What went wrong for the Warriors in ‘disappointing’ season
The Warriors' bad habits came back to bite them in the playoffs.
LOS ANGELES — Steve Kerr examined the visitors’ locker room at Crypto.com Arena Friday night and saw tired eyes and disappointed faces looking back at him.
The Warriors didn’t have enough this year, with their season coming to an end at the hands of the Los Angeles Lakers, who defeated them in six games to advance to the Western Conference finals.
There was obvious sadness amongst the Warriors, but many had already come to terms with the reality.
“That’s probably where we should be,” a top-eight team in the league, Kerr said. “This is not a championship team.”
The Warriors opened training camp eager to defend their title after an improbable climb back to the mountaintop last summer. Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green and Andre Iguodala had a fifth championship on their brain.
“It’s mind-boggling to think that we have that opportunity,” Thompson said back in September. “We are going to seize it, I just — I can feel it. I can feel it.”
Where did it all go wrong?
This season started with what Kerr called “the biggest crisis” of his Warriors tenure and finished with a fitting season-ending loss on the road, with the team’s stars “maxed out.” Bad habits formed over the course of this rocky season haunted the Warriors in this series, and Curry couldn’t save them as he had done so many times before.
The writing had been on the wall for some time.
“When you go 11-30 on the road during the regular season, that’s not what championship teams do,” Kerr said. “It felt like all season we were desperately trying to recapture what we had last year and we did a pretty damn good job of finding something here over the last month.”
It wasn’t any one specific person’s fault that the season played out this way, but rather it was a culmination of one dishing of adversity after the next, and the Warriors were unable to get their bearings until it was too late.
Green punching Jordan Poole in the face in a preseason practice and the subsequent unauthorized release of video showing the altercation was a catalyst to this season; the disconnect between young and old, earned and entitled — all coming to head before the season even tipped off.
Green lost the trust of his teammates when that happened and it took time to mend those relationships.
Injuries to key players piled up, too. Curry was limited to just 56 games. Andrew Wiggins was available for even less — a career-low 37 games — because of a nagging strained adductor and a family matter that cause him to miss the last seven weeks of the regular season.
Poole severely regressed after a breakout third season that earned him a nine-figure extension, leaving Klay Thompson as the primary scorer without Curry.
James Wiseman, Golden State’s highest draft pick in decades, didn’t work out. The Warriors sent him away at the trade deadline to bring back Gary Payton II, who couldn’t even help them for six weeks as he rehabbed a core muscle injury.
The younger players, Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody, did not make the expected leaps in Year 2, as both found themselves in and out of the rotation all year.
“There were several things that went wrong,” Green said. “It was hard to prepare for the things that happened in the beginning of the season and then bounce back from that as we did, it’s hard to prepare for all the injuries that we dealt with throughout the season… and in saying that there’s no excuses. (Stuff) happens every season.
“Every season is made up of events, some are great, some are not. I think for this team more of the events that aren’t so great were so public. And that’s not something that you normally deal with. And so the world knows the tough times that this team has had but there’s tough times in every season. Winning a championship, there are tough times.”
The Warriors hadn’t found themselves on solid ground since, spending most of the season fighting an uphill battle. They boasted one of the best five-man lineups in the league, but it took time for the bench to establish its identity. The Warriors, who didn’t win a road game until Nov. 20, never found an answer for why their home-road splits were so drastic.
“The way this season started, we were disjointed, we had that 0-5 road trip and it felt like we were swimming upstream from the beginning,” Kerr said. “We found ourselves down the stretch and in the first round of the playoffs and to be fair, this team probably ultimately maxed out. We were barely in the playoff picture for most of the year so to make that push, to get there, to win an epic first-round series and then to get the Lakers, a fight in this series and have our chance.”
The Warriors were on the fringe of the Western Conference playoff picture for most of the season and narrowly avoided the play-in tournament, closing out the regular season 5-1 to pick up the sixth seed. They overcame a 2-0 deficit in the first round to beat the Sacramento Kings in seven games, but couldn’t stave off elimination this round, suffering their first series loss to a Western Conference opponent since 2014.
“We came close to recapturing what we had but we didn’t quite get there,” Kerr said. “In my mind, we didn’t feel like a championship team all year. But we had the guts, the fortitude to still compete and we made a pretty good push, we just couldn’t get there.”
Kerr wasn’t ready to talk about what might come next. The emotions of Friday’s loss were still too raw.
But he did emphasize that this isn’t the last chapter of this Warriors’ dynasty, despite some writing them off as they head into an offseason full of uncertainty. His confidence is buoyed by the dynastic Curry-Green-Thompson trio.
“All three guys are still high-level players and I still feel like this team has championship potential,” Kerr said. “We didn’t get there this year but it’s not like this is the end of the road.”