The Warriors officially need help to avoid the ‘dangerous’ play-in now
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Warriors star Stephen Curry complains about a call to Bill Kennedy during their game against the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first half at Chase Center on March 26, 2023, in San Francisco.
After 76 games of an extremely tumultuous season, the playoff hopes for the Golden State Warriors depend on the Minnesota Timberwolves.
After the Wolves’ win over the Kings on Monday night, the Warriors and Wolves are both 39-37 entering Tuesday’s games. If both teams win out, Minnesota will finish in the top six, while the Warriors would be in the play-in tournament barring a collapse by the Clippers or Suns. (The Warriors and Wolves split their four games this season and Minnesota has a better record against conference opponents, which is the second applicable tiebreaker.)
In other words, the Warriors no longer control their own postseason destiny.
Up until two years ago, seeding in the NBA only meant so much come playoff time, because the league’s seven-game series usually give the better team on paper enough chances to win.
However, when the NBA adopted the play-in tournament for the 2020-2021 season, it took two formerly automatic postseason berths (the seventh and eighth seeds) and turned them into maybes. Now, the seventh and eighth seeds go into the play-in with the ninth and 10th seeds, where they have to win at least one more game to punch their playoff ticket; if they lose twice, they can be leapfrogged by one of the lower-seeded teams, as happened to the Clippers in 2022.
Warriors players seem to know how risky being involved in the play-in can be. “We definitely want to stay out of the play-in tournament,” Steph Curry said Friday, per ESPN. “You never know how that can go — a single game here or there.”
“That is dangerous,” Draymond Green said. “We’d much rather avoid that.”
The Timberwolves’ tiebreaker over the Warriors means that if both teams finish 45-37, the Wolves will finish in the top six. The Warriors could still avoid the play-in in that case, but the case remains the same: They would need outside help, namely Suns and Clippers losses. (The Suns have clinched the tiebreaker against the Dubs while the Clippers one is still up in the air.)
And now, some painful hindsight: Had the Warriors not blown their late lead against the Wolves on Sunday, this may have been a nonissue. The win would have put them a game clear of the play-in and given the Warriors the head-to-head tiebreaker against the Wolves as added insurance. The conference record tiebreaker is only relevant now because the teams ended their season series against one another at 2-2.
Instead, the loss allowed Minnesota to overtake Golden State in the standings Monday with a win against Sacramento, leaving the Dubs stuck in the play-in. It’s wild to think that the Warriors could go on their longest winning streak of the season (six games) and that it could do nothing to move them up the West’s ladder. Worse still, the Dubs’ remaining games are against tougher teams than Minnesota will face to close out their season.
The Warriors have no one to blame but themselves for being in this mess. Every blown opportunity leads a team closer to a situation like this, and when you do things like, say, lose 29 of 38 games on the road, you pay for it.