Warrior Offense Sputters in Tough Blowout Loss to Hawks
In the NBA, not all losses are created equal. The opponent, margin of victory and context surrounding the defeat all play a part in determining how painful it is. In some recent games, for instance, the Golden State Warriors have kept things close and interesting against some of the league’s best teams. They’re losing, but at least they’re competitive and playing better than their roster suggests they should be. Losses like these are about as good as losses can be.
Monday’s 104-79 loss to the Atlanta Hawks was not one of those games. The Hawks and the Warriors are two of the league’s worst teams. The Warriors entered the game with a record of 4-17, while the Hawks came in at 4-16. Unsurprisingly, the game was ugly. The two teams combined to commit 37 turnovers and neither team shot well apart from a few solid stretches from Atlanta in the second half. During certain sequences, the theme song from The Benny Hill Show would have fit in perfectly as background music. Throughout the game, the two young, somewhat disjointed teams threw bad passes, lost control of the dribble and took bad shots. It was not good basketball.
However, on paper it should have been a close, competitive game, and on the court it wasn’t. The Warriors lost by 25 points. They only scored 79. To lose by that much to the Atlanta Hawks while scoring that little is almost impressive. The Hawks have allowed less than 100 points just one other time this season, and even then they let up 99. It’s as remarkable an offensive failure as we’ve seen in the NBA this season.
The offense just didn’t have anything. For the game, the Warriors shot 39.8% from the field and 17.6% from three-point range. They committed 23 turnovers against just 17 assists. For long stretches of the game, the offense stagnated as players were forced to take bad shots and the Hawks picked up easy steals. At the points when the ball did move nicely, the players missed open looks far too often. It wasn’t any one aspect of the offense that was failing. The offense, as a whole, simply didn’t have anything going.
The one player who played well offensively was Eric Paschall. He was confident and aggressive, occasionally taking matters into his own hands. He created opportunities for himself and gave the Warriors second chances by crashing the offensive glass while also performing the distributor role from time to time. In total, he scored 24 points on just 11 field goal attempts to go along with nine rebounds (including five offensive boards) and six assists.
But that number of 24 points on 11 shots highlights probably the craziest offensive stat of the night for the Dubs. Paschall was the only Warrior to post more points than field goal attempts. The only one. To put this in some context, even as the New York Knicks lost 132-88 to the Milwaukee Bucks on the same night, four of their players were able to do this. Paschall wasn’t just the only Warrior to have a good game offensively. He was the only Warrior to play even somewhat efficiently on offense. No one else could muster up many good plays. On a related note, it would be nice to see Paschall be more aggressive. On nights where no one else is executing, he should work for his own opportunities more often. When the Warriors are healthier, he will still be expected to be an offensive catalyst and he can start working on that now.
The defense kept the team in the game for a little bit. In spite of the abysmal offense, the Warriors only trailed by nine points at halftime. But the Hawks ran away with things in the second half. After the Warriors did a nice job of using double-teams to keep Trae Young off the three-point line in the first half, he adjusted in the second half by focusing on driving to shoot two-pointers. He finished with 24 points despite making just two three-point field goals. The heavy focus on perimeter defense by the Warriors also opened up opportunities for Atlanta’s big men as Alex Len and former Warrior Damian Jones combined for 27 points and 12 rebounds on 73.3% shooting in 43 minutes. On the whole, the defense actually played decently for much of the game. But with the way the Warriors offense played, the defense would have needed to be otherworldly to come out of Atlanta with a win. Obviously, that did not happen.
The Warrior players are young, inexperienced and still going through the growing pains of adjusting to NBA basketball. Blowout losses are inevitable. But to have one of them come against the Atlanta Hawks stings just a little bit more than most others.