Sports are stupid sometimes.
The Warriors had no business winning this game. Coming off a perfect five-game road trip, the team looked sluggish, one step slow and outgunned for most of the game. In a Tuesday night matchup against the Orlando Magic, many thought the Warriors would cruise to another double-digit victory against a hapless Eastern Conference opponent.
-== Steph Curry Drains Game Winning 3-PT Shot ==-
And for most of all four quarters, the Magic looked to be the better team. Victor Oladipo was giving Stephen Curry fits on both ends. The Splash Brothers weren’t hitting. Mo Speights regressed to mortality. After the game, even Steve Kerr said that Orlando deserved the victory.
“I told Jacque [Vaughn] that after the game,” Kerr said. “I thought he did a hell of a job with his team without Vucevic and they had a great plan and put a lot of pressure on us. We are lucky to have the players that we do because down the stretch they took over.”
But, as elite teams do, the team found a way to win. On a night the team shot below 30 percent from deep, never found a rhythm on the defensive end and let Kyle O’Quinn score 21 points and notch 11 rebounds, this was a game that this team loses last season. The theme for this early season has been gradual improvement over an already established product.
How much can Steve Kerr change this team? How will the offense perform? Will the starting lineup change help or hurt long-term?
The answers to these questions may seem apparent now, but it will take time to see how the results over weeks, months and years measure up to the 17-game stretch we’ve seen so far. Of course, when Curry is hitting game winning shots with 2.2 seconds left, that makes the head coach’s job a little easier.