OAKLAND – Lest anyone needed a reminder of what makes the Golden State Warriors so special, a fresh set of eyes on the scene as they prepared to win a record 73rd regular season game on Wednesday at Oracle Arena, the Los Angeles Angels were there to provide a fascinating context.
Yes, you read that right. The baseball Angels.
Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, Joe Smith, palling around with Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and the other Warriors at the team’s practice facility on Tuesday because they were in town to face the Oakland A’s and because, well, greatness tends to gravitate to greatness. And while the headlines may have focused on the entertaining sideshow – Curry losing to Smith and Green falling to Trout in their back-to-back games of P.I.G. – there was something more substantive here that was worth noting.
Good-natured braggadocio aside, these masters of their baseball craft were blown away by the level of excellence on the basketball floor.
“It makes you realize that you always sit back at home and (think), ‘I know I could play,’ and then you come out here and watch these guys, and you’re like, ‘No chance,’” said Smith, the 6-foot-1 Angels reliever who called basketball his “first love” growing up. “Steph’s hitting 90 out of 100 (on three-point attempts in practice). Klay (Thompson), I’m filming (with his cell phone) for like a minute and 30 seconds and the dude doesn’t miss. It’s like, ‘Goodnight.’ These guys, they’re pretty impressive to watch.”
Enjoy anything for long enough and the brain will always normalize it. The Eiffel Tower isn’t quite as grand on the second and third visits. The Sergeant Peppers album (or Thriller, for my generation) eventually gets passed on the playlist. Heck, Yankees season ticket holders of yesteryear probably got used to seeing Babe Ruth take over the baseball world after a while.
But there’s nothing like a change in the backdrop to help highlight the reality of it all. It’s like convincing a run-of-the-mill tough guy to square off in the ring with Mike Tyson in his prime, or having the fastest guy on the block line up next to Usain Bolt. Or, from this vantage point, like those humbling shooting sessions on the basket in front of my suburban house that – while offering a nice breather from the day job – have led to an unspeakably low field-goal percentage.
The Warriors, no matter how this season ends, are at the top of their game in ways that are tough to fathom.
Curry, who may be having the best follow-up season to an MVP that we’ve ever seen, is in a class all his own. He broke his own single-season record for three-pointers in late February, became the first player in NBA history to surpass the 300 mark less than two weeks later, and can reach another level of ridiculousness on Wednesday by hitting eight more to reach 400.
His season high on made three-pointers for one game is 12, which set a league record in Oklahoma City on Feb. 27; he has hit eight or more three-pointers in a game 15 times this season; his season average is five, on 45.2% shooting. He’s changing the game, perfecting an art that the Angels players appreciate more now than before. Even Curry, who joked last week that he’d be firing away if he neared the 400 mark, marvels at the absurdity of his own feats.
“One hundred percent,” he said recently when asked if it made his head spin, “because from how well I thought I had to shoot to get to just 280, or whatever it was (286), last year to (being) almost 100 (threes) past that right now, it doesn’t make sense. I’ll keep trying to push the envelope, and whatever happens …”
Yet regardless of what happens on Wednesday, when the Memphis Grizzlies will hit the floor as the final obstacle between the Warriors and regular season record they already share with the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, this became a hoops happening quite some time ago. And Curry, who will surely win his second MVP award when the votes are tallied, has been so transcendent that he overshadowed some of the greatness that surrounds him.
Has anyone noticed that Thompson is on the verge of finishing with the third best single season of three-point shooting of all time? He’s at 272, now tied with Curry’s mark from the 2012-13 campaign that was a new record at the time. Or what about Green, a terror of a two-way player who could win the league’s Defensive Player of the Year award in the same season in which he has posted 13 triple-doubles? Or Andre Iguodala, the super sixth man whose ability to play such a pivotal role while posting nominal numbers is changing the way the game is viewed?
The list, and their growing legacy, goes on.
