The Warriors officially finished 8th in the Western Conference and claimed the second best spot in the NBA Play-In Tournament with a 113-101 win over the Memphis Grizzlies at Chase Center on Sunday.
Want early access to 2021 postseason tickets? Sign up below to get notified when tickets become available!
First Name
Last Name
Email Address
Zip Code
×Close
Your information has been recieved.
Thank you for your interest! We will email you when tickets become available for potential Warriors home Play-In and Playoff games.
Stephen Curry hit two critical threes out of his nine splashes through the game in the closing minutes to lift the team into a double-digit lead the team rode to the victory. Knowing the weight those shots carried, Curry celebrated in a way that may be very familiar to Dub Nation.
Curry finished with 46 points, etching his name in stone as the NBA’s leading scorer on the 2020-21 campaign. He finished the regular season scoring 30-or-more points in eight of the Warriors’ last nine games.
Sunday’s game was initially opened up with solid play from the Dubs’ second unit in the second quarter, but then the Dubs really locked down the game with an outburst on offense in the third frame.
TEAM LEADERS
Up by one point after the first quarter, the Warriors watched as their reserves expanded the lead to as much as nine points. Leading the charge was Jordan Poole, who scored six points in the first six minutes of the quarter with Andrew Wiggins adding eight through the quarter. Their work were the foundation for the Warriors 55-49 lead going into halftime.
But despite the early effort, neither team had taken a double-digit lead through the first 24 minutes of the contest.
That changed in the third quarter when the team held down the Grizzlies with 18-7 run over a three-minute span of the frame. Curry scored seven of those points through that run, including another trey for his 30th point of the night. The Warriors closed the frame up 86-69 after back-to-back corner shots were made by Poole and Kevon Looney.
To say the Grizzlies did not go down without a fight is an understatement. Memphis came roaring back in the fourth quarter with a 28-9 run to take a two point lead following a Jonas Valanciunas tip-in with just under five minutes left in the game.
Answering right back was Poole who railed a three pointer to bring the Warriors up by one, followed by an emphatic dunk from Wiggins off a Curry missed 3-pointer.
And then, Curry put the game to bed. The next three scoring plays were all from the two-time MVP, and they were all three pointers. The splashes put the Dubs up by 12 with 1:35 left on the clock and created a lead the Grizzlies could not overcome that late in the game.
Wiggins finished as the Warriors’ second leading scorer with 21 points, while also being the team’s second leading rebounder with 10 boards. It was his third double-double of the season.
Poole led all reserves with 15 points and three treys off the bench following his career-high 38-point night on Friday against the New Orleans Pelicans. He scored in double digits in his final six games of the regular season, averaging 20.5 points with three splashes per game.
The Warriors now await to see who they will play in the first game of the Play-In Tournament, which runs May 18-21, and that will be determined Sunday evening. The Los Angeles Lakers currently sit in the 7th spot. An L.A. victory in New Orleans would force the Portland Trail Blazers to win (vs. DEN) to keep their No. 6 spot, otherwise the Trail Blazers would fall to the No. 7 seed. Those games tip off at 6 p.m. Read more on the Warriors’ Play-In Tournament outlook.
Regardless of their opponent, the Warriors will next play on Wednesday (7 p.m., ESPN).