You know all about baseball’s “dog days of summer” — the stretch between June and July where the initial excitement of the season has been fully extinguished, but the playoff race isn’t even close to starting
Well, the NBA schedule has its own “dog days” stretch, and we’re right smack in the middle of it.
The holidays are over, but February’s All-Star break is four weeks away — this stretch can be a slog.
It has certainly has been for the Warriors, who over the last two weeks have been playing unfocused basketball, as most recently evidenced by a 19-turnover loss to the Rockets in Houston on Saturday.
Every team goes through stretches like this, but coach Steve Kerr thinks that the Warriors are particularly susceptible to the dog days.
After all, they’re really tired from all the winning they have done over the last three years.
“Well, if you go to work for four years and you never get a vacation, you’d be a little fried — it’s the same concept, it’s just happening on a basketball court,” Kerr said Monday after a longer-than-usual practice.
Forget turnovers, opposing dribble-drive point guards, or injuries — The Warriors’ biggest problem is that that they have been too good over the last four seasons.
Don’t expect anyone to cry for them.
But you shouldn’t scoff at Kerr’s assessment — while every other team would trade places with the Warriors in a second, for good reason, being in Year 4 of one of the greatest runs in NBA history is a real problem for Golden State.
Only four teams in NBA history have gone to the NBA Finals in four straight years, and while Golden State is in excellent position to be the fifth member of that club, there’s some pacing required to get it done. And the cumulative effect of playing 355 games (regular season and playoffs) since the start of the 2014-15 season means that this year’s Warriors team needs a bit more pacing than most.
This team’s collective attention span is going to wane. It would be impossible for it not to wane. It’s almost better not to fight the human nature of it all.
Over the last two weeks, the Warriors as we have come to know and love them have shown up in spurts — locked in mentally and at full-splendor athletically — but against Houston, the Warriors simply weren’t sharp enough to win against the closest thing they have to a worthy adversary in the NBA today.
“You would think guys would be able to get up for every single game,” Kerr said. “But if you haven’t been in the NBA, it’s like the line from Airplane!: ‘Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes.’
Kareem was right. Tell your old man — tell the fans — to drag Chris Paul and James Harden up and down the court every night … It’s exhausting, mentally and physically.”
The wise words of Roger Murdoch, the co-pilot, and Kerr’s experience as a player with the second 3-peat Bulls teams in the 1990s are why the Warriors’ coach didn’t seem perturbed about one game against Houston in January. The Warriors are still confident they can take the Rockets, as good as they might be, in a seven-game series in May. They will be up for those games.
That said, Kerr was rightly concerned about the Warriors’ last three contests, which have featured two 40-point opponent quarters and more than 15 Golden State turnovers per game.
Such lapses in focus are inevitable — particularly for this Warriors team — but at some point, they have to be nipped in the bud. Negative momentum has a funny way of snowballing — just ask the reeling Cavaliers, who are also aiming to make a fourth-straight Finals.
“There are key points in the year where were have hit the reset button in terms of our priorities,” Kerr said. “Right now is one of those times. This is an important week for us: We need to take care of the ball. We need to be smart, make good decisions. If we do that, we’re really really hard to beat.”
That said, how could anyone stay focused on effectively meaningless regular-season games when you know, deep down, there’s only one team in the NBA that could even entertain the notion of taking four out of seven games in a series against you? (And let’s be honest, if the Warriors are healthy, you would have to be crazy to actually take the Rockets in seven.)
Finding the answer to that question is Kerr’s biggest challenge over the final three months of the season. He probably will have to come up with a few different solutions, too.
That said, he’s confident that his team will be in peak mental condition to repeat as champions by the time the dog days are over.
“We know what we’re doing: We’re navigating the season — there’s going to be some ups and downs,” Kerr said. “You just gotta be right down the stretch — that’s our whole aim as a coaching staff and as a team and I really like where we are right now. I really like our position.”
