SACRAMENTO – The tenor from the Golden State Warriors after a 126-123 loss to the Sacramento Kings — their first playoff win in nearly 17 years — was, “well, good for them.”
It wasn’t quite patronizing, but there was a lot left unsaid.
You could hear it in the way they pointed out the players who beat them.
D’Aaron Fox is a dynamic All-Star who averaged 25 points a game in a breakout season. He’s a weapon. But he was 4-of-8 from 3-point range. He’s a 32 percent 3-point shooter.
Malik Monk is an excellent piece who seems like he’s finally fulfilling much of the promise that surrounded him when he was drafted 11th overall. But he averages 13.5 points and 2.7 free throw attempts per game. He had 30 on Saturday, making all 14 of this free throws.
Trey Lyles? He’s a solid 3-point shooter off the bench. He averages 7.3 points a game and shot 36.3 percent from deep for the season. He was 4-of-6 from 3 with 16 points against the Warriors.
Despite that, Golden State lost by just three, with Andrew Wiggins missing a wide, wide, wide open 3-point attempt to go up by two with 10 seconds left — and finishing 1-of-8 from 3-point range on the night.
While that can be attributed to rust, there was a degree of shock from Steve Kerr and Warriors players with the way Wiggins missed those attempts given what they described as can’t-miss performances in scrimmages.
They also feel that in the chess match that is an NBA series, they’re going to be able to counter moves more effectively than their opponents. Specifically, the Warriors feel like they’ll exploit the box-and-one thrown at Steph Curry on Saturday if the Kings continue to employ it.
After any loss, explanations often sound like excuses. That’s the nature of it. But there was a pervasive sense of calm in the Warriors’ postgame assessments.
Call it cocky, but you earn the right to be a bit dismissive of an upstart, young opponent after winning four titles in eight years.
Fox’s 3-point shooting
The Warriors made no mistakes about the sort of player they’re facing in De’Aaron Fox. No one expressed a sense that they are going to shut him down, or come close to it. But they’d prefer him to beat them inside the arc.
Draymond Green chuckled at Fox’s performance, saying he scored on “just about everybody who was on him.”
“He was able to get downhill quite a bit and get some easy ones, and then once he got the easy ones, his threes started falling,” Green said.
He stressed the importance of being more intentional in their defensive coverages, especially in the paint against drives.
But the way the Warriors allowed him to get hot from deep is something that was seen as a bit of an anomaly. Steve Kerr didn’t see his 38 points (13-of-27, 4-of-8 from 3-pt, 8-of-12 from FT line) as something that’s cause for a total defensive recalculation.
“He made four threes in the second half and he’s one of those guys, if he’s gonna shoot threes like that, it’s gonna be a tough night,” Kerr said. “I think he’s 32 percent for the season. So you have to play the odds…
“He made some big ones, you give him some credit. I don’t think that I’m gonna look at that and say, Well, that was something we could have done differently.”
In other words, they’re expecting Fox to keep scoring, just not be that efficient from deep.
Monk’s free throws
The other part of the Kings’ backcourt dominance was Malik Monk. He and Fox combined for 70 points in their playoff debuts. They’re the second duo in NBA history to score 30-plus points in their playoff debut, after Alonzo Mourning and Kendall Gill.
Monk, who finished with 32 points (8-of-13, 2-of-4 from 3-pt, 14-of-14 from the line), got his by driving.
Kerr pointed to him as the back-breaking part of the Warriors’ performance.
“I look more at Malik Monk getting 14 free throws — that’s that’s a huge killer for us,” Kerr said. “Fox is a great player. He’s an All-Star. He’s gonna do his thing. But we did not do the job on Monk or Lyles.”
That poor defense started early, Kerr said. In the first half, he was able to score on those dribble hand-offs that Draymond Green and the Warriors have patented over the better part of the last decade.
Green indicated the Warriors were viewing him more as an outside threat than an inside one and will need to be more aware of him as a penetrator going forward.
