Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports
After the season’s first blowout, Steve Kerr warned there would be games like this.
Not many expected there to be games like this, though.
The game was ugly, the news was uglier for Stephen Curry. And a season not yet a week old is in jeopardy of being finished.
The Suns ran, passed, shot, outhustled and outplayed the Warriors from the jump. They Warriors’d the Warriors, putting on a moving-the-ball clinic that finished so often with layups, so often with 3s.
And those 3s fell, knocking down 12-of-21 in the first half alone.
In a very different Warriors season, they will be on the wrong side of some routs. But few could have seen the destructions coming so often.
And just when it looked like it couldn’t get any worse, it did.
The reigning West champs were humbled again Wednesday, getting blitzed 121-110 at Chase Center in front of a sellout crowd of 18,064, falling to 1-3 and having fully earned those three losses. They lost something much more important, though, Stephen Curry breaking his hand on a hard fall.
After Monday’s not-that-close 134-123 victory over the Pelicans, there was an exhale around the team, belief planted that the team’s magic still flickered.
It did not take long for Phoenix to make a statement that magic does not exist.
The Suns reeled off 16 points straight in the first, part of a 30-1 run that turned a 10-9 Warriors lead into a 39-11 massacre. Phoenix was balanced and deadly, led by Devin Booker’s 31 points and Aron Baynes’ 24 and 12 rebounds.
Damion Lee’s 3 at 1:46 ended the run but was a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. The final three quarters were elementary — even with a spirited comeback in a 43-point fourth — better served as time for Willie Cauley-Stein and Alec Burks to get some run and the Warriors to figure out which is worse right now, their offense or defense.
And in a game already bleak, the unthinkable happened.
With 8:31 to play in the third — as Golden State trailed, 83-54 — Curry drove and elevated, with Phoenix big man Baynes not leaving his feet. Curry flipped up a shot and crashed into the wall of a man and fell to the ground — as did all 260 pounds of Baynes, who landed on Curry’s hand.
A grimacing Curry was down for an extended period before he rose and left the game, Cauley-Stein replacing him.
The powerhouse Warriors are in danger of not just being irrelevant, but being boring. What started — just six days ago — as a season in which they hoped to hang on long enough for a possible Klay Thompson return has already turned into a season more focused on the lottery than the playoffs.
If there were a bright side – and you would have to use a telescope to find it – rookie Eric Paschall (20 points, plus-16) looked composed and solid, and Cauley-Stein and Burks, while not smoothly inserted into the flow, played extended minutes and looked healthy.
Curry did not, and the Warriors may have watched their season crumble underneath Baynes’ weight.