Do these Warriors have another gear?
Is this surging team currently playing the best basketball it can?
The Dubs’ next five games will tell us everything we need to know.
Well, almost everything.
The Dubs’ upcoming stretch is, in a word, hellacious. Thursday and Friday night, they’ll play a road back-to-back against two of the better day-to-day operators in the NBA, the Knicks and Raptors.
Then, on Sunday, they’ll face arguably the NBA’s best team, the Celtics, in Boston.
The Warriors will return home and have a few days off after that, but the infamous first game after a road trip at Chase Center on Wednesday will be against Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Bucks. And that’s the front end of a back-to-back — the scrappy Bulls come to San Francisco on Thursday.
I’m exhausted just thinking about it. I can only imagine how the Warriors will handle it on the court.
But if this team can amass a winning record over the next week, it’ll speak volumes to the quality of this operation. If that happens, we can buy the Warriors’ current form — they’ve won nine of their last 11 games — as a baseline.
The alternative takes us down a darker alley. I don’t want to go back down there again.
Though, seeing as the Warriors are 3.5 games back of the No. 6 seed — the last guaranteed playoff spot — in the Western Conference, it’s not as if they can afford to do worse than three wins over the next five.
But beating quality playoff teams like the Knicks, the Celtics, and the Bucks is something this team needs to prove it can do.
So far this season, the Warriors are 6-21 against the top six teams in each conference’s playoff standings (as of Thursday). That includes an awful 3-17 mark against the top teams in the West.
The Warriors deserve plaudits for turning their awful season around and becoming a respectable, entertaining product once again.
But if this team is going to do anything more than it did last year — one-and-done in the playoffs — it needs to start beating playoff teams. That’s not a hot take, it’s logic.
The Dubs’ loss to Denver on Sunday hardly inspired confidence that this team can do that. The Nuggets downright punked the Warriors.
Even Tuesday’s Warriors win over the Wizards — an embarrassing operation that will likely be remembered as the worst NBA team since the 10-win 2016 Sixers — failed to inspire confidence.
Sure, Chris Paul came back into the fold for that game and looked good, but the Wizards made the Dubs sweat for more than a few minutes. That’s unacceptable. What’s the opposite of a moral victory?
The performances in the last two games point to a team that appears to have peaked. It took months to find a style of play that worked for the Warriors — they settled on small-ball — but only a few more weeks to find the limits of that style. Predictable stuff.
Of course, the Dubs can keep doing what they’re doing and still make the play-in tournament and maybe even steal a first-round win in the playoffs.
But if that’s the best the Warriors can do, they’re simply treading water. They’ll be right back where they started this season.
Beating the Celtics, Knicks, and/or the Bucks would tell us something different, though.
To do that will require a level of play beyond what the Dubs have put on the court in recent weeks. (Which, again, is good. But the standard around these parts is greatness, and I refuse to let that change.)
To do that, the Warriors will need to find Andrew Wiggins.
I’m not even talking about the best version of him — the 2022 playoff edition. I’m speaking literally: Do they know where he is?
They need him on the court to beat the league’s best. It’d be preferable if he was at his best, but at this point, such a request seems greedy.
Can coach Steve Kerr properly manage Paul’s minutes to limit his time on the court with Steph Curry? I know the Warriors think it’s a good idea to play the two Hall of Famers together — it takes Steph off the ball, after all — but opposing coaches think it’s a good idea, too. Whatever the Dubs can get on offense with that backcourt is promptly given up on the other end. The duo pushes the concept of small-ball beyond the point of usefulness.
And can the Warriors continue to play with the pace and space their new diminutive style affords them? Do they have enough gas in the tank for this road trip, much less enough gas to make it out of April?
Beating some of the best teams in the East won’t answer every question we have about the Dubs — we still need to see them square off with the best in the West, their true peers — but it would be progress on top of the progress this team has already made.
It would provide us all the license to bust out our hyperbole machines and start talking about making a dark horse run at a title.
And that would raise a new question:
What edition of We Believe would this be?