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The Warriors missed 20 of their first 21 3-point attempts, went on several multi-minute scoring droughts, and needed both a tremendous all-around game from Jimmy Butler and a herculean effort by Gary Payton II to just sneak past the 3-17 Pelicans.
Nobody said winning without Steph Curry would be easy.
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Curry missed his first game with the left quad contusion and muscle strain he suffered on Wednesday night against Houston. He’s set to be re-evaluated next week, before Golden State’s three-game road trip to Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago.
The Warriors (11-10) will have to get used to the superstar point guard’s absence, for another game or two at the very least.
Jonathan Kuminga returned to the court after missing the prior seven games and hit a pair of big 3-pointers in the fourth quarter, but otherwise looked rusty in the Warriors’ 104-96 win over the Pelicans. He alone isn’t the answer to staying afloat without Curry, but Golden State laid some tracks on the way to a route.
“Make the game easy,” Butler said after registering 24 points, 10 assists, and eight rebounds. “If you’re open, shoot it. If not, pass it. Attack. I think that’s the formula for everybody. To be successful, keep the game easy. Especially when 30’s not out there, you have to be damn near perfect.”
The biggest key, regardless of Curry’s availability, is reducing turnovers. The Warriors committed only 10 against New Orleans, and are now 10-1 when winning the turnover battle.
Last year, the Warriors struck a healthy balance between their patented motion, split-action offense and spreading out around Butler’s isolation. They’re still searching for the right mix, and likely have to skew more toward the latter as Curry is sidelined.
The Warriors’ most successful offense was getting the ball to Butler and letting him go to work. He always insists on making the right basketball play, but Butler will likely have to turn up his scoring dial in the coming games like he did on Saturday.
With Steph Curry sidelined, the Warriors will try to run their offense through Jimmy Butler. |Source: Amber Pietz/The Standard
“Definitely without Steph,” Draymond Green said. “But we were trying to get him to attack that way from the beginning, he just kept telling us, ‘They’re loading up.’ So we need to create some other movement. Once everybody else started moving around him, then it opened gaps and he was able to do what he did. So definitely when Steph’s not out there, we need him to be more aggressive.”
Golden State works on its spacing around Butler in those isolation situations, and Payton in particular feasted against New Orleans. Over and over again, he found pockets of opportunity to cut into the lane, where Butler found him for easy layups. Between backdoor cuts and putbacks, Payton recorded 19 points and 11 rebounds.
“I always say he’s a power forward in a point guard’s body,” Steve Kerr said. “His speed and quickness in the dunker spot is tough for people to handle, but also just his feel down there to create the openings.”
Source: NBA.com
Curry’s injury — on top of other players in street clothes — gave Kerr a night to experiment with new lineups. Without Trayce Jackson-Davis (knee) and Al Horford (sciatica), Kerr often played microscopic lineups in an effort to create cleaner looks.
Most of Kuminga’s 19 minutes came with him as the nominal center, a position novel to the fifth-year wing. Kuminga grabbed one rebound and struggled to make an impact defensively in the paint against bigger Pelicans players. But that lineup construction could be one Kerr turns to again, either out of necessity or to juice up the offense without Curry’s gravitational pull.
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Regardless of lineups, the Warriors need to be decisive with the ball. There’s no better example of that than Brandin Podziemski, who has largely struggled to begin his third season.
Too often this year, Podziemski has held the ball too long, starting drives with head fakes or jab steps before getting caught in no-man’s land underneath the arc. Against the Pelicans, he was much more efficient with the ball in his hands, either launching a 3 or keeping the offense humming by swinging it.
Podziemski finished with 15 points, six assists, and five rebounds.
Warriors guard Brandin Podziemski had one of his best all-around games of the season against the Pelicans on Saturday. |Source: Amber Pietz/The Standard
“I thought this was one of his best games of the season,” Kerr said. “Just the ball movement, the decision-making. No turnovers, six assists. All-around game for Brandin. That’s the guy we know, that’s the best version of him. Nights like tonight: catch and shoot when he’s open. I love that he took nine 3s. He’s been passing them up this year, pump-faking and driving into the paint. We want him to let it fly. It’s better for our offense, for our rhythm, for our crashing.”
The results still weren’t stellar, and they’ll need to improve in the short-term. The Warriors scored just 104 points against New Orleans, the 28th-ranked defense in the league and a team that was missing Trey Murphy, Dejounte Murray, Herb Jones, and Jordan Poole.
The Warriors’ next game is a rematch with the defending champion Thunder, who blasted them by 24 earlier this month at their place. They’ll then travel to Philadelphia before a back-to-back in Cleveland and Chicago.
Splitting those four games, especially without Curry, would be an achievement.
Any accomplishment will require tweaks in the offensive approach.
“It’s just going to look different,” Podziemski said. “We got to create advantages a different way. We’re accustomed to playing four-on-three a lot of times when he’s out there and teams are just going to start switching one-through-five. So we just got to create pockets of space in different ways.”