Warriors Playoff first round preview: Do the Spurs have a chance?
The playoffs are now upon us, and the Warriors will face off against the San Antonio Spurs. With the Warriors recent struggles, do the Spurs have a chance at upsetting the reigning NBA Champions?
The NBA regular season has officially come to a close, and for a Warriors team that faced a grueling stretch of injuries that caused them to limp through the finish of the season, this conclusion to their 82-game marathon could not come soon enough.
All season one thing has been clear, this team just does not care about the regular season in the least. Add their clear lack of attentiveness together with the seemingly endless cycle of injuries the team has dealt with, and you get the most frustrating Warriors season is recent memory. Thankfully those times are all behind us, and the real season is about to begin.
The NBA Playoffs officially begin this Saturday, April 14th. The Warrior’s first round opponent was not finalized until nearly the final game of the final day of the regular season. Up until the conclusion of the Spurs game against the Pelicans, and Nuggets vs. Timberwolves overtime thriller, the Warriors were in line to face a number of different teams given the outcomes of Wednesday’s games.
In the end, the Pelicans fell victim to the San Antonio Spurs, and the Minnesota Timberwolves triumphed over the Denver Nuggets. These outcomes resulted in the Spurs and Timberwolves obtained the 7th and 8th seed, respectively. With that, the bracket is now filled and the Warriors will face off against the Spurs in the first round of the playoffs.
This outcome is less than ideal, as the team would much rather have had the Nuggets beat Minnesota so they themselves could have faced the Nuggets in the initial round. The Spurs offer a more difficult opponent than that of Denver would have, but in the end, there is no reason to be concerned on the part of the Warriors.
The Spurs are a threat to win on any given night simply because they still have who is perhaps the greatest head coach to ever grace an NBA sideline, Gregg Popovich. Even with a coach of such stature, the Spurs are simply no match for Golden State.
In the regular season, the Warriors won three of the four meetings with San Antonio, with the only loss being the game in which the Warriors were without the likes of Steph Curry, Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson.
While the team will be without the assistance of Steph Curry for the first round, the presence of Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson should still provide enough fire power to get past San Antonio. The Spurs are one of the best defensive teams in basketball, but don’t have anyone on the roster who can stop Kevin Durant from getting whatever shots he wants whenever he wants them and have no real offensive threat outside of Lamarcus Aldridge.
While it is true the team’s scoring load is entirely dependent upon the performance of Aldridge, It would be incredibly remiss of me not to acknowledge how well he has performed against the Warriors this season. In four games, Lamarcus Aldridge is averaging 26.7 points per game against Golden State.
It is true that the Spurs will have no answer for Kevin Durant, but it may also be the case that the Warriors do not have one for Lamarcus Aldridge. While I do not envision any scenario in which the Spurs come out the victor in this series, how effective the team is at stopping Aldridge may be the difference between a sweep and a seven-game series.
Because of this, Draymond Green is the most important player in this series. The reigning defensive player of the year will have to take on the challenge of slowing down the San Antonio big man. If he is effective in doing just that, the series should be a decisive Warriors win, if he is not then the Spurs will give the team headaches.
In the end, I imagine playoff Draymond will give maximum effort and do a good job in slowing down Aldridge. This is not to say that Aldridge will not perform well in the series. He will still get his, but he shouldn’t be able to dominate enough to make this series any longer than five games.
That is precisely how long of a series we should expect from the Spurs. Five highly intensive games, one of which the Spurs manage to win simply off of the greatness of their star big and legendary head coach, and four others that the Warriors manage to pull away in the end.
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Regardless of how close that is to how the series actually plays out, we are in for a greatly entertaining series that should show this Warriors team get back on track and look more like the championship team we know them to be, and less like the team that struggled to finish out the season.