SAN FRANCISCO – Experience was supposed to be the Warriors’ winning factor going into the first round of the NBA playoffs against the much-younger Houston Rockets, and it was the theme Friday night following their 115-107 Game 6 loss at Chase Center.
The Warriors had two straight chances at closing out the series after taking a three-games-to-one lead, and let both opportunities slip away. Now they’ll enter Sunday’s Game 7 in Houston with all the momentum gone, but history on their side.
It’s easy to assume everything feels faster in a Game 7. Heartbeats speed up and adrenaline is begging to burst. There’s truth to that in these pressure-packed situations, but the whole vibe is different than any player or coach can describe. The Rockets have home-court advantage, which also can produce 48 minutes of tense anticipation from a crowd witnessing a rock fight between two teams whose dislike for each other isn’t a secret.
Having gone through all those emotions multiple times, the Warriors trust they’ll be able to meet the moment.
“Just confidence, belief,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “I know our guys believe and they’ll be ready to go.”
Those same sentiments were shared by Kerr’s biggest stars.
The frustration of their Game 6 loss wasn’t gone. It just had to be flushed right away, shifting the focus to what could be their last game as a team together if they don’t rip Houston’s hearts out as they have done in the past.
“A Game 7 is a Game 7,” Draymond Green said. “I think anytime you have the opportunity to play in Game 7, it’s fun, it’s exciting. It’s for all the marbles, so move on. We’ve moved on.
“Learn from what we did wrong. It’s kind of obvious what we did wrong. Get ready for the game. I think Game 7s are fun.”
When the Warriors were last tasked with a Game 7, Steph Curry gave an impassioned speech to his teammates and dropped 50 points on the Sacramento Kings. Curry always has the ability to explode for a historic night under the bright lights. Not too high, not too low, he just wants the Warriors able to withstand anything back in Houston.
“We need to be able to manage the emotions of the next 48 hours,” Curry said. “Again, not panic, but have a sense of urgency on the adjustments we need to make going into the Game 7. How to deal with a hostile environment. I think we’ve had one in that building before. You understand the crowd is going to be into it.
“How we start the game is going to matter. It’s going to be a long 48 minutes. Just stick with it and come with a level of aggressiveness, attention to detail, just the idea that it’s going to be a game of runs. You got to just embrace it, have fun with it, show up with kind of a killer instinct. Everybody got to be like that.”
Curry and Green have played five Game 7s together and are 3-2. Jimmy Butler has played four Game 7s in his career and is 2-2. On the other side, the Rockets have four players who have combined to play 10 Game 7s, with the rest of the roster never having been there before.
The past also can’t be the Warriors’ saving grace. If experience is what the series was going to come down to, the Warriors would have met the moment of Game 5 and slammed the door shut the last time they were in Houston. Instead, they played like they had a game to mess around with and trailed by as much as 31 points. Just three minutes into Game 6, Green was given a Flagrant 1 foul that the Rockets scored four points from.
The Rockets, not the Warriors, were the more composed team Friday night. Curry had three turnovers in the first quarter, four in the first half and five overall in the loss. He now has 24 through six games, making up for them by averaging 24.3 points on 46.7 percent shooting and 39.1 percent from three, with 5.2 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game. His longtime teammate has been nearly as careless with the ball.
Green racked up four turnovers Friday night and is at 19 in the series. Offense is secondary for Draymond, but he has four more turnovers than made shots, and the Warriors will need a defensive masterclass out of him to help negate Alperen Sengun and Steven Adams.
Jimmy Butler (27 points, nine rebounds and eight assists) easily was the Warriors’ best player in Game 6. As he continues playing through his pelvic contusion, the Warriors can’t ask for much more. But what about everybody else around their stars?
“Make shots,” Curry said. “That’s me. That’s Jimmy. That’s everybody.”
Buddy Hield remained in the starting lineup for Game 6 and was a dud for the Dubs, going scoreless in 17 minutes. Hield scored 32 points between the Warriors’ wins in Games 3 and 4, but he has scored only 11 points the other four games. Brandin Podziemski and Moses Moody both have low overall field goal percentages for the series but are shooting in the high 30s from deep. They’ll be left open, and they’ll have to make the Rockets pay, as Podziemski did in Game 4 and Moody has in the clutch earlier in the series.
Kerr needed 17 minutes from 7-footer Quinten Post in Game 6, but he only had one rebound while being picked apart defensively, was whistled for five fouls and made one of his four 3-point attempts. The Warriors are shooting 22 percent from three when the Rockets use their two-big lineup of Adams and Sengun.
Pairing Butler alongside Curry had Green guaranteeing a championship on national TV at the All-Star break. The Warriors always are confident when those three lead them to battle. They themselves have to rise to their latest Game 7 challenge, and those behind them can’t crumble under the pressure.
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