Kurtenbach: What Steph Curry’s stellar Game 6 finish tells us about him, the Warriors
The Warriors star showed up in the team’s moment of need, harkening everyone of glories past and perhaps future.
HOUSTON — It must have been the shoes.
That’s why Stephen Curry was feeling the spirit of 2015 Friday night — he was wearing it on his feet.
Curry recently unveiled the sixth edition of his Under Armour signature shoe, but for Game 6 in Houston, he went into his garage for a pair of Curry 1s, which were first released in that dynasty-sparking 2014-15 season.
Curry found a pair in the “Splash Party” colorway — white, dimpled, and featuring a confetti-cake pattern on the inner lining.
But despite the hightop nostalgia, Curry showed up late to the splash party on Friday, failing to score in the first half — his first scoreless half since 2012.
“I was pretty terrible,” Curry said after the game. “I didn’t make a shot, fouling. I think the only thing I did well was not turn the ball over — I find a positive in everything.”
Normally after a half that bad, Curry will change his shoes. It’s superstition.
But he didn’t do that in Game 6. No, he kept on the 2015 shoes.
It wasn’t a good move, it was a great one.
Curry subsequently played one of the best halves of his career, scoring 33 points, singlehandedly matching the Rockets’ scoring output (16 points) in the final four minutes of the game, and lifting the underdog Warriors — yes, they were expected to lose by seven or more points on Friday — to a stunning 118-113 win and a fifth-straight berth in the Western Conference Finals.
Or perhaps it was the simplest play in basketball.
When Kevin Durant exited Game 5 of the Warriors’ second-round matchup with the Rockets Wednesday, it was clear that Golden State was going to have to throw it back to that first title season in order to advance.
That meant leaning on the team’s core four — Curry, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, and Draymond Green. It meant going back to the motion offense that won them that first title in 2015 and a record 73 regular games in 2016.
So much has changed since those Golden State teams took the NBA by storm, though.
Those Warriors were beloved. They were a phenomenon. Now, they’re the most hated team in the NBA; so despised that people were willingly rooting for the Rockets — a team whose only artistry is in their flops — to win the series.
Those early Warriors also played a beautiful, movement-heavy brand of basketball with a devil-may-care attitude. This year’s Warriors were battle-worn and often resorted to verve-free isolation basketball — simply giving the ball to Durant and letting the master go to work. The strategy was part deference, part necessity, and part laziness — why work hard when you have an unguardable 7-footer in the midst of an all-time great run and he wants the ball?
That safety valve — which was probably used too often — not being there for Game 6 forced the Warriors to dig deep to find that old system — like how one would go digging for old shoes in a six-car garage.
“I wanted to lean into it. Without K, we’ve had a certain look and dynamic. I felt good in those shoes once upon a time, so I wanted to bring them back,” Curry said of his foray into calceology. “A nice little blast from the past.”
That system was built around Curry and a high pick-and-roll game.
The Warriors ran the fewest pick-and-roll plays in the NBA this year, saving them for the team’s few must-score situations, but on Friday, they ran the play dozens of times, including nine times in the final nine-plus minutes of the game. The Warriors dared Houston to stop it and they never did — Golden State scored 17 points off those possessions, the only missed shots came on an alley-oop dunk by Kevon Looney and what was probably a missed foul call on a Green layup attempt.
Which is to say the play didn’t miss a beat. It was absolutely lethal.
”Steph down the stretch was incredible,” Green said. “Everything we did the whole fourth quarter was around him. He made the right plays. He made shots.”
The shot that gave the Warriors the six-point lead with 36 seconds remaining — a lead they would not give up — wasn’t made by Curry, but it stands as the perfect encapsulation of the way the Warriors used to play: The Rockets trapped Curry off the screening action, so Green slipped away from the defense and received a rainbow pass from his point guard. As Green drove to the hoop and leapt, he was met by Houston’s Clint Capela near the rim, so he whipped the ball, mid-flight, to Andre Iguodala in the left corner. The pass was right on the money and Iguodala was open, but, despite having made five 3-pointers in the game (not a typo), the Warriors forward instantaneously made another pass to his right, to Thompson, who stepped into the shot as he caught the ball and fired off a textbook-perfect 3-pointer right as the Rockets’ defense converged upon him.
Splash.
Ballgame.
One of the reasons the Warriors moved away from the Curry-led pick-and-roll heavy offense was that teams, emulating the Warriors’ defense, figured out that being physical and switching everything can slow such an attack down. We saw that in the 2016 NBA Finals.
Then came Durant, brought in to codify the desired shift.
But the Rockets had spent years preparing for that first-wave Warriors offense and they shut down the attack in the series when it was sparingly used with Durant on the court.
This was their moment.
And yet Green told me after the game that he knew that the Warriors would win the contest.
Hindsight, of course, is always crystal clear, but Green was adamant that he didn’t think the Rockets — no matter how obsessed they might be — would be able to stop the Warriors in Game 6. After all, the Warriors were a completely different team than the one that played in the first five games, with different personnel (Kerr played three benched players for a full quarter each Friday) and different offensive sets.
And sure enough, going back to one of the game’s most basic plays — one they ran so often not too long ago — seemingly caught the Rockets by surprise.
Or maybe it was just heart.
It might have only been the second round of the playoffs, but in a series dripping with bad blood from four playoff battles over the last five years, this Warriors-Rockets series was bigger than its timing.
And with Durant out, Game 6 became a legacy game — especially for the Rockets.
They missed an opportunity to take control of the series in the fourth quarter of Game 5. Now they were on their home floor in a must-win game.
And with five minutes left, that game was tied.
A little more than five miles south of Toyota Center, along Interstate 69, is what was formerly known as The Summit.
The building — which was once known as Compaq Center — is now celebrity preacher Joel Osteen’s church, Lakewood. But before it became a mega-church, it was the home of the Rockets, and the site of one of the great moral teachings in sports history.
Just after the Rockets won back-to-back titles in 1995, head coach Rudy Tomjanovich took the microphone and told the crowd and the television audience to “Don’t ever underestimate the heart of a champion.”
The same statement could easily be applied to the Warriors’ effort Friday — especially Curry’s.
Curry could have sulked about his scoreless half or complain about how his finger injury was aggravated in the fourth quarter in a wrap-up with PJ Tucker. But instead, he upped his game when the moment arrived for him to lead his team. And with Thompson, Green, and Iguodala joining him in rising to the occasion, the Warriors’ stunning competence in the most fraught moments of the contest — of the season — can easily be pointed to as the reason their hopes for a fourth title in five years are still intact.
Shaun Livingston — who himself dug deep to summon a special performance for the shorthanded Dubs, scoring — told me after the game that it’s burst pipes or diamonds — pressure has to be relieved somehow.
Well, there’s a reason the core Warriors have three diamond rings on their fingers — they rise to such occasions. They have since they fell behind 2-1 to Memphis in the second round of the 2015 NBA Playoffs.
After the game, Curry, an avid golfer, found LPGA star Michelle Wei in the tunnel outside the Warriors’ locker room. Wei — who is taking time away from golf because of a hand injury — is engaged to Warriors Director of Basketball Operations Jonnie West and has been around the team on the road as of late.
Curry declared his 23-point fourth quarter an “eagle-birdie-eagle finish”.
Wei fired back: “an albatross finish”.
Meanwhile, the Rockets found water on 16, doubled 17, and three-putted 18 en route to a loss.
Whatever the finish was for Curry and the Warriors — no matter if it was the shoes, the pick-and-roll, or the heart of a champion — there’s zero doubt about this:
It was special.