Five days following a disastrous 17-point loss to the cellar-dwelling Los Angeles Lakers, the defending champion Golden State Warriors took on a Portland Trail Blazers team that embarrassed them by 32 points three weeks earlier.
It came on a Friday night in front of a ruckus Oracle Arena crowd in Oakland. It resulted in Golden State putting up 81 first-half points en route to a 128-112 victory.
The Splash Brothers tandem of Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson combined for 71 points on 26-of-45 shooting, including 15-of-25 from three-point range.
Making history once more, Golden State nailed 18 three-pointers. Add in the 19 Portland hit, and it represented the most combined threes in a single-game in Association history.
Tonight, the #Warriors (18 threes) & #Blazers (19 threes) put up a record-setting clinic of beyond the arc shooting pic.twitter.com/Dxg9BzQS3g
— StatsCentre (@StatsCentre) March 12, 2016
By virtue of the win, Golden State remains ahead of the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls pace of 72 wins — a mark that would represent the best regular-season record in NBA history. In fact, Golden State now finds itself on pace to win 74 games after earning its 58th victory in 64 games.
After hitting seven more three-pointers, Curry has added even more separation between his already league-record 311 threes this season and the record he broke last year (286). He’s now on pace to hit 403 from beyond the arc.
In a stunning representation of just how much he’s changing basketball, that 403 mark would represent 134 more than ANY other player has hit in a single-season in the history of the NBA.
The Warriors’ 16-point win on Friday night also represents an NBA record 47th consecutive home win. In fact, Golden State boasts a 67-2 regular season home record since the start of last season.
Warriors extend their NBA-record home winning streak to 47-straight games and improve to 58-6, the best mark through 64 games in NBA history
— Warriors PR (@WarriorsPR) March 12, 2016
Now 3.5 games ahead of the equally impressive San Antonio Spurs for the top seed out west, it’s looking more and more like the Warriors will boast home-court advantage throughout the playoffs for the second consecutive season.
With their unprecedented success at home, that puts them in obvious position to repeat as champions.
None of this is really that surprising. The Warriors have been putting up record performance after record performance since Steve Kerr took over as head coach last year. In his 146 games as the team’s head coach, Golden State boasts a 125-21 regular season record (.856 winning percentage). Add in last year’s playoff run, and the Warriors are 141-26 under Kerr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSTbZBSrP5w
The domination we saw from Golden State on Friday night represented a team that’s playing at an entirely different level than any other squad since that Michael Jordan-led Bulls team of two decades ago.
With with 12 of their final 18 games at home, the Warriors can link themselves with that Bulls team forever. It’s getting close. It might happen. And the rest of the NBA are just spectators at this point.