It’s been a rough week for the best team in basketball. The Golden State Warriors suffered watching their leading scorer go down with a possible regular season ending injury on Tuesday.
Since Kevin Durant (25.3 PPG) went down, the Warriors have been on a 2 game losing streak. They had a tough 112-108 loss to the Wizards, where they only led for 5 minutes of the game. Then they had their lowest scoring game in a 94-87 loss to the Chicago Bulls on Thursday. In those two losses, the Splash Brothers were looking more like the Splash Brother in-laws the way they were out of sync. Curry and Thompson shot a combined 8-44 (18%) from the 3-point line in those losses, while losing fourth quarter leads in both of those games.
After an embarrassing set of games with no Durant, the Warriors faced the New York Knicks, who are 9-21 in the year 2017 so far. A loss to either New York team (Knicks and Nets) would be as low of a point as they could get and would cause Golden State to get into panic mode.
With a subpar start to the game, the Warriors would be down 50-49 at halftime to the Knicks, while Curry and Thompson would still have yet to find their groove. In the second half, the Splash Brothers would finally give meaning to their nickname once again, as Curry dropped 19 out of his 31 points and Thompson added in 15 points of his own 29 in the second half, to lead the Warriors to a 112-105 victory in Madison Square Garden.
The Splash Brothers shot a combined 41% from the 3-point line against the Knicks, slowly finding their groove once again from behind the arc. While Kevin Durant is out, the Warriors are going to need some serious help from their two All-Star guards. If Curry can get back to MVP form before Durant gets back, the Warriors may become the scariest team they’ve ever been.
The Warriors have a very favorable schedule coming up for the rest of the season, as 9 out of their 20 games remaining are against teams with a record under .500. They’ll have some serious tests against the teams with the second and third best records in the NBA this month. Golden State will face the Spurs twice and the Rockets twice as well, before Kevin Durant will set foot on the court again this season. They sit 2.5 games ahead of the Spurs for the best record in the NBA, the Splash Brothers will have to continue to have high scoring nights and stay consistent with their three point shooting if they want to hold onto their home court advantage in the postseason.
