Warriors Hold Strong, But Suffer Close Loss Against League-Best Bucks
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the Warriors played a mostly strong game to keep it interesting against a far superior team, but didn’t do quite enough and came up just short.
Actually, don’t stop me, because I’m going to tell you all about the latest case in this familiar trend. On Wednesday night, it was a 107-98 home loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, who hold the NBA’s best record as of now. In this one, the Warriors turned in one of their hardest fights in recent memory. They played solid defense the whole game and found offense in spurts, but never had enough of both at the same time. After the game, however, head coach Steve Kerr focused more on the positive.
“I just think it’s all about effort, and as long as we walk away from a game feeling like our effort and intensity was there, we can’t be upset,” Kerr said. “I thought we did a good job of that tonight.”
In recent games, the Warriors have struggled to play a complete offensive game, meaning that their defense has to be strong or the opposing offense has to struggle for the Dubs to have a chance. On Wednesday night, both of those things happened. The Bucks, who tend to score over 100 points without much trouble on a nightly basis, spent much of the game struggling to get the lid off of the basket. They took 41 three-point shots, but made just nine of them for a rate of 22%. They were far better from two-point range at 56.5%, but couldn’t get inside as much as they wanted to without getting the Warriors to respect their three-point shot, which they were never able to do. Some of this was simply the Bucks having a bad shooting night. Milwaukee’s shooters, many of whom are highly capable from long range, found themselves open regularly and simply missed shots that they would make on most other nights. But the Golden State defense also deserves some credit. They brought good help defense on drivers such as Giannis Antetokounmpo and decided they were willing to dare the shooters to take threes, and it was a strategy that paid off. They also did a fantastic job rebounding all those misses, allowing just five offensive boards and two second-chance points the entire game.
“We were willing to contest late and try to get there as much as possible, but [our main focus was] basically to try to slow [Antetokounmpo] down for most of the game,” Glenn Robinson III said. “I thought we executed our gameplan pretty well for the most part throughout the course of the game.”
Put as well as the defense went, the offense struggled to find a rhythm. In this way, the offense against the Bucks resembled the offense against the Sacramento Kings two nights prior. In noth games, the Warriors had a lot of the right ideas and ran a lot of the right plays, but simply missed shots and committed turnovers while trying to execute. Their offense was the reverse of the Bucks’ offense: strong from three-point land (39.5%), weak from everywhere else (36.7% on twos). The first half was particularly messy, as the Warriors shot just 30.2% from the field and committed double-digit turnovers, which prevented them from finding any sort of rhythm. They had played mostly stellar defense, yet they trailed by nine after 24 minutes because of how much their offense was floundering.
However, a handful of stretches in the second half were incredibly impressive, particularly on multiple occasions when the Bucks built a double-digit lead. Every single time it appeared as though Milwaukee was about to run away with the game, the Warriors found something on offense to hit a few shots and make it close. But in the end, they couldn’t hit the timely shots. Multiple opportunities to cut the deficit to a single possession resulted in misses which, combined with the first-half struggles, prevented the upset from coming to fruition.
“Our pace was not great in the first half,” Kerr said. “It picked up in the second half. I thought we were a little tentative in the first half … we did a better job of that in the second half, but it took a while to get to that point.”
The strong games against the NBA’s best teams continue for the Warriors, which is obviously a trend in the right direction. But they are doing so while simultaneously turning in disappointing performances against weaker teams, and games like the one on Wednesday night only serve to highlight this. If the Warriors want to be more competitive in the league, they have to treat more games as if they’re playing teams like the Bucks.