After a hot start to the season, the Golden State Warriors had dreams of competing for a championship in the West. But now, after dropping five straight games, the situation has changed and Draymond Green says the Warriors must adapt.
“You hit these rough patches during the season, and sometimes you can wanna do everything right, you can feel like things are going right and it just doesn’t go your way,” Green said. “That’s why you wanna log them games when you can early on in the season to kind of give yourself a little cushion. So here we are riding a losing streak. I think our mindset is we gotta get back to what was making us successful, we were defending well, knocking down shots… Nobody’s in a panic but sh*t’s gotta change.”
Draymond, 34, is one of the longest-tenured Warriors, along with his All-Star teammate Stephen Curry. Together, they won four NBA championships from 2015-2022 in one of the most dominant and successful stretches by any team in basketball history. Recently, however, the franchise has fallen on tough times.
After their most recent Finals run, a series of events triggered a breakup of the Warriors which began with the departure of Jordan Poole. After he left, and the Warriors continued to fall off, Klay Thompson eventually went his own way and left the team to pursue a future with the Mavericks.
Coming into this season, the Warriors were very much seen as a team in decline and if it wasn’t for Stephen Curry, most fans would not have considered them at all in the NBA playoff picture.
But after a 12-3 start where the Warriors looked elite on both ends, confidence was building internally that they could make a run. Draymond Green even quietly implied that the Warriors were about to pull off something special.
In a matter of days, however, the Warriors managed to undo most of their work from the early season. As losers of five straight games, the Warriors are now 12-8 this season and 6th in the West. They’ve seen major slippage in all major categories and are on track to slide back into the play-in bracket.
Head coach Steve Kerr has already tweaked the rotations several times and has adjusted the minutes to key role-players like Jonathan Kuminga, Mosses Moody, and Brandin Podziemski. Of course, the true path to success involves Draymond and Curry.
As the final remnants of their golden era, the veteran duo will have to step up and elevate their game in order to snap this streak and get back on the right side of the win column. With averages of 8.8 points, 6.2 rebounds, and 6.0 assists on 43.3% shooting as one of the NBA’s elite defenders, Draymond is meeting his standards and he’s staying out of trouble in the meantime.
But if something doesn’t change soon, the Warriors will keep sliding down the standings and jeopardize their chance to make a run this season.
Tonight, against the Houston Rockets, we’ll get to see how they respond to their ongoing losing streak. The 10:00 PM EST game is the first night of a back-to-back set, which ends on Friday against the Timberwolves at 10:00 PM EST. They begin next week in the Crypto.com arena for a game against the Trail Blazers at 9:30 PM EST.
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