Six games ago the Warriors were 0-3 and the questions were loud. Thursday night they beat the Miami Heat 120-100 at home, their sixth straight win, and the loudest thing in the building by the fourth quarter was silence, because Golden State had already put it away.
Stephen Curry finished with 29 points on 9 of 19 shooting, six threes, and he did it the hard way. He opened 1 for 8 and was still just 2 of 10 at halftime. Whatever got said in that locker room worked, because he came out in the third quarter and the whole night flipped. Golden State outscored Miami 26-9 in one stretch of that quarter alone, the kind of run that doesn't show up as a storyline the next morning but is the actual reason the final margin says 20.
Curry sat once the game got out of hand and missed a fourth straight 30-point night because of it, which tells you Golden State's bench depth is finally letting Steve Kerr manage minutes instead of needing every one of them. Yaxel Lendeborg had a quiet, complete line, 17 points, eight rebounds, six assists. Draymond Green put up a season-high 11 assists. Georges Niang scored 13 off the bench. None of those guys needed to be great. That's the whole point of six straight wins, nobody has to be a hero every night.
Klay Thompson's return to Golden State
The emotional center of the night had nothing to do with the scoreboard. Klay Thompson came back to San Francisco in a Heat uniform and got a warm ovation before tipoff, the building remembering a guy who won four titles there before the business of the league moved him on. He finished 3 of 10 for 11 points, a quiet line for a guy who, a night earlier in Los Angeles, hit a winning three with a second left in overtime against the Clippers. Andrew Wiggins, also facing his old team, scored just two points on 1 of 6. Some nights the ghosts just don't show up.
Miami came in saying the right things about defense. Erik Spoelstra called guarding the three-point line "high on the priority list" before the game. The Warriors shot 39 percent from deep, 16 for 41, and that gap between the stated priority and the stat sheet is basically the whole game in one number. Davion Mitchell had 22 points and eight assists and Bam Adebayo added 18 and 10 boards, which kept it from getting embarrassing, but Miami was outscored by 20 on its own.
Curry passes Oscar Robertson
Buried in the box score is the kind of milestone that would be the headline on a slower news night. Curry's three-pointer at the 7:03 mark of the first quarter moved him into 17th place on the NBA's career scoring list, passing Oscar Robertson. That's a name that means something to anyone who's spent time with the almanac, a Hall of Famer whose 1961-62 season still gets cited as the gold standard for a triple-double year six decades later. Curry doesn't play that style of game at all, and he still walked past him on the list on a random Thursday in November, during a stretch where he was shooting 2 for 10 at halftime of the same game. That's the career, in miniature.
The Warriors also used the night to honor Jason Collins on Pride Night, with his twin brother Jarron, a former Golden State assistant and Stanford star, in attendance.
What's next
Miami moves on to Sacramento on Sunday, the third stop of a five-game West Coast trip that has not gone the way Spoelstra drew it up defensively. Golden State hosts Orlando on Saturday night, chasing a seventh straight win and trying to keep stretching the distance between this team and the one that opened the season 0-3.
