Amazing how quickly sports narratives shift, isn’t it? The Golden State Warriors win five straight playoff games without Kevin Durant, and all the talk is about how they don’t need him. The same Warriors lose Game 1 to the Toronto Raptors, and the “Warriors are sunk without Durant” bus is in fifth gear steaming toward an NBA Finals defeat and a summer of doom when Durant leaves.
Let’s keep this thing in perspective, shall we?
Yes, the Raptors beat the Warriors in Game 1, 118-109, in pretty much every way imaginable. They were tougher. They were more aggressive. Their defense was smothering. Pascal Siakam and Marc Gasol were nothing short of brilliant. The Toronto crowd was in a full-blown frenzy. The Warriors were sloppy, or rusty. Or perhaps both. Their transition defense was a mess. The Raptors were just better, and frankly, anyone who is surprised by the way this game went wasn’t paying attention.
That 5-0 record the Warriors banked without Durant was deceiving, after all. Both games they won against Houston were within five points with five minutes to play. In the conference finals, they trailed the Blazers by 17 in each of the final three games. Yes, they won those games and proved they are a great team even without Durant. But they don’t have the same margin for error, and the Rockets and Blazers are not the Raptors. Golden State has to be on its A-game for at least stretches of games to beat the elite teams without Durant, and the simple truth is they played a C-game at best on Thursday.
That said, you would be making a mistake, not to mention disrespecting the Raptors, to just assume it would’ve been different had Durant played in Game 1. Those final two games against Houston that were within five points with five minutes to play? It was the same situation when Durant played in the first four games of that series, two of which Golden State lost. He is not the cheat code people think he is. But he is an almost certain source of elite offense, and in Game 1, Stephen Curry, who willed himself to a hard-fought 34 points, was all by himself.
Curry was hounded all night long. He saw double team after double team. He was trapped on pick and rolls. He got his points, yes, but those points didn’t become exponential in the way they often do, igniting the whole offense as he breaks down the foundation of the defense. Toronto kept Curry contained pretty much to his own production, and when that’s the case, and he’s not creating easy offense for Klay Thompson and Draymond Green and everyone else, that’s when you need Durant, who doesn’t need anyone’s help to score.
Thompson got it going in stretches and finished with 21 points, but Green was nowhere near the player we saw against Portland, on either end of the floor. That should have been expected. The Raptors, to put it mildly, have way better players, and thus tougher matchups for Green, than the Blazers. He was not going to come into this series and look like a Hall-of-Fame point guard and shot-blocking, ball-hawking machine, but without Durant out there, he needs to be better than he was on Thursday — even though he did finish with a triple-double.
Defensively, Green left Pascal Siakam a little too freely to tend to — seemingly — more pressing defensive matters, and he got burned for it. Once Siakam got going, he didn’t let up. But some of Siakam’s production was inevitable. Maybe not 32 points on 82-percent shooting, but someone was going to be open with the Warriors sending multiple bodies at Kawhi Leonard, and that’s not necessarily going to change moving forward. Green could pay more attention to Siakam and it could end up being Danny Green who gets hot, or Marc Gasol could have a repeat performance of this 20-point Game 1.
Still, don’t make the mistake of thinking Green won’t be much better in Game 2. And certainly don’t make the mistake of thinking the Warriors, as a whole, won’t be better in Game 2, in which Durant is again not expected to play. Friday morning every sports show in the country was debating, in some capacity, whether the Warriors “need” Kevin Durant to win this series. Again, be careful with the verbiage here.
To say the Warriors need Durant to win is to suggest they can’t win without him. That’s not true. The Raptors “need” Kawhi Leonard. The Warriors “would love to have” Durant. There’s a difference. The simple truth is Durant just makes things easier. Golden State was outscored 75-18 in the front court matchups in Game 1. Durant is a front-court player. Call me crazy, but something tells me one of the best scorers in history would’ve closed that gap.
That said, you won’t hear much talk about the Raptors getting lucky that Durant is out, not nearly in the same way you heard the “lucky” card thrown around for years after the Warriors won the 2015 title with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love sidelined for the Cavs. People are going to credit the Raptors, as they should. But that reluctance to FULLY believe a Warriors team led by Stephen Curry can win a championship is still alive, just beaneath the surface, and every time it gets a chance to bubble up, it does.
At about the midway point of Game 1, my dad, a shameless new-school Warriors fan but a die-hard nonetheless, started texting me how much trouble Golden State was in against a Raptors team that “might just flat out be better.” My gut tells me this is a common sentiment right now.
The Raptors are better than we thought.
The Warriors, without K.D., aren’t as good as they’ve looked.
As usual, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. The Warriors are clearly feeling Durant’s absence against Toronto in a way they didn’t against Portland, which was simply overmatched when it came down to it. And the Raptors probably are a team that a lot of common fans haven’t paid enough attention to. If you go down the matchup board in this series, there’s a lot to suggest a pretty even series. I picked the Warriors to win in seven. I still believe that. But it’s clearly going to be close either way, whether Durant returns or not.
So again, let’s keep this in perspective. The Raptors won Game 1 on their home court. If the Warriors win Game 2, they will have stolen home-court advantage with Durant a possibility to return in Game 3, and will be in the driver’s seat. Even if the Warriors lose Game 2, Houston lost both games to start the second round vs. Golden State and came back to tie it up 2-2 at home. In fact, the Raptors were down 0-2 to the Bucks in the conference finals and rattled off four straight to win in six.
Between now and Sunday, you’ll hear people talking about Game 2 being a must-win for the Warriors. It isn’t. But it’s clearly a swing game. There’s no doubt the Warriors look like they’re fighting upstream against Toronto, and if they go down 0-2, that current will feel like a flash flood. In a seven-game series, teams that lose the first two games go on to lose the series 92 percent of the time. But this is the Warriors. They don’t think that way. For the first time in the Steve Kerr era, they have lost Game 1 of the Finals. And I guarantee not a single person in that Golden State locker room is as worried as a lot of people are sure to be outside of it.
