The Golden State Warriors will not know who their opponent in the first round of the NBA playoffs will be until the regular season finale Wednesday. On Sunday, they concluded their final regular season game at Oracle Arena in Oakland with a 131-104 win against Los Angeles Clippers.
Beat writer Mark Medina outlines 14 confusing playoff possibilities the Warriors could face and the rotating rest strategy Steve Kerr will employ in upcoming games. Half of the following eight players are slated to rest each game: Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, DeMarcus Cousins, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livingston and Kevon Looney.
“Regardless of how these last two regular season games play out, the Warriors feel really good about themselves,” Medina said on this week’s Warriors Looking Forward in reference to potential upcoming matches against Los Angeles Clippers, San Antonio Spurs or Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round of the playoffs.
Warriors Looking Forward
Beat writers Dieter Kurtenbach and Mark Medina lay out what’s next for Golden State now that they’ve clinched the No. 1 seed in the NBA Western Conference.
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On Sunday, Warriors pulled off the win over the Clippers in their final regular season game at Oracle Arena, sporting “We Believe” throwback jerseys in reference to the 2007 Warriors.
“Usually it takes two years for NBA teams to have new jerseys,” Kurtenbach tells Medina. “What we had here tonight in this being the final regular season game at Oracle Arena certainly pulled some heart strings in some places. But that was a really big deal for the Warriors to be able to bust those out.”
The “We Believe” jerseys from the 2007 season just mean more, because that team was so definitively Oakland, Kurtenbach said.
“It was rough around the edges, it was headstrong, it was an underdog. They had to fight and scrap and claw their way even into the playoffs, and then they go out and they pull off the first 8-1 upset in a seven game series in NBA history.
“That team really captured what really made this arena and what makes this East Bay community so great.”
There’s no good way to break up with Oakland, Kurtenbach concluded, adding that the Dubs’ win against the Clippers was the “perfect cap” to the team’s residence at Oracle Arena.
Warriors Look Back
The Dubs were not playing great basketball in their home games throughout their final season at Oracle Arena, Kurtenbach points out to Medina, who agrees that complacency became a central challenge the team overcame.
“The turning point for this team was when they went on that four game road trip, they go to Oklahoma City and Houston and they don’t have Kevin Durant for those first two games and they played exceptional basketball,” Kurtenbach said in reference to the team’s mid March four-game road trip.
“Kevin Durant knows, that basically, the system runs around Klay [Thompson] and Steph [Curry] and that it is an exception in many cases, when it runs around Kevin, Kurtenbach said to credit Durant for the team’s recent success.
”He doesn’t necessarily love that, but that’s what it is. He showed up on a team that had already won a championship and 73 games. That’s how it’s gonna work.”
Steph from Distance, Durant in the Mid-range, Cousins on the Block
The “clunky” rollout of Cousins’ debut on the Warriors this season may have contributed to the team resolving how to manage a system where Cousins, Curry and Durant could each score from their respective best shooting distances from the hoop.
“Ultimately Kevin taking a step back and saying I’m going to facilitate, I’m going to be the bridge between the two of these guys as a playmaker, really took the Warriors to the next level … This team is playing, I would argue, its best basketball of the season, right now, and it’s most consistent.”
