The Golden State Warriors enter Tuesday night's game against the Minnesota Timberwolves just four wins away from immortality. After improving to 69-8 with Sunday's win over the Portland Trail Blazers, Stephen Curry and company need to go 4-1 over their final five games to topple the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls' record for the most wins in a single season in NBA history and cement the 2015-16 edition of the Dubs as one of the greatest teams the game's ever seen.
And yet, as the Warriors draw closer to the finish line, head coach Steve Kerr — who, as you might have heard, also played on those '95-'96 Bulls — insists that he and his players aren't really focusing on trying to hit the 73-win mark, according to Sam Amick of USA TODAY:
“We’re not really pushing for this,” Kerr, whose Warriors (69-8) must win four of their final five games to best the 72-10 mark set by the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls squad on which he played a pivotal part, told USA TODAY Sports after practice Monday. “All we’ve said is, ‘Yeah, it’d be nice to get. We’d like to get it.’
“But if I were pushing for it, I probably wouldn’t be resting (backup point guard) Shaun Livingston and (center Andrew) Bogut, and I’d be playing our starters more. We’re just playing it out. I don’t understand if people are going to say that we’re pushing for this. I don’t think that’s the right word to use. We’d like to get it, but we’re still resting people and trying to get us set up for the playoffs.”
At issue, though, is who Kerr means by "we." (Which, incidentally, is something he's had a tough time figuring out of late.)
After all, Kerr's players — most notably and vocally, Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson — have made it clear that they want to set the record. Kerr acknowledged as much last month, before the Warriors beat the Dallas Mavericks for their 64th win: "Now we're right there. That's pretty enticing. It's really the players' record. I know they want to get it. So we'll act accordingly."
But as the Warriors have kept up their torrid and unbelievable pace through the second half of the season, Kerr has also maintained that he will not push his charges or assent to their demands to play for 73 if he believes it in any way impedes the larger organizational goal of winning Golden State's second straight NBA championship.
"Resting, that will take precedence,” Kerr said in early March, with the Warriors sitting at 55-5. “We will rest guys if they need it before we will go for any kind of streak or record, that’s for sure.”
That's an entirely reasonable perspective, of course — "It don't mean a thing without the ring," and all that. But his players don't want just sit idly by for the final two weeks, and Kerr does want to keep his top guns sharp heading into the postseason.
"For us, we don't want to limp into the playoffs," Curry recently told the media, including Tim Kawakami of the Bay Area News Group. "We want to continue to play better and fine-tune on both sides of the ball, our execution. We want to continue to establish winning habits and a winning mentality as you go into the playoffs."
In fact, as CBSSports.com's James Herbert noted, Kerr has sure seemed willing to lean on his stars of late, playing Curry and Green both more than 40 minutes to beat the Utah Jazz in overtime one night after playing them both 35-plus minutes in a win over the Washington Wizards. So it's not as if Kerr's long-view approach is manifesting itself in major minute alterations at the moment, even in the waning stages of the season, and even after Golden State's closest competition, the San Antonio Spurs, appears to have punted on the prospect of catching the Warriors in the race for the top overall seed in the Western Conference and home-court advantage throughout the 2016 playoffs.
Then again, it's entirely possible that Kerr's not resting the likes of Curry, Green and Thompson because ... y'know ... they don't really need the rest.
Even last year, the Warriors were lauded for their commitment to using wearable technology and advanced sports science tools to get as much information as possible about the physical health of their players. Kerr drew ire from some fans after deciding to sit Curry, Thompson, Andre Iguodala and Andrew Bogut for a matchup with the Denver Nuggets last season, but the information he'd received from the team's training staff and director of athletic performance indicated that the members of the core quartet "were exhausted and redlining to dangerous levels," so he sat them down. (The Warriors, incidentally, lost the league's fewest total minutes to injury last season en route to their first NBA title in 40 years.)
This is an organization, then, that pays close attention to the well-being of its players, as well as one that — even in the course of putting together a campaign for the ages — has largely steered clear of overuse. From Brian Witt of Warriors.com:
Whether due to injury or simply resting during blowouts, the Warriors coaching staff has made a conscious effort to get their players consistent rest throughout the season, and because of that, they’re in a position now where they can continue to try to win games without it coming at the expense of pushing the players past their limits. Heavy-minutes players like Draymond Green, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson have gotten plenty of rest during the Warriors’ frequent fourth quarter blowouts, and the more aged veterans like Andrew Bogut, Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston have been given the occasional night off. Factor in the somewhat lengthy injuries to players like Iguodala, Harrison Barnes and Festus Ezeli, and what you get is a Warriors team, the vast majority of which is either right on pace with their minutes totals from a season ago, or significantly more rested.
There’s also a relative component to rest, too. Every team plays 82 games, and at the end of the season, everyone is tired. But when you compare the Warriors’ heavy-minutes players’ total minutes played this season to those of opposing players Golden State could possibly see in the postseason, suddenly it’s apparent that, relative to their counterparts, the Warriors are rested. Draymond Green plays the most minutes per game (34.7) of anyone on the team, but he’s played nearly 300 fewer total minutes than James Harden has this season. Similarly, Curry has played nearly 140 fewer minutes than Russell Westbrook, and Klay Thompson has played nearly 120 fewer minutes this season than LeBron James.
Even with all the attention to athletic-performance detail, though, every season is different and this season, with all the attendant pressures of pursuing history and defending a title, is quite a bit different than most. That's why Kerr recently made a deal with his players in hopes of preventing the race for 73 from leaving the Warriors prematurely out of gas, according to Kawakami:
-Q: You’ve mentioned the pact you have with Steph and Draymond, that they’ll tell you if they need rest. When did that conversation happen?
-KERR: We had a talk as a team, the whole team, a couple weeks ago. And I just wanted to know from the whole group what their feeling was–about the record, because at that point everybody was asking all of us about it; and we needed to talk internally.
So we had a discussion about it. It’s kind of what came of it–the young guys don’t want to rest, they say they don’t need a rest; and the older guys, some of them have needed a rest so we’ve offered that.
It was kind of a, let’s get everything on the table, so that was the discussion.
All of which is to say: sure, Kerr might be right in saying that his team's not "pushing for" the record, but the Warriors are still undeniably pushing — for home-court advantage, for the reclamation of a certain level of bite and polish in their play, for the successful reintegration of injured contributors like Iguodala, Bogut and Festus Ezeli, and for whatever gives them the best chance of hoisting the O'Brien for the second straight summer.
"I care [about the record]," Kerr said last weekend, according to Ethan Sherwood Strauss of ESPN.com: "I think it'd be a great feather in our cap, caps, whatever [...] I think it'd be cool, but we all know what our focus is. We want to win a championship. The championship goes up on the wall, and records are broken. People break records. Championships last forever."
So they're going for it, but not at the expense of going for it. Whether you consider that distinction to be significant or semantic, Kerr feels it's important to make it ... which could make Golden State's in-game and between-game roster management decisions over the next week and a half something to keep an eye on.
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