The people saying the Warriors need to tear it down after two games are being lazy, and so are the people saying Friday was just bad luck and old legs. Golden State led the Grizzlies by 12 with 3:47 left at its own home opener, missed its final nine field goals, and lost 111-108. That's an execution failure. You don't blow up a core over one bad finish in Game 2 of 82. What you can do is stop pretending the man who committed the offensive foul, drew the illegal-screen whistle, and picked up a technical in the dying seconds was just standing there.
Draymond Green is 36. His box score Friday was quiet: five points, four rebounds, six assists, a block. The problem was the sequence that sealed the game. Cameron Boozer hit a turnaround to put Memphis ahead with 20.1 seconds to go, and on the next possession Green got called for an offensive foul and then a technical with 12.8 left, which sent Ty Jerome to the line and then let him add a layup. Steve Kerr picked up his own technical arguing the illegal screen on Jerome and called the whistle "shocking." Maybe it was harsh. But you don't get to lean on a 36-year-old veteran's physicality as a feature right up until it costs you the game, then blame the officials for noticing it.
This fits a pattern. Against Memphis, Green caught Zach Edey in the eye in a scrum, and the league reviewed it the next day and upgraded the foul to a Flagrant 1. Add that to a history that already runs through the Sabonis stomp, the Gobert chokehold, and the Nurkic shove, and the defense that it's all just competitive fire wears thin. For most of Green's career the Warriors could absorb a self-inflicted mistake because the margins were enormous. They aren't anymore.
Rating
RatingWhat stings more is Curry's night. He's 38 and played just 43 games last season through injury. Friday he led the team with 24 points but needed 15 shots to hit five of them, going 1-of-6 in the fourth, and he got there only by living at the free-throw line, where he made all 11. A 38-year-old shooting 3-of-10 from distance and surviving on foul-drawing is fine when everything else around him holds, and a disaster when it doesn't. The Warriors can't win many games where Curry's jumper disappears and Green's discipline vanishes in the same four minutes.
Kerr's internal framing is that this was an avalanche, that eight different things had to break and all of them did. Curry said pretty much everything went wrong. That's true as far as it goes, and it's also the comfortable version. Eight things going wrong at once is what happens to a team without closing-lineup discipline. Figuring that out is Kerr's job. Golden State is treading water until Jimmy Butler, Moses Moody, and Kristaps Porzingis are healthy, and that's a real reason to hold off on panic. It's not a reason to keep running late minutes that gift the other team free points.
RTGYou don't bench Draymond Green over one bad final four minutes, and you don't start drawing up lottery scenarios 0-2 into a season for the first time since 2020-21. But the front office isn't who should be losing sleep after this one. Kerr should, for not having his closing group buttoned up. So should Green, who is still the guy whose undisciplined hands turn a game the Warriors had won into a game they lost.
