It’s deja vu all over again as Warriors blow another huge lead

The Warriors forgot how to score or stop Dennis Schroder in the second half in their worst loss of the 2024-25 season, 128-120 to the Brooklyn Nets

The Brooklyn Nets were playing on the road on the second half of a back-to-back. Due to injuries, they started first-round bust Ziaire Williams at center, a man who weighs about 200 pounds. Cam Johnson and Cam Thomas both left the game with injuries. Meanwhile, the Golden State Warriors had an 18-point lead midway through the third quarter. Somehow, they lost, 128-120 in what has to be their worst loss of the season.

Warriors arch-enemy Dennis Schroder scored 31 points and dished seven assists despite playing on a sprained ankle. Cam Thomas scored 23 points in his 23 minutes. Williams is averaging 8.6 points this season, and he scored 19. Are you familiar with 2023 second-round pick Jalen Wilson? I wasn’t either, but he went for 18. Brooklyn shot 30 free throws and made 26 of them as the Warriors collapsed in front of their home crowd.

Steph Curry had 28 points and made eight threes, but inexplicably sat for long stretches of the game. Andrew Wiggins had 18, but only got 13 shots. The Warriors took half their shots from behind the arc, despite the lack of interior defense present for Brooklyn, and got to the line for 17 free throws, one coming on a Curry four-point play.

There were simply a lot of strange moments in this one, a game where Steve Kerr felt like he was asleep for long portions on the sidelines.

Like when they ran an offense late in the first quarter where Buddy Hield shot the ball five times in seven possessions. Hield shot 3-for-12 for the game. Or when Draymond Green and Steph Curry sat for 10 consecutive minutes in the first half, and then sat almost another quarter as the Dubs got outsscored by 13 points with them on the bench in the second half. Or when Moses Moody went for 15 points in the first half, only to be rewarded with two minutes of playing time in the second half.

Steve Kerr might need someone younger than Terry Stotts or Ron Adams next to him simply reminding him that young players are still on the team. It’s like the game last season where he benched Jonathan Kuminga for the last half of a game against the Denver Nuggets, where the team also blew an enormous lead, basically because Kerr forgot he was there.

It looked like the Warriors were about to blow out the Nets early in the third quarter, which is always the most dangeorus moment for this 2024-25 Warriors team. First, they made three free throws in a row, never a reliable proposition for this team. Green and Curry both made threes, with Green’s coming on a behind-the-back assist from Curry.

Then Curry found Trayce Jackson-Davis for a dunk. It was nearly party time.

But the Warriors made the mistake of taking a huge lead, their Achilles heel this season. At the 7:13 point of the third quarter, Trayce Jackson-Davis got an easy basket to give the Warriors an 86-68 lead, and then things started to fall apart.

Nets coach Jordi Fernandez took a timeout, and even with Cam Thomas leaving the game after a hard fall, Brooklyn went on an 11-0 run.

How’d it happen? Some really sloppy basketball from the Warriors, mostly the starters. They threw a home run pass to Lindy Waters, who blew the finish in a one-on-two. Curry had a sloppy turnover which led to a Ziaire Williams dunk. Steve Kerr took an angry timeout and pulled his remaining starters, and the Warriors immediately committed a shot clock violation. Then Williams blocked Buddy Hield.

It was reminiscent of Saturday’s collapse in San Antonio, where the Warriors only scored 13 points in the final 14 minutes of the game. Monday, from the 7:13 mark of the third quarter to the 9:31 mark of the fourth, when Andrew Wiggins finally got a dunk, the Warriors scored six points in a 9:40 stretch, That’s simply remarkably bad offense. The team shot 2-for-15 with three turnovers, with three of their shots getting blocked by a team that doesn’t have a healthy center on their roster.

Waters forced a jump ball with just under six minutes to go, and in an unusual move for the Warriors, he actually won the tip. Curry rewarded Waters with a throw-ahead pass for a wide-open three-pointer, which he missed, but Wiggins got the follow to go to cut Brooklyn’s lead to a point. After a few more Brooklyn buckets and a failed Kerr challenge on a fairly obvious Draymond Green blocking foul, Curry hit a stepback to cut the lead to three points with 3:26 to go.

But foul shooting killed them again. Schroder got a three-point play. Williams made two free throws. On the Warriors possessions, Green went to the line twice and missed three of his four foul shots. The net result was a seven-point Nets lead and Warriors panic.

Schroder finally missed, but the Nets collected the offensive board and turned it into a dunk, off a Schroder assist, of course. Gary Payton II got two assists, but the Nets made their shots, too, one Schroder bucket and an assist to Trendon Watford for a three. With a minute to go, it was over.

This may lead to a referendum on Kerr’s vaunted 12-man rotation. At a certain point, that’s simply too many guys. It didn’t help that the team blew a number of layups and dunks, or that they didn’t have Jonathan Kuminga for a second straight game. There’s some very useful players in the Warriors’ deep rotation, but in the latter part of the third quarter, they had a lineup where all the players besides Hield didn’t want to shoot.

It’s the worst loss of the season right as the Warriors’ schedule starts to get very difficult. They get the Oklahoma City Thunder Wednesday, the Phoenix Suns and Denver Nuggets on the road, and then the 12-6 Houston Rockets and a weekend homestand against the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Look, it’s impressive that the Warriors are able to take enormous leads so regularly. But Kerr and his players need to figure out how to close games and decide on rotations or this promising start for the team could fall apart very quickly.