The Golden State Warriors have gotten off to a rough start to their season, losing their first two games in blowouts to the Los Angeles Clippers and the Oklahoma City Thunder. Yet ESPN's Stephen A. Smith is not quite panicking, but rather putting the title runner-ups on notice:

“It's just two games. I'm not getting on them like ‘oh my god, this season is over, it's finished.' I'm putting them on notice,” said Smith. “You don't get to sit up there, you're Draymond, you got $100 million. You're Steph, you're the 200 million-dollar man. You're Steve Kerr, that inherited Mark Jackson's squad, but you have proven to be a great coach and that's undeniable. You don't get to sit back and say ‘well, this is what you can expect from us.' No the hell we won't expect that. You have enough to fight. You can lose, fade in the fourth quarter, fade because you're an inferior team, fade because you don't have the same talent that other teams have, but to come out there and just get straight punked in a Sunday afternoon by 40 in Oklahoma City? That's disgraceful, that's disgraceful.”

Smith wasn't done just yet, still having more pennies left in his mind, noting it isn't so hard to hunker down and play some defense.

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“It ain't that difficult to hunker down and say ‘alright, we might not have the necessary skills, but what we're gonna do is make sure you understand you're in a dog fight. Excuse me your name is the Warriors for crying out loud, it ain't the Golden State Punks. It's the Warriors! Go out there and be a Warrior!”

While Smith's speech is worthy of a halftime motivational pep talk, unfortunately it is that difficult to play defense when two thirds of the roster are still learning the basics of playing it, switching, defending the 3-point line, and keeping from fouling.

The Warriors just have a whole lot of new things to teach, and Kerr will have to earn his newly-branded paycheck by searing those simple aspects of the game to one of the NBA's youngest teams. As sad as it sounds, the Warriors might just have to take one giant step back before they can even hope to move forward in the right direction.