Warriors Must Consider Adjustments After Second Straight Blowout Loss

As much as it may feel like it after a 120-92 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, this season is not lost yet. Far from it.

It’s important to remember that the Warriors have only played two games. That’s less than 2.5% of the season. If this were an NFL schedule, we’d be roughly eight minutes into the second quarter of the first game of the season. We wouldn’t decide the season based on less than one half of football, and we shouldn’t decide the season now. We certainly shouldn’t do so while the Warriors are down a handful of players due to injury.

It was known going into this season that they would suffer growing pains as the new players tried to mesh with the existing players and the young guys gained their footing in the NBA. Steve Kerr acknowledged as much postgame.

“We don’t have a sense of who we are as a team yet,” he said. “We haven’t established much.”

Even taking all of that into consideration, this team has looked so different from what we’ve seen over the last five seasons that it’s almost hard to believe. The offense has been mediocre. The defense has been atrocious. And the players are addressing that reality in harsh terms.

“The reality is we f---ing suck right now,” Draymond Green said. “I don’t know what better way to frame it.”

The Warriors have at times appeared careless, out of focus and almost oblivious to the action on the court. They are regularly committing lazy, sloppy turnovers and missing defensive assignments and rotations. After the loss to the Thunder, Omari Spellman chalked up the struggles to a lack of effort.

“We need to compete. Everybody. Myself included. I have been a culprit,” he said. “We have to compete as a team every time.”

That competitive drive can’t be taught in practice or picked up in the film room. It has to come from a place of desire within the players themselves. Perhaps the veterans should call a players only meeting to figure out how they channel their energy into a better product on the court. Maybe practices should be retooled to focus more on competition and giving maximum effort. One way or another, it doesn’t feel like the players are doing everything they can to win basketball games right now and that needs to change.

But it isn’t just up to the players. There are more concrete on-the-court elements of the Warriors struggles that can be addressed by the coaches. The challenges the Warriors face are many, but let’s focus on two for the moment: a lack of defense and a lack of wing scoring. With multiple injured big men, the coaches may need to retool their strategies to make up for the fact that the Warriors will be undersized in many of the games that they play. Whether it’s sending more people to crash the glass or double-teaming bigs in the post, or going in the opposite direction and daring big men to isolate while preventing anyone else from scoring, something in defensive strategy will have to change.

As for the wing scoring, it’s clear that the Warriors don’t have the pieces around Stephen Curry to play the ball-movement, team-oriented style of basketball that has defined the Warriors at their highest points. Other than Curry, who scored 23 points, no perimeter player scored double digits. Consistently getting the ball to wing players and having Curry run around to get the ball back doesn’t work if said wings are not scoring threats. The answer here may be to put the ball in Curry’s hands as much as possible. Have him run the whole offense and try a bunch of James Harden-type isolations if need be. As much as this style of play is the bane of existence for every Warriors fan who has come to love the team-driven offense, it should at least be given a look. Curry is the Warriors’ best offensive player and one of the best in the league. If there’s anyone on the current roster who can right the ship, it’s him.