OKLAHOMA CITY — Draymond Green took the question and ran with it.
The emotional leader of the Golden State Warriors had just watched and played a role in his team getting manhandled for the second time in five days, this time a 126-102 blowout at the hands of the defending NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder. When asked what the difference was between the way the Warriors finished last regular season after Jimmy Butler was acquired (23-8) and why the group is struggling so much to start the season (6-6), Green pondered his answer, then offered an honest and frustrated assessment.
“I think everybody was committed to winning and doing that any way possible,” Green said. “And right now, it doesn’t feel that way.”
It was a point that will surely filter down through the rest of the group as the Warriors try to figure out why they have stalled after a promising opening week. Tuesday’s game showed how wide the gap is between where the Warriors are and where they’d like to be again at the end of the season. It was a complete demolition by the Thunder, the best team in the league, over a team still holding out hope it can win the race against time and one more title before Stephen Curry retires.
When asked why he thought his team wasn’t committed and whether personal agendas were getting in the way of the common goal, Green offered a glimpse into why he feels the group is struggling early.
“I think everyone has a personal agenda in this league,” Green said. “But you have to make those personal agendas work in the team confines. And if it doesn’t work, then you kind of got to get rid of your agenda, or eventually the agenda is the cause of someone getting rid of you. And so I think you don’t want a team with no personal agendas because a goal is an agenda. And so you got to have some type of personal agenda, but your personal agenda must fit into the confines of the team.”
What the Warriors have shown less than a month into the season is that they are struggling to find the type of cohesiveness that makes any team great, no matter who is on the floor. They aren’t playing well on the defensive end, they are struggling to find a rhythm offensively, and they haven’t found the consistency that defined their group for so many years.
Golden State coach Steve Kerr said as much again Tuesday, acknowledging what anyone who has watched the Warriors recently could see. The group hasn’t been the same since losing two straight games to a Giannis Antetokounmpo-less Milwaukee Bucks team and an injury-riddled Indiana Pacers squad.
“I could feel we weren’t in a great place coming back from Indiana and Milwaukee,” Kerr said. “You could just feel that things weren’t quite clicking. I thought that continued. We got a couple of wins in there, but we’re not playing well, and we haven’t been playing well for, really, since the second week of the season. So it doesn’t feel right, what’s happening right now on the floor, the way we’re playing, the way we’re approaching things.”
The way the Warriors are approaching things seems to be a sticking point for Kerr and his veteran players. After Friday’s blowout loss to the Denver Nuggets, Green, Kerr and Butler all noted that the group, especially the younger players, needed to compete harder. Though the Warriors beat the depleted Pacers on Sunday night, they still went through periods of lifeless play.
Tuesday’s game offered even more of a wake-up call. The Thunder beat the Warriors up and down the floor, even with Curry, who was back after missing three games with a bad cold. When Butler was asked if he agreed with Green’s assessment, he said he was “partially correct,” then offered his own opinion.
“We just got to get back to doing whatever it takes to win,” Butler said. “Everybody’s going to have to sacrifice something. I can’t tell you what that sacrifice might be for every individual. It may be different for every individual every single night. But it’s got to get back to winning is the main thing and the only thing.”
Jimmy Butler and the Warriors had a tough time in Tuesday night’s blowout loss to the Thunder. (D. Ross Cameron / Imagn Images)
Somewhere along the way, the Warriors lost sight of what that meant. They are going through the motions early in the season and piling up losses in a difficult Western Conference. Almost as damning as Green’s honesty regarding his team’s setup right now was Butler’s answer when asked what he thought the biggest issue was at the moment.
“The fight, honestly,” Butler said. “I think that the fight’s not always there. … We got to fight, no matter what. Most of that fighting I’m talking about is on the defensive end. Not getting stops means you’re just not playing hard, you’re just not doing whatever it takes to win.”
Curry offered his own assessment. The two-time MVP still isn’t feeling well, but he knows that what he’s seeing at the moment isn’t good enough. He wasn’t as forthright in his commentary as Green was, but he knows the Warriors need to figure out their issues quickly.
“The bigger issue is obviously when you lose, you start to look around to figure out what’s the issue,” Curry said. “Commitment to winning is just running the floor, rebounding, taking care of the basketball. It’s not really about shots going in and out, and we haven’t done that consistently enough, and our record shows that. The good news is we can turn it around.”
The interesting part about Green’s commentary Tuesday night isn’t just that he called out the group’s collective mental togetherness. When asked by an Oklahoma reporter what the key is for a young group like the Thunder to try to repeat as champions, Green praised what he has seen from the Thunder while giving a peek into how he feels about what’s happening with his team.
“You have to like each other, which you can tell they love each other,” Green said of the Thunder. “Which leads to all the magic. And you have to understand roles, which they definitely understand their roles. They got their top dog, they got their No. 2. Everybody come in, they know their role. … They are a well-oiled machine. They kind of just plug and play, which is how we were during those times. So it was very interesting to watch.”
Green then heaped praise on reigning MVP Shai-Gilgeous Alexander. It’s the same kind of praise Green and so many others in the Warriors organization give Curry. In the process, Green offered another clue as to why the Warriors’ season might not be clicking the way many had hoped. They don’t have the cohesion the Thunder do — nobody does — but Green knows the Warriors are a long way from where they need to be. They got another reminder of that from the best team in the league on Tuesday night.
“But when you have a leader that has that commitment to excellence day in and day out that Shai does, everyone else has to fall in line,” Green said. “They’re doing that, and it’s special to watch. They’re down Lu Dort, they’re down J-Dub, they were down Kenrich Williams, they were down Aaron Wiggins, who I think is their x-factor, and it didn’t seem like they were down anybody. That’s a level of excellence in order to reach the (championship) over and over again that you must have, and they got that.”
