Must be acknowledged early: a ton of bad calls in our favor tonight. If the zebras tilted against us that hard in a game, we'd be screaming bloody murder; we got damn lucky here. Still. Fun.
Good performances aplenty. Monta gave the kind of mature, strap-your-team-to-your-back superstar turn he's often incorrectly credited with... he was spectacular tonight, with no asterisks. CJ did great with a brutally tough assignment. Morrow had his second solid all-around game in a row, which is nice to see from a supposedly one-dimensional guy. Turiaf provided the passing, fire and blooper-heavy rim play that defines him; Maggette contributed despite a rare off-kilter scoring night; Vlad did his job nicely. And man, Randolph had himself a run or two. Only two bad games from Warrior players, and I'm not worried about the first, as it's reasonable to assume that Andris Biedrins will start making a couple of those. Curry... well, Curry stank. He probably didn't deserve to be put in the deep freezer for the night, but it was certainly one of those games where you see just how far a young guy has to go.
Nellie's coaching performance was not without its weirdness. He made two substitutions at center in one three-minute stretch, and yet only one substitution in the backcourt all night. He rode several guys for too long, gassing them badly, and his Radmanoviciophilia still disturbs me. But a deal is a deal: he gave us 66 minutes of honest-to-God big men on a night where Biedrins had a low minutes ceiling, and as such, Nellie gets an automatic thumbs-up for tonight. He also went with our best starting lineup so far this year (the optimal one would sub in CJ for Curry, but no matter), and Morrow's cuts and passes seemed Nellie-generated, and were very good ideas. And we once again fouled when up three, like all good Christian teams do. So yeah, great stuff from Slim.
Tomorrow does not figure to be pretty; we'll be tired, away from home, and facing a team with literally thousands of skilled nine-footers. But our Oracle swagger appears to be back, and the importance of that can not be overstated. If we're a competitive team half the time, we can only sink so low.
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