Getty Josh Okogie defends Stephen Curry during a bout between the Phoenix Suns and the Golden State Warriors.
Following a series of rough losses, the Golden State Warriors had a chance for redemption on Friday night when they took on the San Antonio Spurs (in front of a record-breaking crowd at the old Alamodome). And while the Gregg Popovich-led Spurs don’t make life easy on anyone, redemption was exactly what Steph Curry and Co. got.
In what was the best road performance of the year for the club, the Warriors steamrolled their way to the W, dropping a season-high 144 points in the process.
Still, the team’s horrendous performance on the road throughout the season, its shockingly mediocre 21-21 record overall and the fact that dropping three straight games to sub-.500 teams was even a possibility has all of Dub Nation on edge.
No one would have predicted that the Warriors — who rolled to a 53-29 record in 2021-22 despite a slew of injuries and captured their fourth championship in eight years — would be in this situation at midseason, but here we are. And this strange new reality continues to be a head-scratcher around the league.
For his part, Bleacher Report‘s Grant Hughes just gave the Warriors’ “meek title defense” a featured spot on his list of the NBA‘s 10 biggest disappointments at the campaign’s halfway mark.
B/R: Warriors Are ‘Failing to a Larger Extent Than Any Team in the League’
Hughes noted the myriad excuses for the Warriors’ “zombified” state through the first 40-plus games of the season. Things like Otto Porter Jr. and Gary Payton II leaving in free agency, the underperformance of the team’s youth contingent, an aging core and fatigue all received a mention.
Whatever the reason(s) for the Dubs dropping to the play-in range of the Western Conference standings, though, Hughes maintains that the sum result really can’t be described as anything but a disappointment.
He didn’t stop there, either, making a particularly damning statement about Golden State’s actual performance relative to the club’s potential/expectations:
The good news is that the Warriors’ starting five is still the most productive high-usage unit in the league. You’d be a sucker to bet against a massive second-half surge. But all that does is underscore the maddening truth that this team is falling so far short of its ceiling, and that its first-half undoing is all self-inflicted.
If success is measured by comparing what you’re capable of achieving to what you actually achieve, then the Warriors are failing to a larger extent than any team in the league.
Ouch.
James Wiseman Catches Criticism, Too
The Warriors’ uneven campaign to date wasn’t the only thing to come under fire in this list. Hughes also mentioned former No. 2 pick James Wiseman’s inability to make any headway as one of the bigger disappointments league-wide.
At the same time, the hoops scribe opined that discerning eyes probably saw the big letdown coming long before the season began:
If you saw much of James Wiseman in his four 2022 summer-league appearances, you probably had a sense that no career turnaround was imminent. His averages of 10.5 points and 5.5 rebounds against sub-NBA competition underwhelmed, and they came with all the same concerning shortcomings—bad hands, slow processing on defense, a maddening inability to high-point rebounds—that were present before injuries cost him his sophomore season.