Can The Warriors Conquer Their Road Monsters? If not now then when originally appeared nbc sports birea
SAN FRANCISCO — Here they come again, the biggest beasts to haunt the Warriors during this torturous, historically uneven season.
street city they have fallen on a regular basis, and they visit five in the next nine days.
Klay Thompson believes the Warriors, this time, will triumph over the demons that have plagued them from the first road trip, when they went 0-5, to the last road trip, when they were 0-3. .
“I think we’re going to do it with the next five games,” Thompson said late Monday. after his 38-point explosion sent warriors 123-112 win over the Phoenix Suns.
This concluded a two-game homestand that pushed Golden State to 29–7 at the Chase Center. However, the team is 7-26 everywhere, as in 22 different cities, from the first road loss in Phoenix in October to the last in Memphis last week.
That’s what the Warriors take to Los Angeles, where they face the Clippers on Wednesday, followed by trips to Atlanta (Friday), Memphis (Saturday), Houston (March 20) and Dallas (March 22) .
Thompson said, “I think we’re going to come out of this road trip with great momentum.” “And although the history of this season has not been so good for us, I think it is time to increase our ability to win games.”
It’s really the only time. Of the 13 matches remaining in the Warriors’ schedule, only five are in the chase, where they have won eight matches in a row. Eight games are on the road, where they grappled, losing eight in a row.
No matter how well the Warriors play at home, failure to change the trend on the road during this trip — and with three road games next month — will have dire consequences.
That would probably cost them any reasonable chance of finishing among the top six teams in the Western Conference and avoiding the play-in tournament.
And if the five-game trip goes anywhere as awful as the last one, the defending NBA champions will lose their opportunity to reach their most-desired goal: finishing in the top four, thereby securing a homecourt in the first round. Profit will be sure.
“It started with the defense,” said coach Steve Kerr. “If you look at the numbers, our defensive stats, at home, are really good, or one of the top few teams in the entire NBA in terms of defensive rating, and then on the road, we’re one of the worst. .
“It has to start with the defense.”
From there it started on Monday. Golden State contained their defensive fumbles from the early end, building a 12-point lead in less than six minutes, going up 43–21 in the first quarter and leading by double digits for eight of the remaining 42 minutes. maintained.
The Warriors were even more stingy in the first quarter than in the previous game, when they limited the Milwaukee Bucks to 41.7 percent shooting, taking a 28–26 lead after one quarter.
Usually early on, often after trailing by two points, the Warriors would resolve their first-quarter blues. Strength.
“It’s important because you want to assert yourself early and make the game as easy as possible and give yourself early lives,” Stephen Curry explained. “We need to do it on the road.”
If Curry appears to be in a more skeptical state than Thompson, it’s not necessarily because he’s older — he turns 35 on Tuesday — or has played more games. That’s because he’s put this team’s season under his microscope and gotten to the point where seeing is believing.
“Even when we’ve been down big, we’ve fought back and found our way into a game,” Curry said. So, you want to put together good quarters and stack them up. And we did that in the last two games at home.
“The challenge now is what do we do on Wednesday.”
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and Friday. and Saturday. And next Monday. And next Wednesday.
Warriors take turns from locations on the map of the mainland, sometimes once and sometimes twice. When they arrive in an arena that isn’t the Chase Center, they become lunatics, while some of the least dangerous opponents in the NBA turn into monsters.
This trip is their last chance to fight back, five chances to reorganize what remains of their famous “championship DNA” and end the cycle of abuse.
