Warriors Will Carry Statement Comeback Win Throughout Playoffs
Great NBA teams find a way to win no matter what, and the Golden State Warriors are a great team.
At a time when it looked like the New Orleans Pelicans were about to turn a playoff corner and unseat the league's best Thursday night, the Warriors took Game 3 and made it their own.
Trailing by 20 entering the fourth quarter, on the road, with no momentum beneath their feet, the Warriors fought back to force overtime, where they would inevitably pull away and leave Smoothie King Center one win from advancing into the second round.
Nothing about this win was easy. Not the first three quarters (through which Golden State shot just 35.8 percent from the floor), not the 39-point fourth quarter, not the game-sealing overtime.
The 20-point fourth-quarter deficit itself is one the Warriors had not erased before, according to the folks over at ESPN:
This comeback ranks pretty highly on the league-wide playoff scale, too:
Stephen Curry did what he always does with games on the line: explode. He scored 17 points through the fourth quarter and overtime, finishing with 40 on the night.
Three of those points came on a game-tying deep ball inside five seconds to play. Marreese Speights grabbed the rebound off a Curry miss and then handed it back to the point guard, who proceeded to do this:
Just so we're clear: Curry barely had room enough to breathe, let alone get a shot off.
Somehow, he got a shot off, surrounding traffic jam be damned:
All this is more unflattering than laudatory on some level. The Pelicans, a No. 8 seed, have been trouble all series. The Warriors may be up 3-0, but after posting the sixth-best regular-season record in league history, they're not meeting expectations.
Game 1 saw them nearly blow a 25-point third-quarter lead. The Pelicans whittled it all the way down to four inside the final minute of the fourth before the Warriors squeaked out a 106-99 victory.
During Game 2, the Warriors spent a majority of the first half playing catch-up. It was a tie contest entering the fourth quarter, at which point it took a 14-point outburst from Klay Thompson and the defensive stand to end all defensive stands by Draymond Green to secure victory.
Now, there's Game 3, the almost loss. The should-have-been loss. And yet, for the same reasons Thursday night's performance wasn't up to par, it was also a reason to believe in these Warriors.
They could have folded entering the final period. Head coach Steve Kerr could have elected not to put Curry back in the game. He could have looked ahead to Saturday's contest and been content with trying to grind out a 3-1 series edge.
But the Warriors rallied, because they're irrepressible. Or, as Curry put it, per Evan Sernoffsky of the San Francisco Chronicle, because they're hardheaded:
It takes a special kind of team playing a special kind of basketball to do what the Warriors did in Game 3.
Anthony Davis amassed 23 points, 12 rebounds, three assists, two steals and three blocks through the first three quarters, and yet the Warriors still won.
Players not named Curry or Thompson were shooting 10-of-34 from floor entering the fourth, and yet the Warriors still won.
Ryan Anderson hit dagger after dagger after dagger, and yet the Warriors still won.
The lesson in all this, as SI.com's Rob Mahoney underscores, is simple:
In the end, that's what makes these Warriors so dangerous.
When they're not struggling, they're dominating, as their historically good regular-season point differential shows. When they are struggling, they're never out of it. They have the defensive stinginess to get key stops. They have the offensive firepower to evaporate leads.
Heck, even though they ranked in the bottom 10 of offensive rebounding percentage during the regular season, they have the scrappiness to create second-chance opportunities when it matters most:
No, shooting under 36 percent for most of the game won't get the Warriors wins against the San Antonio Spurs, or the Los Angeles Clippers, or the Houston Rockets, or whomever else they may face in these playoffs. To beat those teams, to own those title contenders, they'll have to play better.
But as CBS Sports' Matt Moore points out, that's exactly what they'll do:
"The Warriors are going to need to play a hell of a lot better than they have in this series in the next. Unfortunately, they will.
— Hardwood Paroxysm (@HPbasketball) April 24, 2015"
How can we be so sure? Because of games like this one.
"It was good for us, good for us to feel that,” Kerr said after Game 1's nail-biting fourth quarter, per the San Jose Mercury News' Tim Kawakami. “It’s good for us to have to deal with the feeling in the building, especially as a favorite, when a team starts to come back. You have to feel that.”
Indeed, they do. And they are.
Part of winning entails overcoming some form of adversity. The Warriors haven't played a game that truly matters in months. There have been marquee matchups on national television, but nothing that's legitimately tested their will quite like playoff basketball.
Those are tests the Warriors face now, against the Pelicans, in a competitive series no one saw coming. It hasn't been easy or even close to easy, but it's not supposed to be. That's what makes them so scary moving forward.
They can win any game, against any opponent, playing any style.
And, scarier still, they know it.
Unless otherwise cited, all stats courtesy of Basketball-Reference.
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