Warriors get their wish, will face Clippers in first round
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MEMPHIS, TENN. — The Warriors are happy. For the first round of the NBA playoffs, they will only need to take a one-hour flight to Los Angeles instead of traveling to San Antonio or Oklahoma City.
The top-seeded Warriors will face the Los Angeles Clippers beginning with Game 1 at Oracle Arena on Saturday. Game 2 is expected on Monday back at Oracle Arena.
“Just not having to change two time zones is a big deal,” said Warriors coach Steve Kerr, whose team played postseason games last year in San Antonio, New Orleans and Houston. “I like the idea of staying in California. It’s easier on everybody. Hopefully we’ll take advantage of that.”
The Warriors learned about their playoff matchup just after losing loss their regular-season finale 132-117 to the Memphis Grizzlies. The Clippers, San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder spent the last week jockeying for playoff seeding since the Warriors locked up the No. 1 seed with a win Sunday over the Clippers.
The Clippers (47-34) closed the season late Wednesday against Utah. But the Clippers’ eighth seed became cemented after San Antonio and Oklahoma City won against Dallas and Milwaukee, respectively.
The Warriors mostly professed apathy over their first-round opponent, citing their internal confidence after winning three NBA championships in four NBA Finals appearances. But Klay Thompson echoed the thoughts a few on the Warriors expressed privately on their preferred first-round matchup.
“I would like to stay close to the Bay,” Thompson said last month. “L.A. would be nice because we don’t have to travel far.”
The Warriors also will not have to deal with playing in the Central time zone in the first round. The Warriors won three of four regular-season games against the Clippers.
The Clippers lack star talent after breaking up the trio of Chris Paul, Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan in recent years. Instead of competing for lottery ping-pong balls this season, the Clippers have remained competitive because of a collection of dependable scorers and defenders.
“We got our work cut out for us,” Kevin Durant said. “I know it’s a one-eight seed. But they have a lot of talent that know how to play in the playoffs. They have players ready for the playoffs. We’re looking forward to seeing what the game plan is.”
The Clippers have a productive bench scorer (Lou Williams), a scrappy defender (Patrick Beverley) and a promising rookie (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander). That falls short, of course, to the Warriors’ star talent in Thompson, Durant, Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and DeMarcus Cousins. The Warriors have dominated the past two games with the Clippers after the teams split their initial matchups of the season.
“They’re definitely going to play us hard from the start,” Durant said. “It’s not going to be as easy as people think.”
Just Sunday, Golden State beat the Clippers 131-107 to clinch the Western Conference’s top seed. Cousins’ first game in a Warriors uniform was a Jan. 18 win at Staples Center, in which he scored 14 points and six rebounds, announcing his return from a ruptured Achilles tendon.
The greatest drama of the Warriors season also came against the Clippers, though. In the Nov. 12 Warriors loss, Durant and Green got into an argument on the sidelines captured by television cameras. Green was ultimately suspended in the wake of the altercation, which centered around Durant’s buy-in and impending free agency.
The Warriors will have the chance to put all that behind them for a while to focus on the matchup with a familiar playoff opponent in Los Angeles, even if the Clippers look different than they did in the “Lob City” era.
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