The Golden State Warriors will be without Stephen Curry in the first playoff round. Without the two-time MVP the dubs will have to increase especially in the defense. Kevin Durant will again bear the brunt of the attack.
On Saturday afternoon, local time, there was certainty. Stephen Curry has sprained his inner ligament and will be out in the last games of the Regular Season. And not only that: According to Warriors coach Steve Kerr, the two-time MVP will not be on the field in the first playoff round either.
Officially, curry will be tested in three weeks, but this does not mean that the playmaker is ready for use. The second playoff round starts in a good five weeks, the Conference Finals are a good seven weeks away. It should be a tightrope act for the franchise, which was last in the finals three times in a row and won the crown twice.
To reach the finals, however, three playoff rounds have to be overcome. The dubs have proven in the past that they can compensate for injuries (Curry 2016, Durant 2017), but the margin for error has become much smaller.
At least: After all four All-Stars have been cancelled, there is now also some good news. Draymond Green hasn’t played against Utah Jazz yet, but could be back against Indiana on Wednesday night. Durant’s rib fracture is also almost healed and could also be back on the court by the end of the week. Only Klay Thompson’s right thumb needs a little more. However, he will probably make his comeback before the playoff start.
Second place in the West is a sure thing anyway (Houston are 5.5 games behind), so Golden State will have three absolute top players at their disposal at the start of the hot phase of the season. How many other teams can claim that?
However, Curry is and remains the most important building block in the super team from the Bay Area: “Steph is the system,” Durant said a few weeks ago. This system must and will change a little without curry. Probably similar, as seen in December, when Curry had to pause a good month with an ankle injury.
After the two-time MVP retired, the reigning champ won nine of ten games and suddenly became the best defensive team in the league. If you were otherwise an offensive Juggernaut, the offensive rating was only 106.8, while at the rear end only 97.7 points were allowed per 100 ball possessions.
“We’ll play a slightly different style,” said Kerr when asked what would change without curry, “We’ll slow down a bit, there’s a bit of a lack of flow, but that’s all right,” but that’s not surprising. Curry is probably the best offensive player in the league, with him and his presence and danger from a distance, the field opens up for the Warriors. There is so much more room for the creativity of these exceptional players.
Without curry the offensive load will be unloaded more on the shoulders of KD, a fact with which the current finals MVP from old times at the Oklahoma City Thunder is still very familiar. The game in Charlotte, the first game without curry in December, can serve as an example. Durant did almost everything, took 28 litters, scored 35 points and also played 10 assists, which combined with 11 rebounds gave him his first triple double of the season.
If the forward is on the field with Curry, his usage rate is 26.6 percent; without the Guard it rises to 34.3 percent, which in the league is only outbid by James Harden of the Houston Rockets.
But it wasn’t just Durant’s brilliance in the offense that kept the Warriors going. Especially defensively his influence was enormous, in that 9-1-stretch KD blocked an average of 3.1 litters. We have to defend at the highest level and give the ball to KD,” Kerr concluded.
In December, this was partly achieved without Green, who had to pause five games due to a shoulder injury. This made the defensive rating of 97.7 all the more impressive. But when the defensive player of the year was on the field, he was outstanding, a fact that was not always true this season.
At the end of 2017, the Dubs made another smaller move that might be worth its weight in gold in retrospect: two-way player Quinn Cook was pulled up from the G-League, a little surprising at the time, and immediately placed in the starting five, “I only knew three or four plays,” reported the curry substitute on Saturday, “which I implemented and put the ball into the stars’ hands”.
In the meantime, however, the role of the former Duke star has changed. The Guard always scored double-digit in the last six games and had a stretch in which he scored 53 points in two games with absolute fabulous odds (21/30 FG). The Warriors have gained confidence in the rookie and he, too, has become acclimatized.
“I was a starter here without a training session,” Cook explained, “I had no training, no camp, nothing. Now I have been here since the All-Star Break and have settled in. Against the Jazz he was immediately back in the starting line-up and again scored a good 17 points in the defeat.
The dubs will need Cook, especially his shooting. Shaun Livingston, for example, has deficits here, which will continue to provide the backup guard even without curry. Open threesomes will get Cook a lot, but the other three all-stars attract too much attention. This trio will continue to be the key to Golden State.
“It is now a matter of our mentality. We have to take the easy things away from our opponents,” Kerr demanded. That’s a good recipe.”
The champion now has nine more games left to groove into the playoffs with these conditions (soon with KD and Thompson again). It is particularly important to reach the elitist level of previous years in a defensive manner. If this does not happen, the warriors without curry could have unexpected problems in the first playoff round. Ranks 5 to 8 are currently occupied by New Orleans, San Antonio, Minnesota and Utah, all very unpleasant tasks to start the hoped-for playoff run.