After the most consequential win of the season on Saturday night, the Warriors played a glorified G League game on Sunday. The atmosphere couldn’t have been more different, but the result was back-to-back wins led by most of the Warriors’ bench players in Sacramento.
A dumb, but useful win
This felt like watching bad spring training baseball in the middle of the day. Someone’s getting blown out, no one is really paying attention, and if you need to take a nap, the tenor is juuust right. At some point, it gets just interesting enough to mentally clock back in for a few minutes.
And just as quick as it got interesting on Sunday, it was over.
The closest this game got — and “close” should be in air quotes — was a 9-point Warriors just past halfway through the fourth quarter. The only reason it got even that close was because the Warriors discernibly couldn’t believe they had to keep playing.
What sort of sick deity would force these teams to play out the remainder of the fourth quarter?
In the preceding third quarter, the Warriors had seven turnovers. Then Draymond Green came in to start the fourth with the old neck crack and a disposition of making sure one sloppy quarter was resigned to irrelevancy. When it started to slip, he facilitated and Jordan Poole and Andrew Wiggins executed.
And this game, for most intents and purposes, was irrelevant. But Green made sure to play when he could have taken the night off, and ensured it was an easy win, punctuated by some nice Jonathan Kuminga minutes and a hilariously good Nemanja Bjelica performance.
While it was an objectively dumb game, it did represent an easy win in the final four games of the season, before the Warriors see the current 9 (Pelicans), 10 (Spurs) and 11 (Lakers) seeds to end the year.
It keeps Golden State a game ahead of the Dallas Mavericks for the third seed with those three tricky games to go, the last two of which are on the road.
The Bjelica revenge game
You know it’s an unserious game when we’re talking about Nemanja Bjelica as one of the Warriors’ main weapons.
But Bjelica clearly had his best game of the year against his old employer. He spent more than two years with Sacramento and seemed to enjoy an extended opportunity to bully them.
It was a 19-point, 12-rebound (both season highs), 6-assist performance with a couple of blocks. And while he sometimes looks like he’s running with cement in his shoes on his slo-mo drives to the lane, that works against a team like the Kings. His shot was falling, too, hitting three of his six attempts from deep.
In addition to Bjelica, the Warriors got another productive performance from Green, who could have taken the night off. Klay Thompson, Otto Porter Jr. and Andre Iguodala all did, but Green made sure the game didn’t get out of hand late, and opened the game with a rare pair of threes, en route to 11 points, 7 rebounds, 5 assists, a steal and a pair of blocks.
Wiggins also had an efficient 25 points, Poole had 22, and Kuminga got an extended run for the first time in a while, en route to a 17-5-4 line.
What, exactly, are the Kings?
The Kings have a roster you build in 2K when you’re trying to find any bodies on a rebuilding roster and simulating the season, waiting for the draft. You end up with a group of mostly washed-up former first-rounders.
Especially with their semi-recognizable players in D’Aaron Fox and Domantas Sabonis on the bench, this made for some particularly horrendous Kings lineups.
Josh Jackson? Sure. Jeremy Lamb? Of course. Damian Jones is still around? Of course he’s in Sacramento.
When they traded away Tyrese Haliburton for Sabonis, it left quite a few folks scratching their heads. There is no indication they are a team that is remotely close to competing for a playoff spot, let alone competing in the playoffs.
It’s a hodgepodge of random players and it feels like there will be mediocrity at best for the foreseeable future in Sacramento.