The Warriors are good? Nice, but wow, imagine how good they’d be with Thompson and Wiseman! To be fair, it is literally true. Sure, it’s an optimistic line of thinking, and optimism is preferable to the Lars von Trier dread that old-school Warriors fans know deep in their brittle bones, but it’s truly morphed into a confusing mantra that you are supposed to be reminded of at every opportunity. The talking point is a bit harder to make sense of when NBA fans start taking up the idea, especially Warriors fans.
You can expect it from cogs in the machine like friendly company men Bob Fitzgerald and Kelenna Azubuike, the former a notorious propagandist for any regime that pays his Notre Dame football season ticket bills. It’s literally a thing to say and you have to say something in front of the cameras.
"They’re doing all this without Klay Thompson or James Wiseman." You can definitely forgive people on TV for shoehorning that talking point into the discourse. That is to say, if they’re already this good, do they even need him at all? Could the emphasis be shifted somewhat? The Warriors are doing this without Wiseman. Logging onto Twitter and seeing someone with a Steph Curry avatar demand you commit seppuku for the good of team chemistry probably gets old.īut wanting Wiseman to have the opportunity to play basketball again is a far cry from believing that adding Wiseman to what the Warriors are already working with will elevate the team to some new level of unstoppable. But it’s not exactly controversial to say Wiseman had a disastrous rookie year, and the added ache of Golden State only finding their stride when he went down with injury would wreak havoc on anyone’s heart, let alone a 20-year-old kid who has never been so accountable to the exasperated dispositions of millions of strangers. It’s an incredible achievement to get to this level and you want to see all the players on your favorite team succeed.
Everyone deserves a clean slate to clobber narratives and make doubters eat their horrible words. Let’s be very clear that we’re (that is to say I am) super excited for Wiseman to return to the lineup. It segues to a common refrain from both him and actual fans: “They’re doing all this without Klay Thompson and James Wiseman!”Īpologies to Wiseman, who absolutely seems like a sweet guy who can run the floor and looks to have a more or less fluid shooting stroke, but that’s a bit of a record-scratch, freeze-frame moment courtesy of people who should know better. That’s super great to hear from a man who is never wrong. “The Golden State Warriors are going to the Finals," he proclaimed recently. He's shamelessly attached himself to the Golden State Warriors Renaissance bandwagon, undergoing a sort of talking-head Road to the Chase Center divine enlightenment. (And some even-handed yet still optimistic proclamations from various intelligent and attractive people.) Postgame show luminaries like Tim Legler, Skip Bayless and Kendrick Perkins are all talking up the Warriors, but no one has glommed on as hard as Stephen A. It’s terrific to watch revenge unfurl in real time, but this has of course led to some histrionic knee-jerk proclamations from the usual windbag suspects.
They've woken up in the late third quarter of their life span and suddenly remembered they’re hunters. Without the Kevin Durant escape hatch, the Warriors have hunkered down and ignited pugilistic defensive schemes that almost border on cruel. The record is great (and can be unpacked!) but the best thing about it is that this team is playing with a tenacity and cohesion not seen since perhaps the first 24 games of the 2015-16 season. The Golden State Warriors have stormed the flimsy battlements of Castle Preseason Predictions and are pulverizing their way to the best record in the NBA. Golden State Warriors center James Wiseman poses for photos during the NBA basketball team's media day in San Francisco, Monday, Sept.