“It just feels like a loss, a feeling that we haven’t experienced in a while”, Draymond Green said after the game.
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Milwaukee opened the final quarter with some really aggressive and gutsy play, turning the score to 85-77 with about nine minutes left.
The Bucks also stopped the Lakers’ winning steak in 1972.
Reigning NBA MVP Curry paced the Warriors’ attack with a team-high 28 points in front of a crowd of 18,700 at Harris Bradley Center arena in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “But it is nearly like a sense of relief”, Green said.
And Green, in keeping with his nature, spun off words proper and true. “I think now we can settle in more to the season”. I’m not sure if all if that is going anywhere.
“It’s been a long road trip, [we’re] just trying to refocus as we get back at Oracle [Arena] and maybe start a new streak”. Warriors C Andrew Bogut scored just two points Saturday but blocked a season-high four shots and grabbed 11 rebounds against the Bucks, with whom he spent seven seasons with the Bucks…. “Come on, we can beat them”. “So our plan of knowing how to win has gotten us through”.
Except on Saturday in Milwaukee, when they shockingly looked like an National Basketball Association team instead of a flawless juggernaut. Or the game in January 2014 when Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce returned to TD Garden for the first time as Brooklyn Nets. Now it’s time to focus on getting better each and every day.
“We missed shots. They didn’t shut us down, man”, guard Klay Thompson said after the loss. And it touched everybody, from Walton down through the roster.
Manu Ginobili had 17 points for San Antonio, which has won six of seven. Through all this you get caught up and trapped inside of what is going on.
In recent seasons, playing in the weaker Eastern Conference has opened doors for unexpected teams to make the conference finals, and the Pistons might be that team this year. The Spurs and Thunder are not dealing with almost as much attention as the Golden State Warriors are. Thompson has been late to the party. They’ve been a hit overseas, where viewership for Sunday games increased 32 percent last season over 2013-14, when the games weren’t being shown at a consistent time.
Which means it was a tougher ticket than the first regular-season game LeBron James played in Miami Heat colors in 2010.
After leading the league in almost every significant defensive metric last season, the Warriors this season are sixth in field-percentage defense and fourth in adjusted field-goal defense. They are handling the media hype extremely well for a franchise that was not this good a few seasons ago. That is no excuse, a loss is a loss just as a win is a win.
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The Warriors lost one in a row, so to speak. The Cavaliers are making some headlines with their inconsistent play, but there would be a whole lot more criticism for Cleveland if it were not for the Warriors historic start that we are all privileged to witness. Yet as a chuckling Curry went on to explain, those long mornings on game days are actually the players’ fault.
