Thursday was a character win for the Warriors. One of the highest order.
The Dubs didn’t have to win Game 3 to win this series, but a 3-0 series lead would effectively end the series, securing a tidy start to the playoffs for the Warriors and likely as much as a week of rest before the second round.
The blowout wins in the first two games of the series were great, but the margin of victory didn’t matter in Game 3. This was a pass/fail test, and a great team — a true championship contender — would care of business on Thursday.
The Warriors did just that.
And while Denver has proven to not be much of a matchup for the Dubs, Golden State establishing a 3-0 lead and their win on Thursday speak volumes about this team.
In early March I wrote that the struggling Warriors were no longer title contenders.
My argument was simply that the Warriors had lost the benefit of the doubt and that they would need to reestablish their bona fides in the weeks to come.
I’m not sure they did that in the regular season.
But these first three playoff games feel highly informative.
These Warriors might not be the NBA’s best team, but they sure look like they’ll be the hardest team to eliminate.
It’s just the first round, and it’s a favorable matchup in the Nuggets, no doubt, but these Warriors have shifted gears in the playoffs. There will not be a quiet exit from the postseason for Golden State. No sir, to kill off these Dubs, an opponent will need an incredible level of precision and endurance.
Frankly, I question if any other team has what it takes.
Now, other matchups will be tough. And these are not the world-beating Warriors of years past — Golden State isn’t so talented it’s being alleged that they are ruining the league.
But those years of supernova success are not negated just because the Warriors are no longer in a league of their own.
No, the experiences that came from those dynastic years can still be drawn upon by the Warriors. They were Thursday.
And in a playoffs where six, seven teams could make a case to win the title, it’s the Warriors core’s experience of going to five titles in five years — of playing in now 21 playoff series under Steve Kerr — that will likely be their biggest advantage over the field.
We saw it in Game 3.
“These guys have been around the block a few times. They’re not fazed by this stuff,” Kerr said.
A lesser team would have folded in Denver.
The referees were calling a lopsided game, as expected, the altitude of the Mile High City was clearly taking a toll on Jordan Poole at the very least, and the Warriors were downright disjointed for the first 40-or-so minutes of the game.
That was Denver’s best shot.
The Dubs could have picked up a bunch of technical fouls in Game 3, moped around on both sides of the floor, and allowed Denver to re-enter this series.
That’s what these Warriors would have done during the regular season. That’s what the vast majority of playoff teams would do in a similar postseason circumstance.
But it’s in those challenging moments where nothing seems to be going right where we find the character of a team.
The Warriors might not have a viable backup center, but they have character up and down their lineup.
The Dubs dug deep on Thursday night. Whether it was championship pride, experience, or bullheadedness, the result was the same from a challenging circumstance:
Denver led by two points, 111-109 with 3:20 to play in the fourth. The Nuggets were in the bonus, Draymond Green had five fouls and was guarding Nikola Jokic, Andrew Wiggins had fallen off the wagon of engaged play, and the Warriors’ dynamic small-ball lineup was being overpowered.
This team had to dig deep.
They did. They scored the next eight points of the game, with Wiggins making critical plays down the stretch, Denver staying off the free-throw line and Green stripping Jokic to seal the game.
“Some guys that you think are 'guys' are not guys in the playoffs,” Green said. “The real ones, they show up on the road, they make plays on the road. Then some people just show up at home.”
We saw the Warriors’ critical players — Green, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Andre Iguodala — be 'guys' in the playoffs before, but that was years ago.
We did not know if that group still had it going into this postseason.
Three games in, it’s without question that they have not lost that mojo.
What has been most impressive, though, is the number of new Warriors — guys who have little to no playoff experience — showing that they are winning postseason players over the first three games.
Jordan Poole has been a revelation. We’ve run out of superlatives for his performance over the first three contests. Wiggins was fantastic in Games 1 and 2, and had the play of the game — a critical offensive rebound with 2:19 to play — after a poor start Thursday. Otto Porter, Nemanja Bjelica and Gary Payton II all look like 16-win players, as Green likes to call them.
They look like they’ve been through the wars with the Warriors before, too.
Whether it was Poole giving a pep talk to the championship core on the bench late in the game, the energy that emanates from the brash Green, the understated leadership of Curry, who has been happy to come off the bench for the first three games of this series, what’s clear is that this team — young and old — knows (or still knows) the formula for playoff victories.
And they love the drama of the postseason, too.
“You go into an opposing team’s building and you can shut that crowd up — there’s no better feeling in sports,” Green said. “It’s hard to duplicate that feeling, that rush that it gives you.”
The Warriors have now won a road game in 24 straight playoff series.
That’s gumption. That’s character. That’s why the Warriors were perhaps the greatest dynasty in basketball’s modern era and three championship banners hang from the rafters in Chase Center.
And after seeing that gumption and character show up again Thursday night, I don’t think it at all ridiculous to imagine a fourth such banner going up after this summer.
