golden state warriors playoff race (Photo: Rocky Widner / NBAE/Getty)
The Golden State Warriors are often underrated, and they are fine with that. The Warriors have an underdog mentality, and they’ve been able to come back in several games because of their resiliency.
Last season, the Warriors shocked the nation when they made the playoffs as the sixth seed, when they proceeded to beat the Denver Nuggets in the first round, and when they came within a couple games of earning a trip to the Western Conference Finals.
The Warriors entered this season with targets on their backs. They weren’t going to sneak up on anyone this year.
Stephen Curry has seen this first-hand this season, as opponents know how dangerous he can be and sometimes send a double team at him right when he crosses halfcourt.
Despite some injuries and minor setbacks, the Warriors have positioned themselves to potentially snag the fifth seed in the super-competitive Western Conference. They are a confident group, and they are mentally prepared to fight for their spot in the playoffs.
“Honestly, at this point in the season if you overlook any team with 14 games left, wherever you are in the standings, then something’s wrong,” Curry said today at morning shootaround, “That’s a test of our maturity and mental toughness, to put all that noise out, ‘Ah, they’ve only won four road games’ and this and that.
“This is the NBA. We’ve already seen that teams can come in and get hot and make plays,” Curry added, “They’re all talented, so we feel like at home we should win this game, but we have to go out and play like it and not just expect it to happen or else we’ll have the same post-game pow-wow where we’re frustrated with the outcome.”
Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle perfectly described this season for the Warriors as an “emotional roller coaster.”
That’s where Warriors fans are right now, wondering if this is a miracle team or a mirage. Could go either way, right?
.
If you’re looking for a limo ride to the NBA Finals, you’ve got the wrong team, the wrong conference, the wrong century and the wrong transportation. This will be a roller-coaster ride.
This season, the Warriors have shown flashes of pure brilliance. However, the Warriors have also mysteriously struggled as a team at times with playing at home and playing down to their competition, such as in their home losses to the Washington Wizards, Charlotte Bobcats, and Cleveland Cavaliers, most recently.
“We just haven’t been able to put together 48 minutes,” Curry explained, “We’ve played well enough to win a lot of those games. You give up a run like we did to Cleveland, allow teams to kind of take you out of your rhythm at home, you can’t rely on those big — we’ve had three or four of those double-digit comebacks — you can’t rely on those. That’s the one thing, try to figure out how to not have those dead periods of six or eight minutes.”
Harrison Barnes concurred.
“It’s trusting and knowing we’ll continue to play off each other. We move the ball around, we execute our stuff, we should be hard to guard,” Barnes said yesterday after practice, “Where we get when the ball stops, when we start going isolation, when guys aren’t moving the ball, trusting each other offensively and defensively, that’s when we get into trouble. That’s when we get down by a lot. That’s when we put ourselves in a hole. We can’t keep trying to make these heroic comebacks.”
They know they are not going to easily snag a playoff seed. As Andrew Bogut said to Rusty Simmons of the San Francisco Chronicle, they’re going to have to fight for every game.
The Warriors got another reality check Friday, when they allowed 26-win Cleveland to erase an 18-point deficit and build a 16-point advantage. The Warriors have a tendency to play down to their competition, something that needs to be fixed over the final month of the regular season as they play nine teams on the outside of the playoff picture.
.
“We’ve got no choice,” Warriors center Andrew Bogut said. “The West is getting tighter and tighter by the minute.”
Coach Mark Jackson shared the same sentiment with Simmons and understands how difficult it will be to make the playoffs in the West.
The Spurs, Thunder and Clippers appear to have the upper hand on the Western Conference’s top three playoff berths, but with a month remaining in the regular season, the Warriors and Suns are among the next six teams vying for five postseason spots.
.
“It’s wide open,” Warriors head coach Mark Jackson said. “People may say we’re (stuck) where we are, but we have a chance to continue to climb. The teams at seven, eight and nine, I don’t think anybody is out of the picture. The shifting from top to bottom, it’s going to be interesting.”
Becoming an elite NBA team doesn’t happen overnight. The Warriors are still going through the growing pains that the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers have gone through to get to the elite level that they are at now.
Jermaine O’Neal explained to his teammates that they can’t become complacent now. He shared these thoughts on this with Simmons:
“When you have a fairly young team, you don’t really have the experience to know what it takes to win it all…You think that you have tomorrow to get better. When you see the calendar year dwindling down and you see yourself bouncing back from sixth to eighth and maybe eighth to ninth, it tends to send a message about what reality is.”
The Warriors are still on their emotional roller coaster right now, and hopefully it leads them right to the playoffs.
[NOTE: Poor Man’s Commish contributed to this report.]
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
