Ok, this doesn’t seem fair.
The Golden State Warriors played without Kevin Durant, one of the greatest players in the world, on Tuesday night and all they did was roll to a 22-point win over the Portland Trail Blazers in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals.
The Western Conference finals!
This wasn’t some game in November that doesn’t matter. It’s a game and a win that brought the Warriors to within seven victories of their third straight NBA title.
It was a big night for the “Splash Brothers,” Steph Curry (36 points) and Klay Thompson (26 points), who shined once again without their star player in the lineup.
Seriously, Durant has been out since the third quarter of Game 5 against the Rockets and the Warriors haven’t skipped a beat. They held off the Rockets in the fourth quarter of that one, then won a wild one in Houston in Game 6, and then absolutely rolled over the Trail Blazers at home on Tuesday night.
Right now it looks like they could even sit Durant for the rest of the playoffs and still win this thing yet again, as they did before Durant arrived in town.
Which is ridiculous.
Curry did Curry things in Game 1, hitting nine 3-pointers and having fun doing it:
Klay did his thing:
And the Trail Blazers didn’t do their thing.
We have to hope that coming off a Game 7 in altitude in Denver was a big reason why Portland was never really a factor in Game 1. They never seemed to put up a fight or make things feel like a Western Conference final game. The intensity wasn’t there at all, which hopefully is just because they did have to give everything they had to win Game 6 and 7 against Denver.
What made the Houston-Golden State series so great was that the two teams really hated each other. That feeling wasn’t there at all in the Game 1 between the Warriors and Trail Blazers, which had all the intensity of a matinee on a Saturday afternoon in January.
We gotta hope that Dame Lillard and CJ McCollum can regroup and find their footing in Game 2.
Because if not, the Warriors could roll through this thing and give KD even more time to get back
Which is scary and shows just how good this team is.
But that’s nothing we didn’t already know.
