WARRIORS PRACTICE FACILITY, OAKLAND, CA — There’s no “team” in “panic”, or something like that. That’s essentially what Golden State Warriors assistant coach Luke Walton told reporters yesterday at media availability after the Warriors practiced at their Oakland headquarters.
As you’ll recall, Warriors head coach Steve Kerr started Game 4 with a “small-ball” lineup of small forward Andre Iguodala instead of center Andrew Bogut.
While that starting five netted just a +1 for the entire game, it did change the pace, which was the primary goal, and the Warriors eventually won the game.
Nevertheless, the Cleveland Cavaliers got off to a 7-0 start against “small-ball”, with Timofey Mozgov dunking over the smaller Draymond Green and Iman Shumpert draining a three.
So what was the mood like when Kerr took a timeout with 9:43 to go in the first quarter?
“I’m not going to lie,” said Walton. “It started out like, ‘Look we had three great shots. We had wide open three for Andre in the corner, a wide open three for Harrison (Barnes) in the corner, an iso for Steph (Curry) at the top of the key.
“Three great shots. We missed. They hit shots.”
But Kerr and the coaching staff knew there was a lot more of the game left to play, and that the speed of the game was in their favor.
“The pace. We could already notice this was at a faster pace, which was one of the main reasons we wanted to make the move,” Walton added. “So we knew that over 48 minutes, eventually we were going to make some of these shots. They were going to hopefully fatigue and that was kind of the strategy.”
Still, there was a contingency plan.
“After we said all that we were like, ‘Okay, but what are we going to do if this keeps happening and this gets to 15-2?’ So there was a little bit of a ‘Let’s have a Plan B’ in case what we think is going to happen doesn’t, but we called the first timeout. There was no panic. We were calm. We were seeing what we wanted to see.”
(Photo: @letsgowarriors Instagram account via NBAE/Getty)
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