SAN FRANCISCO — Backup forward Kyle Anderson muscled through an and-1 layup with 5:45 left on Wednesday night to give the Warriors a 96-93 lead on the Thunder. It forced an Oklahoma City timeout, the brief high point of a game Golden State trailed nearly the entire way.
But the momentum faded quickly. Anderson missed the free throw after the timeout, and then the Warriors failed to score on nine consecutive possessions. They went from the 5:45 mark to the 19-second mark stuck at 96 points, an extended drought that delivered them a third straight loss, dropping them to 12-6 this season.
“It’s kind of pick-and-roll time late in the game (in the NBA),” Steve Kerr said. “With Steph (Curry) out, it makes it a little trickier on our team.”
Despite averaging only 29.7 minutes per game, Curry is “banged up” early this season, Kerr said. He’s popped up on the injury report a few times recently with left knee bursitis. There was some talk internally of him missing the second night of a road back-to-back in San Antonio last Saturday.
But Curry instead played against the Spurs and then played again two nights later, logging 94 minutes over four days. Curry’s knee tendinitis is causing pain in both knees. He had an MRI that came back clean on Tuesday. But lead medical decision maker Rick Celebrini suggested he miss Wednesday’s game against the Thunder, giving him a few extra days of rest before Saturday’s game in Phoenix.
That left the Warriors without Curry in crunch time against the Thunder’s fierce defense, currently ranked first in the NBA. Against it, with the game on the line, Golden State had a sequence of jagged possessions that ended in contested Andrew Wiggins and Jonathan Kuminga fadeaways, turnovers or rushed jumpers late in the clock.
“I thought we were a bit scattered and that’s on me,” Draymond Green said. “The game gets to that point, somebody got to slow the game down and get us into a set. I am the veteran out there. I am the one with the most experience out there. So I gotta get my head out of my a– and go get the ball and get us into a set. Something that would be beneficial for all of us.”
Without Curry, Kerr decided to go small with his starters for the first time this season. Brandin Podziemski started in Curry’s place and Kuminga replaced Trayce Jackson-Davis, bumping Green to the center spot.
Podziemski and Kuminga — expected to get a bump in scoring responsibility — started extremely slow, and the Warriors dug an immediate double-digit hole. But both brought more juice in the second quarter and were a large part of the third-quarter surge after Thunder wing Jalen Williams left the game, injuring his eye while contesting a Kuminga poster dunk.
Podziemski had 12 points and five assists. It was a small step forward as he tries to climb out of his offensive slump. Pat Spencer, the two-way guard who stepped into backup duties, turned the game with his second-quarter energy. Kuminga scored a team-high 19 points on 8 of 21 shooting.
“JK came and did that great job after that first (stint) when he was rusty,” Kerr said. “We definitely will play that smaller lineup with JK at the four and Draymond at the five plenty coming up. But my gut would be to keep starting the way we’ve been starting with Trayce and Draymond.”
Kerr said pregame that he knows Kuminga would “prefer to start,” but he likes him as the team’s scorer off the bench
“When (they) took me out the starting five, I didn’t complain,” Kuminga said. “Coming in today and telling me that I’m going to be in the starting five, I was happy but that hasn’t affected me at all. I still go out there and just play and be free. It’s not something that really affected me or anything like that.”
Steve Kerr started small because he said he didn’t want to pair Draymond/TJD without Steph Curry. But Kerr said his “gut” would be to move back to the big starting lineup (with Kuminga back to the bench) when Curry returns. pic.twitter.com/M8VYVb4iAC
— Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) November 28, 2024
In the five-plus-minute drought in crunch time, Wiggins and Kuminga both had an in-traffic turnover, Podziemski missed a contested floater, Kuminga had a 3 blocked in the corner, Wiggins couldn’t get off a clean 11-footer and Green left an open corner 3 short. Nothing operated smoothly.
“Everybody wanted it,” Green said. “JK was getting to the hole. He wanted it. Wiggs got into the paint a couple of times. He wanted it. BP did as well. But our spacing wasn’t correct, and so they’re able to collapse on the paint and we don’t have the proper kick-outs because our spacing wasn’t right because we weren’t getting into anything. It was just guys making plays themselves.
“So I can do a better job there and I definitely have to, especially when Steph’s out . .. Sometimes you just get lost in the game. I kind of got lost in the game a little bit, but I got to be able to identify that we’re a little scattered and get us settled down and get us into something. That’s not on BP or any of those guys. They don’t have the experience to do that, so that’s on me, that’s my fault.”
(Photo of Kyle Anderson shooting against Oklahoma City’s Ajay Mitchell and Cason Wallace: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)
