By the time a Durant alley-oop from Westbrook tied it 49-49 with 1:35 left in the second quarter, the Thunder had done more than enough to make these spoiled Warriors fans nervous.
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Defending NBA champions the Golden State Warriors bounced back from their surprise opening-game loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder with a 118-91 win on Wednesday.
Curry also told reporters his elbow swelled up after hitting it on a “metal platform”, per Sports Illustrated’s Ben Golliver. The elbow’s fine. It looks like it has a tennis ball on top of it but it doesn’t affect range of motion. “I should be all right”.
Warriors coach Steve Kerr wasn’t surprised with Curry’s performance. There was still 5:47 left in the game when Billy Donovan called a timeout for his team to gather themselves, but when the reigning two-time MVP has a spurt like that, it’s almost impossible to overcome.
“They were sending three guys”.
Game Three is Sunday night in Oklahoma City. They exploited Oklahoma City’s preference to switch everything on defense by running effective high pick-and-rolls with big men, not Draymond Green, and that created big-on-small mismatches throughout the contest. Green finished with only 3 fouls but things almost got out of hand in the 3rd when he escaped a fourth technical foul for the postseason.
“Obviously we let Curry get loose a few times and we need to do a better job in that area”.
Durant had 23 points in the first half and followed that up with only six points in the second half. He wound up with 14 points.
The Warriors’ spurt was needed after Durant led the charge to erase what had been deficit of as many as nine points in the second quarter.
The Warriors had soon stretched their lead to 20 points, a margin they held as they headed into the fourth quarter, ahead 88-68. In the first quarter, the crowd experienced a scare when Curry came reeling in head first to save a ball from going out of bounds. It wasn’t just about the loss, it was the double digit halftime lead that they lost.
Curry did in fact suffer an injury.
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“Our ball movement was a lot better tonight”, Steph Curry, who had 28 points including five of eight three-point attempts, said. “We got it going side to side and set screens and found easier shots and thankfully they went down”, a relieved Curry said. It’s been like that since I’ve been back. “(And) I think all this 73 games, all this (with) the records and whatever (the Warriors) have, I think in playoffs it doesn’t really mean anything”. This was good news for one team, and bad news for the other. That said, OKC got the split that it realistically came to Oakland for.
