The Weekly Dish

The Warriors’ incredible season keeps getting harder and harder to believe.

For the week of Monday, Feb. 29 – Sunday, Mar. 6

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s something incredible going on with this team.

We’ve all heard of the milestones. The 24-game win streak. The best pre-All-Star break record in NBA history. The chase for 73 wins. Those are empirical ways of defining what we’re seeing from the Warriors as something historic; something that we’ve never seen before. And they’re noteworthy. At this stage in modern society, for a group of individuals to be in the process of accomplishing something so unprecedented, it’s not just a sports accomplishment; in the grander scheme of things, it’s a human accomplishment, which makes it relevant in some way to all of us.

And while the numbers are staggering – the list goes on and on – the roll the Warriors are on seems almost too unrealistic to be fully explained by pure data. The Warriors’ scintillating comeback over the Thunder on Saturday night and Stephen Curry’s unbelievable shot to end it seemed like something that could only come out of a cartoon. And at that point it dawned on me – the Warriors are a cartoon. They are Superman, Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner all wrapped into one. No matter the stakes, no matter how down and out they might appear to be, they are capable of defying what we otherwise know to be the limits of possibility and doing something that is so simultaneously unbelievable yet predictable that even the national broadcasters can’t entirely smother their own personal shock at what is transpiring in front of them. Of course, they aren’t actually a cartoon. They’re a real team constructed under the same restraints as all other 29 teams in the NBA, subject to the same complications of inter-personal dynamics that are an elemental part of the functioning of any large group. Which is what makes what they’re doing so special.

In going 4-0 last week, the Warriors closed out their extended road trip with a 5-1 record, including four wins over current playoff teams. Factoring in back-to-back and home/away sets, the empirical data tells us that the toughest part of the Warriors’ season is now behind them, and now they’ll play 17 of their final 24 games of the season at Oracle Arena, where they haven’t lost a regular season game in over 13 months. The stats, the data – it’s all tremendously useful and extremely complimentary of what the Warriors have accomplished thus far. But as we head into this final stretch of the season, we can only hope that there will be more cartoon-like instances that continue to push and redefine our common conception of what truly is ‘realistic’.

Speaking of cartoons, I’m just going to leave this here. I dare you not to smile:

That shot alone was probably worthy of Player of the Week honors, but considering the full slate of his credentials accumulated over the past week, it wasn’t exactly a huge shocker when Curry received the honor for the fourth time this season on Monday. In doing so, he became the first player in franchise history to win the award four times within the same season and passed Tim Hardaway to become the franchise’s all-time leader with six career Player of the Week awards. For the week, Curry posted averages of 43.8 points, 7.3 assists, 5.8 rebounds and 1.50 steals in 35.8 minutes per game while hitting 60.8 percent from the field and 61.1 percent from three-point range (33-of-54). He became the first player to average at least 43 points on 60.0 percent shooting from the field over a four-game stretch since Michael Jordan in 1990, and his 175 total points were the most in a four-game stretch since Jordan scored 178 in November 1992. Oh, and he just topped his own NBA-record for the most three-pointers in a single season with still 24 games left to play. At this point, perhaps the best compliment we can give him is that he continues to force the entire basketball journalism universe to expand the range of its collective lexicon to match that of his majestic jumper. He continues to mystify the mind with displays the likes of which we have never seen before, and by numerous measurements, remains in the midst of quite possibly the best individual season in the history of the league. Don’t blink while he’s on the court. If you haven’t learned by now, you probably never will.

Home, sweet home. After spending the vast majority of the month of February on the road, the Warriors return home to play eight of their next nine games at Oracle Arena, beginning with Tuesday night’s matchup with the visiting Atlanta Hawks. Warriors fans will then get treated to another enticing game on Thursday when the Dubs host the Oklahoma City Thunder in a rematch of Saturday’s overtime thriller. Golden State will then round out the week with their only road game in this prolonged home stretch, a short jaunt to Los Angeles to take on the Lakers on Sunday in the first game of a road/home back-to-back. The Warriors have done well to pile up all the road wins they have to this point, but those will mean slightly less if the Dubs don’t take advantage of this seemingly favorable stretch run to close out the regular season. A strong start to this homestand could set them up well for a blazing finish.

Till next week.