The Golden State Warriors are only eight games into the 2026-27 campaign, but they've already done something they failed to achieve through the entirety of the 2025-26 season --win five consecutive games.
That's sort of hard to believe, but when one remembers back to last season, the team seemingly couldn't sustain any sort of momentum. Maybe this season will be different.
It felt last season that for every step forward the Warriors took, there would usually be at least one, if not two, steps back. That sort of team is frustrating to watch because it always feels like the team is on the precipice of going on a run, only to never quite prove able to get there which can be maddening.
It's still early so there is plenty of time for the Warriors to have a repeat of that same frustration this season, but so far this Warriors team has done a really good job of building upon its successes and carrying them forward. It would have been really easy for the opposite to have happened after the Warriors lost their first three games of the season, and the fact they were able to bounce right back and rattle off five straight wins is as encouraging as it is surprising.
Warriors rejecting expectations may allow the momentum to flow easier
Perhaps the ability to bounce back is due to the fact head coach Steve Kerr has treated the word"expectations" like it's a curse. If the Warriors were thinking about playoff seeding or winning a championship, those three opening losses would have been more debilitating because they put themselves behind the eight ball from the jump.
Yet since they aren't thinking about the bigger picture and are instead just taking each game as it comes, they are better able to perform on a night-to-night basis when it's all about trying to win that game with whoever they have on the floor.
That doesn't mean there isn't a pretty high likelihood for regression. Every team is going to deal with adversity and for this aged Warriors team, one would imagine that at some point the injuries are going to start piling up.
Sustaining momentum will be key for the Warriors if they want to prove they're different from last year's team. Obviously they're going to lose at some point, but they can't allow the losses to lead to negative momentum. As long as they remain committed to an approach without expectations and keep that game-to-game mentality, this season should be a lot more fun to watch than last season proved to be.
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