Stephen Curry is out, Draymond Green and Kevin Durant bark at each other and the Golden State Warriors have turned winning into losing. But will it matter in the end?
Stephen Curry is out and won’t be rushed back. At the same time, the Warriors have dealt with the Draymond Green/Kevin Durant incident that further brought back the elephant in the room – will KD return to the Golden State Warriors this summer?
This will be an ongoing conversation for the insatiable media world, and the Warriors will have to deal with it.
Meanwhile they will have to stop the bleeding from the five losses in the past seven games. So a lot is going on!
But the regular season losses to the Milwaukee Bucks, Los Angeles Clippers, Houston Rockets, Dallas Mavericks and San Antonio Spurs won’t be season-ending. A championship team knows how to distribute their energy throughout a season. Especially in a very packed NBA regular season a coach needs to know when players should be alert, and when losing is acceptable.
Last year The Warriors lost five out of seven in March. The exact same amount as now. If you expand your look it was actually seven out of ten games, but no one remembered when the team lifted the trophy later that season.
Great teams have slumps, and the media is ecstatic about it. The Warriors losing is great news, and reporters feed on it. Creating new stories around a team is easier when things aren’t going as planned, but the Golden State slump will not last forever, and the beast will move on to other self-invented carcasses.
Last year when the champions lost 7 games in twenty days (Trail Blazers, Timberwolves, Kings, Spurs, Jazz, Pacers and Bucks) the media wanted Kerr to answer. As usual, he kept his calm, and this time is no different.
Kerr is both juggling the media, his hot-tempered stars and the fact that his fragile superstar Steph Curry isn’t on the court to make everyone smile.
The Warriors are in a slump because of poor play. It happens. Legendary Gregg Popovich always told Craig Sager that “it didn’t go in” as an explanation why the Spurs lost. Sometimes, losing games really just comes down to poor luck.
It’s the same thing now. Buckets aren’t gone in. KD has had a horrific percentage from the arc the past three games. A sad 1-for-8 shooting night against the Spurs, another 0-for-4 performance against Dallas and a 0-for-2 game against the Rockets.
The same goes for Klay who was 3-for-11 against the Spurs, 2-for-11 against Dallas and 0-of-5 against the Rockets.
Eventually they will start falling again, and in the end, it doesn’t matter. Nobody will remember this slump in a year. But right now – the entire media world is concerned!