DENVER – Cards were stacked high against the Warriors to begin NBA Cup play Friday night against the Denver Nuggets at Ball Arena, and they couldn’t pick up the pieces enough without Steph Curry. Not even close.
Draymond Green began the game draining a three from the right corner, and the Warriors then forced a shot clock violation on the Nuggets’ first offensive possession. The sequence wasn’t a sign of things to come. The opposite, in fact.
The Nuggets responded with a 12-0 run, and outside of a short stint in the second quarter, the Warriors were completely outclassed in an uncompetitive 129-104 loss.
Green (17 points) and Jimmy Butler (16 points) provided the only offense for the Warriors’ starters. The rest of the starting five scored two points in the first half, and 15 overall.
Quinten Post was a bright spot off the bench, scoring 14 points on a perfect 6-of-6 shooting and made his two 3-point attempts.
Nikola Jokić in 28 minutes barely missed a triple-double. The three-time NBA MVP scored an easy 26 points on 12-of-15 shooting and also had nine rebounds and nine assists with one turnover.
The play of the game belonged to Bay Area native Aaron Gordon. The 30-year-old stepped into a time machine and channeled his Archbishop Mitty days, crossing Buddy Hield at the 3-point line and throwing down a monstrous dunk on Post.
Along with Curry’s second straight game missed to an illness, the Warriors also were without Al Horford. The veteran center was a late addition to the injury report with left foot soreness. Horford was seen at shootaround getting shots up, but he was icing his left foot pregame in the locker room, something that has been seen frequently to start the season.
Here are three takeaways from the Warriors dropping to 5-5 overall and 1-5 on the road.
Future Trio Drops Dud
With Butler and Green playing through pain, the Warriors’ starting five still featured two eventual Hall of Famers flanked by three players who want to lead the franchise into the future. Well, the future looked bleak in Denver.
The Warriors got absolutely nothing out of Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody and Brandin Podziemski in the first half as the Warriors went into halftime down 66-49. Kuminga and Moody were both scoreless on a combined 0-of-7 shooting and missed all four of their 3-point attempts. Podziemski added a whopping two points, the same number of turnovers he had.
Kuminga’s one turnover in the first half came from simply dribbling the ball off his leg and out of bounds. He settled for bad shots, got stuck offensively and defensively and was a whopping minus-22 through two quarters. Podziemski was a minus-18 at the time, and Moody was a minus-4.
Steve Kerr had a long talk with Kuminga when he first came out of the game where the two didn’t seem to be on the same page, and he was deep in conversation with Podziemski going to the tunnel at halftime.
Another five minutes passed in the third quarter before Kuminga scored his first points. Moody finally did in the first minute of the fourth, and Podziemski ended with seven points – the most between the three of them. Their 15 points came on 7-of-29 shooting (24.1 percent), and they were 1 of 12 on threes.
The Non-Jokić Minutes
After playing the entire first quarter while dropping 11 points, three rebounds and six assists, Jokić took a seat to begin the second quarter. This was the Warriors’ time to make a run and cut an 11-point deficit. They did exactly that, going on a 10-0 run in the first two minutes and 15 seconds to make it a one-point game, forcing a Nuggets timeout.
All the sudden, the Nuggets’ offense wasn’t humming as loud and the Warriors were off to the races after a first quarter where in the halfcourt they were stuck in the mud. But just like that, the Nuggets then went on a 9-0 run of their own before a Pat Spencer 3-pointer put the Warriors back on the scoreboard.
By the time Jokić back in the game at the 4:16 mark of the second quarter, the Nuggets held a 17-point lead, 53-36. His backup, Jonas Valanciunas, scored eight points, grabbed two rebounds and made both his 3-point attempts in the second quarter as Jokic watched from the bench.
That was the game, right then and there. As soon as the Warriors made it competitive with Jokić his rest, they couldn’t find the extra gear to power them through against the bench unit of one of the better teams in the league.
Draymond Goes Boom
Pat Spencer and Will Richard, two role players at the back of the bench, brought the biggest spark when the Warriors were getting blitzed. The most promising sight, however, was Green’s willingness to be aggressive offensively as a scorer and let it fly from deep on a sagging defense.
The Nuggets kept begging Green to shoot, and for the most part, he kept playing into their game plan. And he made them pay on multiple occasions.
Green made two threes in the first half, and three more in the third quarter. He connected on three from the right corner, one from the left corner and another at the top of the arc. The defensive dynamo was 5 of 10 on threes, and the rest of the Warriors were 6 of 22 (27.7 percent) when he came out of the game for good.
Through nine games, Green now is shooting 44.7 percent from three (17 of 38) this season. Teams will keep daring him to shoot them, and he’ll have to keep showing he won’t hesitate to take advantage of that kind of defense
