SAN FRANCISCO — The Warriors looked like they turned a corner in Los Angeles. They were fully healthy, had a rotation that clicked and played a complete game to beat the Lakers, catapulting past their in-state rivals in the West standings.
Yet a game later, the Warriors’ 119-112 loss at home to the Knicks without Julius Randle and OG Anunoby revealed their inconsistency. They didn’t lead for a single second, falling behind after a staggeringly slow start that forced them to swim upstream the entire game. Defensive breakdowns and an apparent effort deficit knocked Golden State back down to the tenth seed.
The loss, which brought Golden State to 17-18 in the Chase Center this year, also served as a bit of a wake-up call.
“Maybe a week or two ago, the six seed was the motivation,” Steph Curry said after the defeat. “Right now, I could care less about where (we’re) at. It’s just the consistency of how we’re playing. That’s the most important thing, because honestly who cares what seed you are if you play like we did tonight, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, whatever it is it doesn’t matter — you’re not going to get very far.”
“That’s the perspective and the focus: it doesn’t really matter where the standings are,” the four-time champion added.
Curry’s sobering admission is a fair assessment. With 15 games remaining, the Warriors (35-32) are running out of time to make the type of run they’ve been talking about for weeks. And if they put up too more duds like they did Monday night, they’ll have to worry more about Houston stealing their play-in spot from behind than advancing to a more advantageous seed.
The tie-breaker scenarios with the teams above the Warriors — Phoenix, Dallas and Sacramento — aren’t in their favor. Even a 17-6 upswing over six weeks barely moved Golden State’s odds in the cluttered bottom half of the Western Conference. Back then, Golden State had reasonable hopes of escaping the do-or-die play-in round. As Curry said, that goal is quickly becoming far-fetched.
“We think about it in the sense that we have confidence that we can be the team we say we’re trying to be,” Curry said when asked about their strong stretch.
After Monday’s loss to the Knicks, the Rockets are closer in the standings to the Warriors than they are to the sixth-seeded Kings.
“We’ve got to just take it one game at a time,” said rookie center Trayce Jackson-Davis. “We’ve got 15 more, got to take it one at a time, and we’ve got to be locked in.”
Not being “locked in,” with every game having such high stakes given their circumstances, is tough to reconcile. Though Steve Kerr said their slow start against New York wasn’t for a lack of effort, the starting lineup that had coalesced began the game on a 3:54 scoring drought and fell behind 20-8.
Before this year’s trade deadline, Curry said that it would be the “definition of insanity” to continue doing the same thing and expecting different results. Golden State wasn’t active at the deadline, but did make changes. Steve Kerr replaced Klay Thompson with Brandin Podziemski in the starting lineup, a move that has largely paid off. He gave Kevon Looney’s minutes to Jackson-Davis, who has flourished in a larger role as a rim-protecting lob threat who brings a different dynamic to the team.
But the Warriors don’t have many levers to pull at this point. They’ve lost four of their last six, a stretch in which Curry missed three games to a sprained ankle and wasn’t able to finish a fourth.
Before the Knicks loss, Kerr warned his team that the Knicks would come out of the gates swinging. The Warriors still started flat. Kerr also told them that a goal of theirs for the rest of the season should be defending their home court. They still don’t have any answers as to why they’ve struggled in Chase Center.
“It’s always important to control your home floor,” Kerr said. “This has been a strange season in that regard. We’ve been good at home for a long time. Just haven’t been able to establish that dominance at home, and that’s what’s keeping us from climbing in the standings.”
Another weight on their ankles: Golden State is 15-27 against winning teams and 20-5 against sub-.500 ones. Their remaining schedule is the third easiest in the league, with an average opponent win percentage of .472. Nine of their last 15 games are on the road, which could play to their curious strength.
There’s less than a month left for the Warriors to look like the Warriors again. Is that enough time to regain momentum, to find the necessary consistency?
“Absolutely,” Curry said. “Sorry for the short answer, but absolutely.”