“We got to stop Malik from getting downhill,” Green said. “He got downhill quite a bit, put a lot of pressure on our defense. We talked a lot about him as a 3-point shooter and he got to the cup and he had some great finishes. He got to the free throw line, knocked free throws down, 14 for 14. So we obviously we can do a much better job on him and we will.”
That last part hammered home the sentiment of the Warriors: “we will.”
Trey Lyles not missing
A shooter making 4-of-6 threes isn’t exactly an impossible feat. But Lyles, who had 16 points on 6-of-8 shooting, seemed like he couldn’t miss.
Part of that was the fact that most of his attempts were excellent looks. That seemed to nauseate Kerr.
“We had a couple of transition breakdowns in the first half where I know Lyles got a wide open three, his first one, and that can’t happen,” Kerr said. “You can’t give a shooter a wide-open look with a breakdown because now, a guy like that makes one and the next one is much more likely to go in. So those two guys [Monk and Lyles], off the bench, they combined for 48 points.”
Green said explicitly that Lyles and Monk’s performances are “the reason they won the game.”
He did not seem to expect that to be a trend.
Andrew Wiggins not making 3s
The first half performance from Andrew Wiggins was astonishing. He was leaping around the court, driving, cutting, defending and blocking shots. He finished with four blocks and 17 points.
But his efficiency was woeful, falling off a cliff in the second half. He was 7-of-16 from the floor and just 1-of-8 from 3-point range.
While that could have been chalked up to missing the past 25 games, the Warriors didn’t see it that way.
“He didn’t miss a shot in the scrimmages,” said Green. “He’s been incredible in the scrimmages, and he was good tonight. There’s a couple shots that he normally makes didn’t fall. You live with those, knowing how well he can score the basketball so he’ll keep shooting and they’ll go in.
If he gets those looks and continues to get those looks and continue to be aggressive the way he was, I like our chances.”
Wiggins, too, was confident.
That last miss, the damning, potential game-winner on a wide-open attempt from the corner, should have been good. Wiggins thought it was.
“That last one felt amazing [out of my hand],” Wiggins said. “It did. Didn’t go in though. But it’s only up from here. I know I’ll make my shots.”
Wiggins shot a career-high 39.6 percent from three this season in 37 games, an admittedly small sample size. But he shot 39.3 percent from deep last season and 38 percent a season prior with the Warriors.
That last mark is nearly two percent better than Trey Lyles this season. If Wiggins shot remotely near his averages, the Warriors would have won this game.
The box-and-one
The Kings threw a lot of box-and-one defense at Stephen Curry, isolating in him in one-on-one defense that has one defender picking him up basically the moment he crosses half court and the rest of the defense playing in a rough box inside the arc.
Curry said he felt the Warriors met the moment, and met the defense thrown their way, but that spacing and patience is crucial.
An opening is inevitable, he said, but “you can’t rush the possession to create that look.”
He expects more box-and-one going forward. So, too, does Klay Thompson.
Thompson had a great first half, but struggled especially in the non-Curry minutes, and finished with a game-worst -14 plus-minus mark.
He had 21 points, 6 rebounds and 5 assists, but was 8-of-19 from the field and 5-of-14 from deep.
As he says in the clip above of the box-and-one:
“I welcome that. The shots I was getting tonight will go down at a much higher rate on Monday.”
Is this hand-wringing, legitimate, somewhere in between? Time will soon tell.
There were certainly other concerns that the Warriors were less at ease about.
Kerr saw legitimate worries, in a way that could be replicated, the way the Kings rebounded offensively. They secured 17 offensive rebounds which led to eight more field goal attempts than the Warriors had and 21 second-chance points.
One thing the Kings could also argue is that Domantas Sabonis will play a lot better offensively than he did in the series opener, going 5-of-17 from the floor. The Warriors would counter that he got legitimately bullied and defended soundly by Draymond Green and Kevon Looney.
That’s all part of the perpetual chess match in these series that the Warriors relish.
“That’s what we live for,” said Curry. “We thrive in these situations. It’s so different than the regular season because you’re playing the same team and that little bit of an advantage mentally, seeing the game, making those adjustments, it matters.”
The Warriors believe they’ll adjust. History is on their side. The beam is not.
