Catchup: Games #65-71

Apologies for the recent radio silence. Look, sometimes fantasy baseball just happens. You've been there, dog... don't hate.

It hasn't been an uneventful time; like a bleary-eyed and recently shot Agent Cooper, we are a bit overwhelmed by the flood of news emanating from Oakland. Don Nelson has tipsily claimed he wouldn't mind coaching summer league. Raja Bell has finally relinquished his inexplicable hold of a roster spot. Stephen Curry has finally broken his "injured Warrior" cherry. Chris Cohan has finally acknowledged an interest in ending our long regional nightmare. And to top it all off, the good guys have played some more basketball games! Since we last checked in, they have

• beaten the Raptors 124-112, on a rare night where both Curry and Monta excelled;

• lost a 124-121 heartbreaker to the Lakers with a classic mix of heartening and head-scratching play;

• topped the Hornets 131-121 behind a trio of career nights from D-League alums;

• gotten stomped 147-116 by the Spurs, making their 24th straight loss in San Antonio one to remember;

• lost a 123-107 snoozer in Memphis, extending their road losing streak to 13;

• been edged 133-131 by the Suns, with a bone-rattling Amar'e dunk summing up the season nicely, and

• won a 128-110 semi-laugher against the Grizzlies, making Memphis the first good team to lose to the Dubs twice.

This was an absurd stretch of basketball, with scads of highlights, lowlights and moments of interest, and had we not been so busy assembling a juggernaut of an f-ball squad (Lincecum, Greinke and Johan --we'll talk later), we'd have very much enjoyed putting these games under our usual nerdy microscope. But time keeps on slippin' into the future [synthesizer solo], and we mustn't dally overlong in the past. So let's examine this heptet of games as a block. What did the Warriors do well? What did they do poorly? What trends are worth noting?

SAS @ GSW 12/16/09: PostThoughts

1) Well, we simply have to start with the man in question. Randolph delivered a performance that was right around average for his season. He took a few too many jumpers (and thought about them too much) and got burned several times defensively, but also produced a number of positive plays on D and continued his streak of passing well. His rebounding total was middling, which seems to be a trend when he's really tightly covering an opposing big... ideally he'd manage to do both, of course, but I don't think it's a hugely worrisome sign. This was quintessental Randolph: lots of good moments and lots of bad ones, with the good ones outweighing the bad. His performance was basically as much of a non-story as it could've been.

2) More notable than Randolph's performance, of course, was his role... Nellie somehow felt he didn't merit a start over Vlad at the five. Both Nellie and Smart have deemed Mikki worthy of a starting spot every time out, but now that he's shelved, here comes the hypersmallball! Maggette and all three of our li'l fellas earned a starting nod tonight, alongside Vlad, who was predictably useless. Nellie was fairly quick to pull Vlad for Randolph (or Hunter, who had an odd and ineffective fourth-quarter cameo), so I'm hopeful that Nellie will abandon this absurdity soon. Suffice it to say that starting Vlad over Randolph, at center, is even more forehead-slappingly incompetent than starting Mikki over Randolph.

3) Nellie definitely looked more energetic than he has in awhile, but I can't say that that resulted in any apparent, y'know, coaching. A terrible player once again started over a good one, CJ and Monta each got over 44 minutes despite both visibly fatiguing in the second half, there was no semblance of a consistent offensive plan, and there was no attempt to involve Morrow. And guess what? Thanks to our hyperhypersmallness (we only spent five minutes with more than one big on the floor, and over twenty with only *Vlad* on the floor), we got outrebounded by 20. Thank God rebounding isn't an important part of the game, right, Nellie?!?!?!!?!?

4) Don't worry, though: Nellie did yell at arbitrary players during the game and throw the whole team under the bus after it.

SAS @ GSW 12/16/09: PreThoughts

No bullet points tonight, no statistical angles, no Spurs player to watch. Tonight, it does not matter if we win (we won't) or lose (we will). Even Nellie's return is peripheral at this point. This game is about one guy and one guy only, the guy whose path back to a well-deserved starting spot opened up the same day his agent publicly acknowledged his openness to a trade. This game is all about Anthony Randolph.

It shouldn't be like this. It's not fair to cast a kid under a microscope this intense, even if he and his agent are partly complicit in aiming it. It doesn't actually matter how he plays tonight; a good game will not negate the mistakes he still frequently makes, and a poor game will not erase the strong overall production he's been providing for the past ten months. Anthony Randolph is, though flawed, a genuinely good young player, no matter what happens tonight.

But once the opening whistle blows, none of us -- the organization, the media, the fans -- will fully remember that. In the benighted world of the Golden State Warriors, time will stop, and all eyes and expectations will fall on the shoulders of the sixth-youngest player in the league. Tonight, there is enormous pressure on Anthony Randolph to play well, against one of the beefiest and most intelligent teams in basketball, and the unfairness of that pressure doesn't make it any less real. Here's hoping the kid has a good night... for his sake, even more than for ours.