Win an NBA title or get to the magical 73 wins and be a team for the ages? As the Golden State Warriors close in on their chase for the single-season wins record, it also faces the home stretch to the NBA playoffs.
Wearing out his team in the pursuit of history isn’t something Warriors head coach Steve Kerr appears interested in. That’s not to say his team is about to tank the remaining games in the season, but that he expects role players to step up and get this team to both of its goals.
“The game is certainly not more important than our health. Our health is the main thing going into next weekend. We’re not going to overrun anyone with minutes, we’re probably going to play a lot of people and we’re going to try to win the game, but not at the expense of wearing people out. If we do it, it’s going to have to be as a team and a lot of people will have to contribute.”
Kerr’s words came before the Warriors go for the first of two needed wins against the Memphis Grizzlies to keep hopes of 73 wins alive. He also backed up those words with a benching of center Andrew Bogut and will be monitoring the minutes played by the rest of his starting five.
“The one thing I won’t do is play anybody 38-40 minutes …” Kerr added. “No matter what happens tonight, we’ll keep minutes down for our key guys and I expect everybody to be ready to contribute and play a solid game.”
After clinching the No. 1 seed with a win over the San Antonio Spurs on Thursday night, Kerr’s team doesn’t have much other than history to worry about in the regular season anymore. For Kerr, his choice to monitor minutes and give certain players more rest isn’t so much about avoiding injury as controlling for a difficult schedule.
His team does have a back-to-back game situation and faces three games in four days as the 2015-16 season comes to a close.
“I’m a little uneasy about it. It’s not that I’m worried about injury. You can get injured in practice. It’s not so much that I want to rest guys to avoid injury, but we do have a back-to-back here. It will be our third game in four nights.”
The question for him is just how bad does the team want that history-making 73 wins mark? The Warriors are about to find out those answers, it just will be up to a larger group than everyone is used to seeing.