this is the modern NBA.
“But we did have turnovers in both games, which allowed both Houston and OKC to get back into the game, and that’s probably where we can clean up some things.”
The Warriors did enough to move into a virtual tie with OKC and the Phoenix Suns – all with 8-2 records – for first place in the Western Conference. The Warriors were in second place when they left town 10 days ago, but they had not been tested. Now that they’ve been tested, they come home with a record unsurpassed by any team in the conference.
A look around the West suggests this is a good time for Golden State to stake their claim and continue rising as injuries plague much of the conference.
In beating OKC, the Warriors took full advantage of Thunder losing center Chet Holmgren to a hip injury in the first quarter. He was helped off the floor and Oklahoma announced after the game that Holmgren suffered a fracture of the right iliac wing and will be reevaluated in eight to 10 weeks.
The Suns say star forward Kevin Durant (calf injury) will be out until at least Thanksgiving week. The fourth-ranked Denver Nuggets will be without power forward Aaron Gordon for at least two more weeks due to a right calf strain. The fifth-ranked Memphis Grizzlies have three starters – Ja Morant, Desmond Bane and Marcus Smart – absent from week to week.
These wounded teams will eventually get their stars back. But the Warriors need to know it’s time to go. There are few things in the NBA that are more glorious for a team’s psyche than having a successful road trip, despite the fact that there is a lot of room for improvement.
“You always have to have perspective in this league because it’s so hard to win,” Curry said on NBC Sports Bay Area’s “Warriors Postgame Live.” “If you get on a plane at SFO ten or eleven days ago and say: we’re going 4-1, you take that all day long. The game against Cleveland was a tough pill to swallow.
“But our resilience to bounce back and play a very strong OKC team in their building and get a win like that on the way home shows what we are building.”
Next up are Klay Thompson and the Dallas Mavericks, who are ranked 11th. They are also hurt, without starting forward PJ Washington and key rotation player Dereck Lively as they lost at Denver on Sunday.
Good health is always temporary. Can change in an instant. The Warriors come home in a good place mentally, and should use that to their advantage.
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