Competitive All the Way, Warriors Fall in Overtime Loss to Spurs

As the Warriors tipped off their road contest against the San Antonio Spurs on Tuesday, they had a difficult task ahead of them. Even though the Spurs currently have a losing record, the Warriors never have an easy time at AT&T Center. In addition, the Warriors had fewer healthy players than they have had in recent games and were forced to revisit the depletion that has plagued them for so much of this season. With no D’Angelo Russell, no Willie Cauley-Stein and no Kevon Looney, they needed two different things to happen in order to make the game interesting. They needed multiple players to step up. And they needed at least one player to play exceptionally well.

Both of those things happened, but that wasn’t quite enough as the Warriors suffered a 117-113 overtime defeat.

For much of the game, the Warriors did what was needed of them on both offense and defense. They ran good plays and had crisp ball movement, racking up 31 assists. They shot well from three-point range, knocking down 12 at a rate of 44.4%. They took care of the ball by committing just nine turnovers. On the defensive side, they held the Spurs to under 45% shooting in three of the four regulation quarters. They moved well, contested well and did a nice job of making it tough for the Spurs to score. Both of these were a full team effort. Of the 10 players who played, nine scored, including four in double figures. Eight grabbed multiple rebounds. Seven dished out multiple assists. On defense, each Warrior turned in at least a few very strong possessions. It was exactly what was needed.

But the Warriors would require more than that. Someone would have to take charge and perform better than normal, especially with the void created by Russell’s absence. Glenn Robinson III answered the call. In the first quarter alone, he scored 15 points. He was obviously confident in his shot, but what made his work especially great was the variety of ways in which he scored his points. He scored from three-point range, midrange and inside. He scored in transition and in halfcourt sets. He scored off the dribble and off the catch. Although the Spurs tightened up their defense on him after the first, he still matched his career-high with 25 points, including a clutch jumper with less than 10 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter to tie the game and send it to overtime. Combine Robinson’s numbers with 28 points from Alec Burks, 20 from Damion Lee and a near-triple-double from Draymond Green and the Warriors seemed in good position to come out on top.

But they didn’t, and a few areas can be pinpointed as to where things went wrong. One was the Warriors’ inability to close quarters. Maybe this can be attributed to a young Warriors team taking their eye off the ball with the end of the quarter in sight. In both the first and second quarters, the Warriors should have been ahead by at least three or four points more than they actually were. Clutch fourth-quarter shooting from Burks could have given the Warriors the win in regulation, but a combination of good offense by DeMar DeRozan and bad defense by the Warriors in the final minute turned the tables and forced the Warriors to tie the game late.

The Warriors also had a lot of trouble cleaning up on the glass. Initially, this area doesn’t seem that bad: the Spurs only had one more offensive rebound than the Warriors did. But the problem lies in the ways in which the two teams capitalized on their rebounds. The Spurs outscored the Warriors 24-8 in second chance points. While “second-chance field goal percentage” is not an actual stat category in the NBA, the Spurs would have dominated it on Tuesday if it were.

Finally, the Warriors failed to defend the three-point line adequately. The Spurs shot 45.2% from downtown as a team. Their two best three-point shooters, Patty Mills and Bryn Forbes, found themselves open too often. When the Warriors actually did contests the shots of these two players, they tended to miss, suggesting that if the Warriors had sharpened up their defense on just a couple of possessions, they could have come away with the win.

The Spurs won the overtime period by a score of 17-13, which can mostly be attributed to good play by San Antonio and the reliably terrific coaching of Gregg Popovich. The Spurs executed fantastically well on offense thanks to some nicely designed plays and the Warriors, while solid, couldn’t match.

As a franchise, the Warriors have now concluded the 2010s in a very different place from where they were at the start of the decade. But as a current team, the Warriors simply continue their season with a familiar result: a close game with a lot of positives that weren’t enough to produce the desired end result.