There is a version of February 22 where the Warriors don\u2019t even bother. Their best player Stephen Curry was out. Their All-Star acquisition Jimmy Butler III was out. Their prized trade deadline piece Kristaps Porzingis was ruled out that morning. Their future Hall-of-Famer and best defender Draymond Green got scratched before tipoff. The opponent was the dangerous Denver Nuggets and the best big man in the world Nikola Jokic was standing on the other side of the floor.<\/p>\n
What the Dubs had left was Al Horford. As it turned out, that was enough.<\/p>\n
Horford scored 11 points in the first quarter before most people had settled into their seats, going 4-of-5 from the field with three threes while Golden State built a lead that told Denver this was not going to be the afternoon they expected. He had 17 points and four assists in his first 14 minutes, and he did it with the particular calm of someone who has been in difficult basketball situations for two decades and stopped finding them frightening a long time ago.<\/p>\n
The Nuggets had to account for him as a real offensive threat, which changed the geometry of everything else Golden State was trying to do, which is exactly the kind of quiet, competent damage that never shows up in highlights but wins games. This is actually why the Warriors wanted him in the first place. When Golden State brought Horford in, the bet wasn\u2019t on the version of him that fills a stat sheet every night. It was on the version that understands how to read a game, how to make the right decision under pressure, and how to be exactly what a team needs on a given night without needing to be told what that is.<\/p>\n
That kind of player takes time to find his footing in a new system, and the Warriors were patient with him through the stretches where it wasn\u2019t clicking, because they understood what they were waiting for. February 22 was the receipt. When four rotation players went down and the franchise needed someone to just be a professional about the whole thing, Horford was ready because Horford is always ready; that is the only version of him that has ever existed.<\/p>\n
He finished 8-of-11 from the field, 6-of-7 from three, with seven assists, three steals, and two blocks. His sixth three-pointer had Chase Center losing its mind for a 39-year-old role player February, which is not a sentence anyone wrote in their pregame preview.<\/p>\n
Jokic finished with a triple-double because that is what Jokic does. The Nuggets scored 117 points because they are still the Nuggets. None of that really matters. What matters is that on a day when the Warriors lost four rotation players and most of their margin for error, the best player on the floor in a Warriors uniform was a 39-year-old center who looked completely unbothered by any of it.<\/p>\n
Horford was BALLING, salute to him for exemplifying the Warriors mentality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is a version of February 22 where the Warriors don\u2019t even bother. Their best player Stephen Curry…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":748963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3781],"tags":[7,301,187,3943,64551,6,302],"class_list":["post-748962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-denver-nuggets","tag-basketball","tag-denver","tag-denver-nuggets","tag-denvernuggets","tag-golden-state-warriors-discussion","tag-nba","tag-nuggets"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116670344937917178","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/748963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}