When the Golden State Warriors added Jimmy Butler to the deadline for trade, it looked like a suitable gift for Steph Curry to give him at least a chance to play – as he called it – significant basketball. But it was like a little to think that a player could transform a dancing team on the lottery line into a real blue competitor.
Even when Golden State began to empty the victories immediately after the arrival of Butler, the calendar was quite soft. It is not as under-sales the encouraging signs that we all seen right away. Defense has resumed. Offensive paint pressure has increased. The attempts to throw francs went path up. Butler connected a team which had, by its own standard of force in the Numbers, in a way lost its collective way. Stephen Curry reflected his superstar switch.
But it was only when Butler reversed his own change of superstar – especially in the final of the season against the Clippers, then again in the victory of Golden State over Memphis – that we could see the real power of what has become the best duo of the NBA. Yes, even better than LeBron James and Luka Dončić, who, for all their greatness, still do a lot of similar things on the ground.
Curry and Butler are linked as deadly competitors, but from a stylistic point of view, they are all that the other is not. Curry is the shooter. Butler is the driver. Curry plays a little crazy. Butler calm everything. The complementary nature of their basketball relationship even removes the slightest decreasing yield of their equation.
Curry and Butler are magic together, and Sunday, they led the Warriors to the 95-85 victory against Houston’s Rockets in match 1 of their series in the first round. Curry paved the way with 31 points. We all knew that Amen Thompson, perhaps a defender without peers, was going to try to make the hell of Curry’s life, and at the beginning, he did exactly that. Curry precipitated his first couples 3 as anyone who would do it with a shadow that followed you. But he worked in the rhythm when he arrived in the basket on the cups and the pipes for four finishes, then the 3 started to fall.
This one with the shooting stopwatch ending in the middle of the third quarter was crazy.
It put the Warriors at the top of 23, and he really felt that the game was over. But that was not the case. With just over five minutes to play in the fourth quarter, the Rockets had reduced it to four with all the momentum. Then Curry did this …
These are laughable photos. He struck another fall rainbow that you would be embarrassed to try your local race at lunchtime, but Curry throws them in the biggest moments of the biggest games. Butler started calling him Batman, and he’s not wrong. Curry, at 37, remains a basketball superhero.
But butler East Bad to place yourself with the role of Robin. It’s not Robin. Not when he has played as he played since the Warriors officially clicked in eliminatory mode. They can say that they played hoops in the playoffs throughout the section because of their post -season time prospects, but it is a different version of Butler – which has now scored 93 points in its last three games.
It is a kind of selfless selfishness that Butler deploys when he decides to become one of the best players on the planet. It does not do it for statistics. Or the recognition of articles like this. He is not a player who even seems to want to give himself priority, but he does it, ironically, because that is what the team needs when she goes to this time of the year.
Very well, I will reduce the connection (although this wonderfully, almost intangible element of its game is omnipresent) and begins to actively pursue a domination for the more traditional bucket. If you insist.
Butler finished with a box score filling 25 points, seven rebounds, six assists and five interceptions. He committed a single turnover. The Warriors won his 42 minutes by 14 points. Do the calculation, and this is 66 points combined on the shot of 22 of 38 for Curry and Butler. No one else was more than 14 years old (Brandin Podziemski, which is great). In a game where the score, for both parties, was an infernal task, this kind of effective production of your two best guys is not something on which many teams can count.
But warriors can count on it. Even against a devastating defense like that of Houston, Curry and Butler do not do unduly lasting things. It is how great they are. Both individually and, more importantly, together.
Before Match 2 of this series and for the duration of the Warriors in these playoffs, it is a duo that no one realistically seems capable of stopping.
