Warriors roar as Steph, Draymond and Klay relish Game 5 win over Kings
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SACRAMENTO — Stephen Curry roared. Klay Thompson raised his arms high and hopped up and down. Draymond Green slapped five with Curry in the backcourt. The arena began to empty. The few pockets of blue and gold-clad Golden State Warriors fans celebrated loudly.
And it was all so very familiar.
“Very familiar,” Thompson said. “The season is so long, and there’s a lot of ups and downs and idle time between games, but it makes it all worth it, when you walk off the floor victorious. Especially with the guys you’ve been with a decade-plus.
“That’s so rare in professional sports… It’s something we’ll cherish forever.”
Wednesday night, the Warriors' dynastic trio did what we have seen it do so many times. What we fully expect them to do. For the 28th consecutive playoff series, they won a game on the road, beating the Sacramento Kings 123-116.
And now the Warriors are one win away from eliminating the Kings and advancing to the Western Conference semifinals. Game 6 will be played on Friday night, with an early tipoff at 5 p.m.
At times on Wednesday night the dynasty created by Curry, Thompson and Green seemed to be hanging in the balance, as the Kings opened up a ten-point lead in the first quarter and kept surging back again and again. The reigning champions looked vulnerable.
But the team that stumbled to 32 losses on the road this year, including the first two games of this series, finally got a momentous road victory. And their coach was not surprised at all.
“This is a team that won a championship last year, that has won a ton of road playoff games,” Steve Kerr said. “Our guys know how to do it. And they got it done.”
It was the original three, plus Kevon Looney, who took over the game at crunch time. Curry, Thompson and Green combined for 76 points. They were all on the floor, along with Looney and Andrew Wiggins, to close out the game, squeezing the life out of the Kings, wringing the will out of the crowd.
“We’ve played in the most pressurized environments,” Thompson said. “We have a lot of experience.”
Every playoff journey of the Warriors is different. This one started with two road losses, putting the trio in a place they had never been before. That makes the chance to win four straight over the Kings even sweeter.
“We understand the pressure that is on us in these situations,” Green said.
They know how to do this. In that knowledge comes a confidence and a calm in the most heated moments.
No one knows how long this playoff run will last. No one knows if there’s another chapter in the dynasty to be written. But no one should take a single moment of this for granted.
In the world of professional sports — a world rife with injuries and trades and free agency and oversized egos and bitter falling outs — to have a trio of stars stay together for this long and accomplish this much is extraordinary.
“It’s iconic,” Gary Payton II said. “It’s exciting to sit there and watch those three. It’s just amazing to be a part of.”
Curry, Green and Thompson have stitched this tapestry together. They know how to do it as a group. Apart? They can’t even imagine it.
A playoff win is lovely. Winning alongside your longtime teammates makes it that much sweeter.
“It’s everything,” Curry said. “Each one of us have gone through a lot to try to sustain this level.
“Games like this are a reminder of how hard it is to win at this level. The reps that we’ve gone through over the course of a decade to be the players that we are. We’re trying to allow this journey to continue and not take it for granted at all. We’re doing something that’s very unique. To be in this position, still creating results like this, is really dope.”
The players who started all of this as kids more than a decade ago, are now grown men in their 30s, with gray in their beards and a greater appreciation of each step of the journey.
“It’s a great feeling to still be riding the same train with the guys you rode in with, it’s a rare, rare thing,” Green said.
“You definitely cherish it more,” Green added. “You got to a space where you expected it. Then a couple of years and not have that opportunity, to not have that feeling, gives you a totally different appreciation of it.”
Someday it will come to an end. But not yet.
Not yet.
Reach Ann Killion: akillion@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @annkillion
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
