There are just three regular season games remaining before the Warriors embark on their first playoff run since the tragic 2019 NBA Finals.
But with Steph Curry not yet back to full involvement, James Wiseman out for the year, Klay Thompson bouncing between massive highs and lows, and a questionable level of depth, there are questions as to how far the Warriors can take this.
Marcus Thompson, as well-versed on this Warriors team as anyone, expects this team to make a run, but he has questions, too.
Asked whether the Warriors could put it together, he leaned on the core.
“I mean, I think so. When have they not?” Thompson said. “We’ve just always seen it’s Steph, it’s Draymond, it’s Klay, it’s Andre Iguodala, when have they not put it together?”
Aside from the caveat of injuries, Thompson said that Warriors core usually shows up.
He also saw the 36-point performance from Klay Thompson as massive for Thompson’s confidence, because he needs “the dopamine boosts from all of the work he’s done.”
The questions, though, for Thompson, revolve around how talented the rest of the league is, and whether the Warriors are still talented enough at the game they created to win another title.
“What we don’t know is if these guys are still great enough to overwhelm the league, they’re now existing in a league that they created,” Thompson said. “Everybody shoots threes. Everybody has wings all over the place. Everybody knows how to run the floor or have a small lineup.
“So before when they were dominating the league, they were kind of the unicorns who just mastered this style of play that people hadn’t caught up to yet. Now it’s three years later and people were like, ‘Okay, we got an answer for that,’ so now they just have to be better than everybody else at it. And that’s the part we don’t know.”
We’ll soon have answers to those questions, and Thompson sees three teams in particular who could cause some problems for the Warriors.
The Warriors currently hold the No. 3 seed, which would set them up for a first-round matchup against the Jazz, and a likely second-round matchup against the Memphis Grizzlies.
“I do think they’re good enough to make a run,” Thompson said. “I feel like the only teams that should be able to beat them is Phoenix and Memphis and I can see Dallas, giving them some real problems but anything other than that would be kind of a disappointment because I do think they have enough barring injuries obviously.”
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