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MINNEAPOLIS — The formula got fried here on Thursday. The method melted down. And now the Warriors have to come up with something else a little bit or maybe almost completely different in a matter of days.
No problem, that should be easy! Anybody got a magic wand that Steve Kerr can borrow?
On Thursday at Target Center, Stephen Curry was in very nice street clothes, Draymond Green nearly got himself thrown out, and Jimmy Butler looked like he was the only Warrior who worried the Timberwolves even a tiny bit during Golden State’s 117-93 loss in Game 2 to even the series at 1-1.
This was not anything like the energy and very focused strategy that lifted the Warriors out of mid-season mediocrity into the playoffs, through a scintillating seven-game victory over the Rockets, and gave them every shot to knock over Minnesota in the second round.
But the hamstring strain Curry suffered in the second quarter of Game 1 has changed everything about this series and about the Warriors. And though he was very present on the sidelines and around his teammates on Thursday, earlier in the day Curry also admitted that he doesn’t know when he’ll be back and can’t guarantee himself or anybody else that it’ll be before the end of this series.
For Game 2, Kerr tried to toss his whole roster out there — all 14 active players saw action in the first half — to see what would stick. It didn’t quite work. But there was almost no way it was going to be the right way to win that game. It was Kerr’s attempt just to get a feel for what the Warriors need to do for the rest of this series — which heads to Chase Center for Games 3 and 4 — whether Curry makes it back, but especially if he doesn’t.
What Kerr found out: Little-used Jonathan Kuminga and Trayce Jackson-Davis added a spark and helped lead a mini-comeback in the second half, just flying around doing athletic things in an offense that lacked its usual flow and structure. And role players such as Moses Moody and Quentin Post who have flourished in the set formula seemed totally out of sorts on Thursday.
“It’s not as simple as Steph’s out so we just replace him with one person,” Kerr said. “The domino effect of Steph being out led to Trayce playing tonight. Because we need the scoring, we need the finishing. You saw what he did out there. Same thing with JK.
“We had found a formula over the last couple months and obviously we were having a lot of success. But without Steph, the formula completely goes out the window and we’ve gotta figure out the next formula.”
Kuminga, who has been in and mostly out of the rotation the last few weeks because he doesn’t fit with the formula, survived a shaky first stint and played his best basketball in a month once he got back in. He made his first eight shots (on his way to a team-high 18 points in 26 minutes) and drove past and through Rudy Gobert for a huge dunk.
Why did he just charge down the baseline like that? Because Butler told him to.
“I was trying to find Jimmy and Jimmy was like, ‘Go,'” Kuminga said. “Once he saw Gobert on me, he was just like, ‘Go, go.'”
That’s probably the new formula: Just go. Or it will be if Butler has anything to do with it. This isn’t the most efficient way to play basketball and it might lead to plenty of the kinds of mistakes that got Kuminga and Jackson-Davis bounced from the rotation.
But what else are the Warriors going to do against a Minnesota defense that is now overloading on Butler the way all defenses overload against Curry? The former formula worked because Curry and Butler are so unique and can create shots for relatively stationary teammates or just do it themselves. With Curry out, the Warriors need more movement. More Kuminga and Jackson-Davis. More leaping. More aggressiveness.
“Attack,” Butler said. “We need as many individuals attacking as we can. You get in there and nobody helps, score. You get in there and somebody helps, pass the ball to the open guy. A lot of times when you get into the paint, it’s wide open to get a bucket.”
So Butler can flourish in minutes with Kuminga after their stints together in the regular season were statistically awful?
“It’s all about playing basketball the right way,” Butler said. “Attack to score. Attack to pass. Just make the right play over and over and over again. … Me and JK could thrive. We will thrive together on the basketball court.”
Kerr left little doubt that it’s worth a try. Right now, anything that tilts the floor just a little bit back the Warriors’ way has to be looked at. The Warriors can’t just pray and hope for Curry to come back quickly and save them. Rushing him back and risking a re-aggravation or something even worse would be foolhardy. They have to figure out some other way and fully commit to it. There is zero wiggle room in a world without Curry playing in playoff games.
Which leads us to the latest Draymond Green drama. As always with Draymond, he had a point after the game when he said his technical foul in the second quarter for hitting Naz Reid in the face as part of an exaggerated gesture to get a foul call was another example of being targeted for punishment. Would it have even drawn a replay review if another player had done the exact same thing? Maybe not.
But Draymond has put that spotlight on himself with years of swiping, kicking, and flailing at opponents. He’s never going to be treated like somebody who has a completely clean record of behavior in games because his past actions inform even the fairest view of his current ones. Judgment works like that. He can vent about that if he wishes and he sure did on Thursday.
“I’m a very successful, educated Black man with a great family,” Green said in a brief statement to reporters in the locker room. “And I’m great at basketball, I’m great at what I do. The agenda to try to keep making me look like an angry Black man is crazy. I’m sick of it. It’s ridiculous.”
Again, Draymond has every right to say and believe this. But he’s not in a court of law or writing an op-ed. He’s in the playoffs, playing under very prescribed rules, and he drew that technical foul because he hit Reid in the face. He could’ve avoided all of this by not hitting Reid in the face. That is not arguable.
The very last thing the Warriors can absorb right now, with Curry out, is for Draymond to accumulate two more technical fouls this postseason and draw a one-game suspension. Or two more flagrant foul points, which would also lead to a suspension.
“I think he knows,” Butler said. “We all know. I thought he got fouled and maybe he was trying to sell the call. Somebody got hit. But it’s just crazy, every time he does something, it’s always a review and it always ends up being something of that nature. He knows he’s got five. He knows how much we need him, now more than ever.”
They can’t lose him. Or they will lose the series. They won’t win enough for Curry to get back into the postseason. They will collapse. It’s happened before. This isn’t the formula. It’s never been the Warriors’ formula. But here they are, at 1-1, with Curry out indefinitely, with Draymond on the edge, and maybe needing a few minor miracles.