Three Things We Learned During the 25-26 Warriors Most Recent Loss Against the Nuggets
The Warriors did not make an ideal start to what may be their most challenging week of this year’s NBA campaign. Though they showed some initial signs of fight, promising enough to lead them to victory, the team eventually succumbed to the superior Denver Nuggets. Excluding their three-game winning streak, Golden State returned to a slump of poor performances last night. Without many positives to take away from this game, here are three things we learned following the contest.
Shuffling the Dominos, Again
Head coach Steve Kerr had to expand his rotation once again to try to get any sort of offensive rhythm. By this time of season, a team’s player selection should dwindle down to single digits. However, this has been a uniquely unfortunate year for the Warriors, who seem to have lost one key player after another. Kerr is forced to shuffle things around and figure out lineup combinations on the fly, whereas most other rosters know their solidified roles by this point. It’s an extremely tough task, even for a head coach as good as Kerr, who is called to click his puzzle pieces ahead of the play-in tournament.
An Uncharacteristic Second Half Domination
Last night, Denver did to Golden State what the Warriors typically do to other teams. The team from the Bay actually took a seven-point lead, 53-46, into the locker room. However, the team image was completely different in the second half. The Nuggets came out punching and pummeled the away team in the third quarter, with a total tally of 40-21. They led in almost every statistical category during this stretch, and clicked into another gear to snatch this game away. The Warriors are used to being on the other end of such offensive explosions, but Denver showed championship-caliber responses that the Warriors simply don’t contain in this year’s version of the team.
‘The Unicorn’ Laughed First, but ‘The Joker’ Laughed Harder
In the battle of two premier stretch-bigs, Kristaps Porzingis and Nikola Jokic began the game’s scoring with a triple on each side. Porzingis started off this contest on the right foot, and by halftime, he had racked up 13 points on an efficient 5-7 shooting, three rebounds, and two assists. The Warriors contained Jokic initially, but it wasn’t long until the otherworldly-talented Serbian took over. As he typically does, the ‘Joker’ had his fingerprints in every aspect of the contest, and finished with a near triple-double statline, coming up just two assists shy of that feat. Ultimately, the Warriors, like many other teams in the league, had no answers to the questions Jokic posed, as he led his team to a comfortable 116-93 victory.
