What occurred in the final minutes of Monday night’s Game 4 matchup between the Warriors and Lakers was nothing short of catastrophic for the visitors.
The 104-101 loss puts Golden State in a 3-1 hole, and on the verge of being eliminated from the Western Conference playoffs for the first time since 2014.
After taking a 99-96 lead, the Warriors scored just one basket, a layup from Stephen Curry with 1:05 left. The rest of those three minutes were brutal. Here’s how it went down:
- LeBron James hit a pair of free throws. 99-98 Golden State.
- Klay Thompson chucked a deep, contested 3-pointer with five seconds on the shot clock. It missed badly.
- Lonnie Walker IV hit a jumper over Curry. 100-99 Los Angeles.
- Thompson chucked another contested 3-pointer, this time with 14 seconds left on the shot clock. It also missed.
- James drove on Curry for his fifth foul, then hit another pair of free throws. 102-99 Los Angeles.
- Curry hit a layup with 1:05 left. 102-101 Los Angeles.
- James missed a 29-foot 3-point attempt. The Warriors got the ball back with 45.6 seconds left and a chance to take the lead.
- Curry missed a floater, then missed a deep, contested 3-point attempt, both of which were contested by Anthony Davis.
- Even after those misses and a couple Walker IV free throws, there was a chance. It was fumbled, literally. James read the final play, cutting off a Draymond Green outlet, which turned into a turnover and a jump ball. Curry managed to win the jump ball, fell on the ground, then threw it away.
So what happened? Here’s how Steve Kerr and Stephen Curry explained it, starting from the Thompson misses.
Despite the poor quality of the looks (see below), Kerr offered support for Thompson.
“I trust Klay. Think of everything that he’s done for this team,” Kerr said. “So part of who he is, is he’s gonna fire away and there were a couple late that he probably would like to have back but that’s part of who we are as a team.
“We’re going to fire. If Steph or Klay gets an opening, they’re going to let it go and they’ve had a ton of success over the years obviously. They both had some looks down the stretch but give the Lakers credit. They played good defense and we couldn’t couldn’t get anything to go.”
The final sequence, though, was the most damning.
James clearly read it, and Green, instead of taking on Dennis Shroeder for a potential layup, tried to swing it. It was cut off.
That’s a play we’ve run quite a bit before. It’s got multiple options. There’s three or four different options. We had time for a quick two. We’re down three, but 15 seconds and we had another timeout left in our pocket. It’s a play where you can get a quick two or maybe a three if it’s open. We just didn’t execute. They played good defense too.
The Warriors running that play “quite a bit before,” checks out given how prepared James was.
But the jump ball still managed to find its way into Curry’s hands. He just threw it away.
Curry said he wasn’t sure how much time was left.
“I didn’t know how much time went off while I was in the air coming down, how long I was on the ground,” Curry said. “I actually felt like somebody was behind me, kind of just let it go. Bang-bang play. I wish I had a little bit more awareness to maybe call timeout knowing we had enough time. Just didn’t go our way.”
Steve Kerr said he tried to call timeout and was “yelling timeout,” but Curry lost the ball so quickly that the Warriors didn’t get time.
Now, Golden State faces a 3-1 deficit in this era for the third time. They’ve come back once, famously, against the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2016, before losing a 3-1 lead, infamously to James’ Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals. Their other 3-1 deficit was the cursed NBA Finals against the Toronto Raptors, when Klay Thompson tore his ACL and Kevin Durant tore his Achilles.
Curry said there’s “confidence” the Warriors can come back, but that will require far more poise than what they’ve shown in this series so far.
