SAN FRANCISCO — The Warriors’ title winners always knew where that proverbial “switch” was.
They were just too polite to bring it up to openly acknowledge that knowledge.
The 2022-23 Warriors might not be a squad built for league domination or supervillainy, but Golden State’s core three players — Steph Curry, Draymond Green, and Klay Thompson — are still a group that, under Steve Kerr, has never lost a Western Conference playoff series when all three players are healthy.
And those core three players have been bored since October.
How could they not be desensitized to the regular season? Even NBA rookies feel like a late-winter game doesn’t mean much — if anything. Imagine how small a March trip to Charlotte or Memphis must feel when you’ve played in the biggest games in the history of the NBA.
Actually, we don’t need to imagine. Green told us a few weeks ago:
“Anybody can win in March. What does that mean? I have a hard time getting out of my bed in March,” he said.
The Dubs — following the lead of their groggy leaders — have doddled and plodded through months of forgettable games. They’d lack focus and conviction at the opening tip and allow the other team to land a few good shots. Sometimes the Dubs would come back, sometimes they wouldn’t.
They put together a few stretches of excellent play, just to prove it was still there or to fend off a forgettable moment of adversity, but deep down, the Warriors have played the 2022-23 regular season without conviction or care.
As such, we’ve had a hard time watching these Dubs. We’ve had an even harder time imagining this team fully actualized.
But amid it all, the Warriors believed it would all work out in the end.
And that end arrived Tuesday night at Chase Center. It came in the form of the New Orleans Pelicans.
Get this: There are repercussions to coasting through a regular season.
After choking away a win Sunday to the Minnesota Timberwolves, the universe issued the Warriors an edict. They could drop Tuesday’s game to the Pelicans and pretend everything would be OK. The Western Conference standings are jumbled between seeds Nos. 4 and 12, and a loss to the Pellies — one of the teams in that mix — likely would have relegated the Warriors to the play-in tournament.
And yet, even with it all laid out neatly and clearly, the Dubs looked keen to fulfill Adam Silver’s dreams of a Warriors-Lakers play-in game in the early goings Tuesday night. They fell behind 20 points to the Pelicans in the first half. They were beaten in every aspect of a game that carried all the telltale signs of playoff basketball.
Perhaps the Warriors’ veterans needed to feel real, authentic fear.
Maybe the Pelicans started talking too early, and the Dubs’ pride took over.
The genesis does not matter. Curry, Green, and Thompson found the switch and flipped it in the second half.
That 20-point first-half deficit was cut to four points by the end of the third. The Warriors won the game by 11, and it wasn’t even that close.
Green was peerless, playing on the brink for six-and-a-half minutes after picking up his fourth foul 30 seconds into the third quarter but staying in the game. He controlled the game on both ends of the floor, leading by example and in voice, which was as robust Tuesday as it has been for any contest this season.
The Pelicans woke the title-winning Green from his deep slumber with hard fouls and more than a bit of yapping.
“At [that] point,” Green said, “I’m going to put myself out there… then you hope guys will back me up. And if not, then our season’s over anyway.”
Green’s fire — muted so often this season, a response that one must presume stems from his preseason punch of Jordan Poole — was roaring Tuesday.
That’s not to say it didn’t get out of control. In the fourth quarter after his fifth foul wasn’t challenged, Green yelled at video coordinator Jacob Rubin to the point where he had to be calmed by President of Basketball Operations Bob Myers on the bench.
But it is easier to quell a fire than to start one. And without Green’s fire, the Warriors cannot win a title this season. There are also no banners in the rafters of Chase Center and probably no Chase Center without it.
“Draymond willed us to victory,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said after the game.
Curry and Thompson did their parts, too.
Curry hit three straight 3-pointers to close the third quarter Tuesday. In bowling, they’d call that a Turkey.
He closed the game by scoring seven straight points and firing a ludicrous cross-court, around-the-defender pass to Thompson, who hit a long 3-pointer without so much as an extra breath.
Thompson also played some outstanding defense down the stretch — a necessity for a team missing Andrew Wiggins.
The core three are still really, really good. And the great news for Warriors fans is that — should they get to 43 wins and the real tournament — they’ve left plenty in the tank for a long postseason run.
That kind of run — once presumed — has felt fleeting all season. Some days, the Warriors are certainly going to win the title. Other days, they’re going to be one-and-done in the play-in tournament.
The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. This team is in the mix to win it all, but the challenge of doing that will be tougher than last season, when seemingly everything broke the Dubs’ way on the path to title No. 4.
But the Warriors will also need Jonathan Kuminga to continue to be a revelation. They’ll need Donte DiVincenzo to play with the confidence of Jordan Poole and Poole to play with the smarts of DiVincenzo. They need Kevon Looney to continue to provide perfect, perpetually undervalued role-player minutes. They need Gary Payton II to make big-time, opponent-demoralizing defensive plays on the perimeter, as he did at the end of the third quarter Tuesday when he stripped Brandon Ingram.
And, oh my, it’d be nice to have Wiggins back in the fold, too.
Those things need to break right, yes.
But the core is what separates this team from the rest. That’s the dynamo of the winning machine.
Give Curry, Green, and Thompson some support, and everything is still possible for this team.
They know where the switch is. They’ve always known.
Tuesday night, they flicked it on.
It should stay there for the rest of the campaign.
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