You’ll notice a trend in these homages to Golden State Warriors players best nights from last season. Many of them came with the team in injury shambles.
This entry into the series is about Quinten Post answering the call. There is a version of Post’s career where December 8 never happens. Where the Warriors keep him in Santa Cruz , bring him along in small doses, protect him from moments that are too big too fast, and let him develop on a schedule that makes everyone comfortable.
The Warriors weren’t supposed to discover anything that night other thn survival. Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, and Al Horford were out. The Chicago Bulls were coming into Chase Center expecting a soft landing against a short-handed roster, and by every reasonable measure, Golden State was the kind of team you schedule when you need to get right. But in reality the Dubs won 123-91 and never trailed, and the most important thing that happened had nothing to do with the final score.
Post made threes on the team’s second and third possessions of the game, as if he wanted to establish immediately that this was not going to be a polite, careful, let-me-find-my-footing kind of night. He finished with 19 points on five threes in 26 minutes, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, he attempted a through-the-legs pass while setting a screen that had no business being as smooth as it was.Young players trying to survive in the NBA don’t attempt passes like that. Players who believe they belong do.
The box score tells one story. But anyone watching that night understood they were seeing something else: a player stamping his arrival in the way that competent people do when they stop waiting to be introduced and just start working.
The defense is what separates this performance from a hot shooting night and puts it in this series. Post was asked to carry a heavier defensive load without Horford and Green to cover for him, and he met that challenge by making Nikola Vucevic, a multiple All-Star center, look confused for most of the evening.
Vucevic kept finding bodies where he expected space. Drives turned into kickouts. Post’s contests appeared a split second sooner than Chicago expected. Possession after possession, the Bulls discovered that attacking the rookie wasn’t producing the results they thought it would. He held Vucevic to nine points on 13 shot attempts, and that defensive performance might have been even better than the offense.
If you want to point to a night that shows what QP is capable of when the chips are stacked agains this squad, look no further than that big December win against the Bulls despite missing hall-of-famers.
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