One season removed from winning their fourth NBA championship in eight years, the Warriors’ 2022-23 season has been a completely different story.
While that story still is being written, many NBA pundits already have turned the page on the defending champs.
“I just don’t think they have it,” The Ringer’s Bill Simmons said on his podcast Tuesday. “I don't think there’s an on-and-off switch with this team. The naysayers would say, ‘Well just wait, we got to see [Andrew] Wiggins and [Gary] Payton, but I don’t think they have it.
“I think the league has gotten better and they’ve gotten worse.”
Golden State (37-36) entered Wednesday as the No. 6 seed in the West but is just a half-game ahead of the seventh seed and one-and-a-half games ahead of the 11th seed.
Including Wednesday's game against the Dallas Mavericks, the Warriors have nine regular-season games remaining, with four of them are on the road -- where they have struggled all season long. But Golden State’s road woes aren’t the problem to The Ringer’s Logan Murdock.
“It’s interesting because I remember seeing them at the season opener last year against the [Los Angeles] Lakers and you can just see the magic was back for that night,” Murdock told Simmons. “There’s no magic this season. There’s no good vibes. The one thing that I always said was that the Warriors always got the right wins. Did they have the best record? No. but they always beat the Utahs, they beat the Celtics, they beat the Nets in Brooklyn. And they had all the right wins.
Golden State Warriors
“This year they don’t have the right wins. They can’t win on the road. It’s just too much bad juju going on.”
Steph Curry has been the most consistent piece of this up-and-down season. The reigning NBA Finals MVP is averaging 29.8 points on 49.8 percent shooting from the field and 43.3 percent from 3-point range, 6.2 rebounds and 6.2 assists through 47 games this season.
But even Curry can't do it alone.
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The rest of the group will need to step up during this final stretch of the season if they want to prove critics like Simmons wrong and if there's any encouraging news for Warriors fans, it's that this team is pretty good at doing just that.