SAN FRANCISCO — Coach Steve Kerr didn’t have to pin a sign on the Warriors’ bulletin board in their locker room or repeatedly circle Saturday’s game in red ink on a calendar.
Even if it wasn’t openly discussed between the coaches and players, Golden State knew just how important a win over the Utah Jazz this weekend would be.
“Oh yeah,” said Kerr, beaming with a smile. “Well aware.
“We didn’t talk about it a whole lot as a team but the guys know,” the coach continued Saturday night after the Warriors’ 111-107 comeback victory. “I know they were talking amongst themselves.”
Kerr told his coaching staff that the game against the Jazz was the “biggest game of the year.” And the injured Stephen Curry echoed that sentiment to some of his teammates.
A loss would have jeopardized the Warriors’ chances of having home-court advantage. Luckily, Golden State doesn’t need to worry about that just yet after Klay Thompson and Jordan Poole led the team to overcome a 16-point deficit in the game’s final eight minutes for the win in a performance that was nothing short of amazing.
The Warriors (49-29) have now secured a playoff spot for the first time since 2019 and own the tie-breaker against the Jazz. They can finish no lower than sixth place in the Western Conference standings and are currently in sole possession of the No. 3 seed, sitting one game ahead of the Dallas Mavericks and a cushy three games in front of the Jazz and Denver Nuggets with just four games remaining in the regular season.
After the game, Poole said the team didn’t directly discuss the game’s implications, though it had to have been in the back of their minds.
“We just know we need to go out there and win games,” Poole said. “Last game [against the Phoenix Suns], we had a lot of energy, a lot of positive things and we just tried to take that momentum and bring it over.”
The Warriors trailed by as many as 21 points in the second quarter, but Poole kept them in the game, scoring 14 of the Dubs’ 22 points in that frame.
Golden State defended the perimeter better in the second half, limiting Utah to shooting 27.3% from beyond the arc, and made the Jazz pay for playing center Rudy Gobert in drop coverage.
Thompson, who finished with a game-high 36 points, was especially lethal from 3, converting on four of his seven attempts from behind the 3-point line in the fourth quarter.
The high-intensity ending to Saturday’s game should set the tone for the Warriors entering the final week of the season.
“It really just showed a lot about our team and the guys on our team to be able to come back from the deficit. We were against a really good team, all games are important at this point,” Poole said.
The Warriors will travel to Sacramento for Sunday’s game against the Kings before hosting the Los Angeles Lakers at Chase Center Thursday. They’ll close out the season with a set of back-to-backs on the road, stopping in San Antonio Saturday before their regular-season finale in New Orleans April 10.
“We should win these next [four] games if we play with the energy we did tonight,” Thompson said.
Poole hasn’t played in a playoff game yet, but he got a taste of what that might be like in front of Saturday’s raucous crowd at Chase Center.
“You love to play in an environment like that, Chase is amazing when everybody’s on their feet,” he said. “I know it’s really hard to play [there] if you’re the opposing team, and I just hope we can keep the energy up because when we feel that, it’s almost really hard to not want to go out there and play as hard as we can.”
