A hearbreaker of a loss, but great to see that this team still has fight left in it. Those back-to-back 3′s at the end of regulation were almost legendary, and had me scaring the hell out of my 4-month-old with my yells. Sadly, they couldn’t recreate the magic at the end of OT, but still a good showing against a playoff team on the road.

Curry brought his A offensive game — as he usually does against the Thunder — though his PG stats (5 assists/6 turnovers) were once again lacking. Monta on the other hand continued his hot streak in terms of distribution, with double-digit assists for the third straight game.

Udoh continued to make his presence felt defensively, and Lee did a good job playing big with 15 boards to go with 24 points (even with Perkins, the Warriors continue to match up inside against the Thunder better than they seemingly do anyone else).

Only Wright disappointed among the starters with a 2-13 shooting night, and he still managed to pull down 10 boards and post a team-high +10. And looking at the overall +/- stats, this game was clearly lost by the bench: all positive for the starters, all double-digit negative for the reserves — only 3 of whom played, totaling just 35 minutes.

Overall, I guess this is the sort of result you want at this point — great effort, but lottery position preserved.

Runner up stat of the night: only 59 field goals in the game for the Thunder. (Sure, part of that is their 28 FTAs, but it’s also rebounding and a lack of turnovers for the Warriors, not to mention avoiding and-1′s.)

There’s the whole back-to-back thing, but the Thunder is still a damn good team with two great players — and the Warriors did a number on them tonight. And if they had shot worth a damn it would have been a blowout.

It was great to see Monta get back in the groove with a team-high 33 points, but to me there were two performances that stood above him in terms of team need. The first was David Lee’s 23 points and 19 rebounds — someone must have been reading TK last night! And second, Stephen Curry looked like a true point guard tonight with 13 assists — several of them spectacular — and no turnovers to go with his 23 points.

Dorell Wright was flat tonight offensively — he’s the one I have in mind when I think of the Warriors missing out on a blowout due to missed shots — but he did a great job defending Durant and led the team with a +18 (while Durant had a team-low -11). Udoh was scoreless in 27 minutes, but he continued to play strong defense and grabbed 4 offensive rebounds while playing meaningful crunch-time minutes.

So all in all a quality win against a quality opponent. Nice bounce-back from the Phoenix debacle (part 2!), and hopefully something they can build on as they close out their home stretch with games against New Orleans, Boston, and Atlanta (sandwiched around a game at Utah).

• Competition. Monta will match his 6th ranked scoring average up against Kevin Durant’s top-ranked average, and Monta has played well against marque competition in the past. Ellis’ down streak is getting worryingly long at this point, so hopefully playing on national television can snap him out of it.
• Getting called out. Lots of complaints about David Lee in recent weeks, and they’re well justified. He’s getting regularly pulled in crunch time, which is not exactly what you pay $13M/per for. At the very least, it would be nice to see him start rebounding again; his 3-boards performance down in Phoenix on Friday was, quite frankly, pathetic.
• The Long Boys. Both Udoh and B. Wright got a sweat going on Friday, and Ekpe in particular is making a strong case for more minutes. Combined with the need to showcase Brandan before the trade deadline, I wonder if we’ll see more from these guys tonight — especially if Andris struggles (again).

Now it’s on to Dallas and San Antonio — fun!