The Oklahoma City Thunder have dominated the Golden State Warriors in all aspects of the game and now hold a 3-1 lead heading back to Oakland for Game 5 on Thursday.
The domination has come as a major surprise to anyone who watched the Warriors’ record breaking 73-win season and the play of MVP Steph Curry. But it has been clear throughout the series that Steph is not the Steph Curry we have become accustomed to see throughout the season.
Many have attributed the slump to the excellent Thunder defense and length advantage. Others are concerned that Curry still hasn’t fully recovered from his knee injury sustained earlier in the playoffs. Both head coach Steve Kerr and Steph Curry have stated that his poor play has nothing to do with his injuries. But some are still skeptical.
Steve Kerr: "Nobody has said anything about Steph being 70% to me."
— Ben Bolch (@latbbolch) May 25, 2016
According to Adrian Wajnarowski of The Vertical at Yahoo Sports, there is clearly something wrong with Steph, and the Thunder sense it.
“Curry has been a shell of himself – missing shots, throwing away passes, losing his dribble, and completely unable to prove that there’s Curry-esque agility in that knee. “He’s playing at 70 percent, at best,” a source close to Curry told The Vertical. Curry refuses to make excuses, but privately the Thunder see something – no explosion, no ability to make the bigs switching onto him pay a price. Twenty points on 19 shots Tuesday night bore no resemblance to the two-time NBA Most Valuable Player.”
This is, of course, contradictory to what everyone said when Steph returned from his injury with a monster game and everyone pronounced, “He’s back.”
Curry returned from his injury in the Warriors’ previous round versus the Portland Trail Blazers and, while we haven’t seen as much of the MVP-caliber play that we saw in the regular season, there have still been moments where he has shined. His overtime performance in Game 4 against the Blazers and 3rd quarter run in Game 2 of this series against the Thunder have shown us he is absolutely capable of going off at any time. The question now is whether we’ll see it again in this series and whether it will be too little too late.
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