SAN FRANCISCO – The Warriors’ eight-game winning streak at Chase Center ended with a thud Thursday when they sustained a thorough beating by the short-handed Miami Heat and lost 114-102.
There was plenty of blame to go around for head coach Steve Kerr’s crew. Stephen Curry got off to another slow start and, except for a brief spurt in the second quarter, never found his shooting stroke. He finished with 13 points on 3-of-15 shooting from the field, with six assists and four rebounds.
Klay Thompson and Jonathan Kuminga also struggled and were benched late in the first half when Miami built a small lead before pulling away after halftime. Thompson did have five assists and Kuminga added five rebounds but on a night when Curry’s shot wasn’t falling, Golden State (15-16) needed more offense from the two.
Miami (19-12) won easily despite being without injured starters Jimmy Butler, Kyle Lowry and Caleb Martin. The Heat led at the end of every quarter and led by as many as 22 points in the fourth.
Steph’s slow start
For the second consecutive game and third time this season, Curry failed to score in the first quarter. The Heat made him the center of their defense but he was missing shots he normally makes. He didn’t score until the second quarter when he went on a brief scoring binge with a pair of 3-pointers, one that resulted in a foul and four-point play.
Curry shot just 3 of 15 with two 3-pointers. He was a minus-14 for the game.
The Warriors are obviously a much better team when Curry is doing his thing, but they have to do a better job when opponents are double-teaming and doing everything they can to take him out of the mix.
Kuminga’s night
Many fans expected there to be some kind of blowback from Kerr following Kuminga’s recent comments to The Athletic about his frustrations over lack of playing time.
Kuminga was still on the floor for much of the game but wasn’t as big a factor as he has been. Kuminga was benched n the first half when he committed six of the team’s nine turnovers, and ended the night as a minus-26.
It’s too early to read much into this either way.
Kuminga had been playing extremely well since joining the starting lineup, and this game resembled many of the games he played earlier in the season. A jarring two-handed monster jam to cap one possession, followed by inexplicable traveling call 90 seconds later.
This is who Kuminga is and has been most of his career. But he can still play a key role on this team, be it as a starter or coming off the bench, and it will be intriguing how much Kerr leans on him when Draymond Green returns from his NBA suspension.
Klay has a rough one
Thompson seemed to have broken out of his early-season shooting slump but wasn’t able to generate much offense, scoring 13 points while shooting 4 of 11 from the field.
It was so rough for Thompson that he even had a first-half 3-pointer taken off the board. When the officials went to review an off-ball foul call on the Heat while Thompson was shooting, they determined that he had stepped out of bounds before the shot, negating the entire thing.
Thompson, who was also minus-26 on the night, still has the ability to score in flurries but he couldn’t get much going at all against the Heat, which magnified the issues that the rest of the Warriors were having.
