While the rest of the NBA was playing hot potato with middling assets on Wednesday night, the Golden State Warriors decided to remind everyone that nothing matters, and that every NBA transaction from now until Kevin Durant decides where he wants to play next summer will be rendered meaningless by wide-open Splash Brother threes.
Playing against a “load-managed” Spurs team missing LaMarcus Aldridge and DeMar DeRozan, the Warriors went on a monstrous run between the second and third quarters to push a relatively close game into farce territory: from the 3:55 mark in the second quarter through the 1:01 point in the third, this damn Golden State team made 24 out of 25 straight field goals. By the time the carnage was over, a four-point game had turned into a 33-point blowout.
Most of the damage was done in transition, as the slow Spurs back-ups had basically no chance of slowing down this flying death machine. Every time the Spurs would miss a shot, and it happened a lot, the Warriors immediately had their army of unspeakable horrors marching down the floor looking to jam home wide-open dunks:
And if they had to slow it down? Well, they have this DeMarcus Cousins guy now, who can just beast everyone in his path:
Immediately after that, the Spurs decided to send help on Boogie, only for him to start a chain reaction that ends in, what else, a Steph Curry corner three:
The 24-of-25 stretch wasn’t even that impressive a run in terms of shot-making, because of how fast the Warriors got into the open spaces left behind by San Antonio. This wasn’t a 2007-LeBron-against-Detroit Herculean effort; it was more like Golden State was at shoot-around with mildly inconvenient traffic cones in the way:
Let’s take a moment to remember here that Golden State does have one weakness right now, and that it’s Draymond Green’s terrible, no-good season. It tracks, then, that the only miss in this collective NBA Jam on-fire sequence came from Green clanging an open three:
Doesn’t matter, though, because this team still has Kevin Durant as a complementary piece to its usual barrage. This sulky motherfucker can still score from anywhere, including just ripping off a massive, Mr. Fantastic-esque jam for fun:
The final tally for that flurry: 64 points, six three-pointers, and one demoralized opponent.
How do you even stop this? New Orleans could just hand Anthony Davis to the Lakers for an In-N-Out coupon, and it wouldn’t matter. Nothing will matter until the summer, when Durant might go mope in New York and Klay Thompson might decide he wants to bum around in Sacramento. In the meantime, this Warriors team isn’t stopping for anyone. Maybe a February game against a rotated Spurs squad isn’t the most potent reminder of the Warriors’ power, but the timing is instructive. All the league-wide transactional chaos of the trade deadline means absolutely nothing until these Warriors decide to call it quits out of boredom.