Warriors Can’t Muster Enough in Final Stretch Against Clippers

At this point, it’s brutally clear that the Warriors’ roster doesn’t stack up to the rosters of most teams in the NBA. As a result, in basically every game they play, they need to turn in a complete game to have a chance to win. They need to be at least decent in every single stat category if they want to come out victorious. This has been stated many, many times, but it’s worth reinforcing. It shows how different they are from past Warrior teams and most of the rest of the league as currently constructed.

Friday night’s 109-100 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers only served to remind us of this. The Warriors played fantastic basketball for most of the game, but never found a shooting rhythm and couldn’t hold up in the fourth quarter as the Clippers found an extra gear and the Dubs took the defeat.

“[The Clippers] just overwhelmed us,” Steve Kerr said in reference to the final frame. “They played a great quarter.”

But when the game tipped off at Staples Center, the Clippers probably didn’t expect that they’d have to play a great fourth quarter to pull off a win that was closer than the score indicated. Even without Paul George, the Clippers are still obviously the better team on paper. They held the edge in the early going, but in the second and third quarters, the Warriors actually started to take control of things. They took their defensive intensity, which had been solid in the first quarter, to another level. They were smart in who they let shoot and who they focused on. They had active hands on defense, stripped the ball and drew offensive fouls, in total forcing 12 Los Angeles turnovers in those two periods. And just as importantly, their offense was solid. Not great by any stretch of the imagination, but doing just enough in terms of cutting, passing and shooting to build and maintain a lead that sat at 10 points after three quarters.

“I thought we played well. I thought we played great as a team,” Glenn Robinson III said. “We moved the ball. We were very unselfish, but everybody was aggressive at the same time.”

At the end of the day, that wasn’t enough. In the fourth quarter, the Clippers, who clearly hadn’t given maximum effort through the first 36 minutes, turned up their intensity. Kawhi Leonard took over as he is wont to do late in games. He got more energetic on both offense and defense, assuming control of the game and knowing full well what he was capable of against a Warriors team that was beginning to run out of energy after working so hard to build a lead. Lou Williams and Montrezl Harrell also increased their level of play, and those three players combined for 28 of LA’s 36 fourth-quarter points.

But on the other side of the court, the Warriors contributed to their own demise as their offense struggled. They managed just 17 points on 30.4% shooting from the field and 18.2% shooting from three-point range. Those numbers were simply a magnification of a game-long trend, as Golden State shot 38.5% from the field and 20.5% from three across all 48 minutes. A handful of their empty possessions were due to good Clipper defense and another handful can be attributed to poor shot selection or stagnant offense, but most were simply makeable shots that missed. On the NBC Sports Bay Area broadcast, Bob Fitzgerald spent a fair amount of time marveling at the Warriors’ inability to put together two consecutive games with solid shooting, and he was absolutely right to do so. It is one thing to play well on offense for a game, but it is an entirely different thing to find consistency.

The one player who has put up several solid offensive games in a row is Omari Spellman. He dropped 17 points and has now scored in double figures in five straight contests. His confidence, energy and passion have clearly made an impression with Kerr and the rest of the coaching staff, who gave him his first start of the season in LA.

“This is the opportunity I’ve been waiting for,” Spellman said. “My confidence has been coming back, so I just wanted to hoop.”

“He’s played so well, I wanted to reward him,” Kerr added. “It might be something that we continue with. We’ll see.”

All in all, it was a solid team effort that came up just short. It served as yet another reminder of something Warriors fans have figured out all too well about this team — they have great chemistry and they’re unlikely to go down without a fight, but they’re just as unlikely to string together enough complete plays and performances to beat good NBA teams.