Warriors hold on for 19th straight win

SALT LAKE CITY -- The Warriors" streak survived a close call. They capped off a November to remember undefeated. Then they fired off warning shots to teams seeking to knock them off the pedestal.

And Stephen Curry didn"t miss.

Curry hit the go-ahead 3-pointer with under a minute left and finished with 26 points as the Warriors escaped at Utah with a 106-103 victory on Monday that improved their record to 19-0 and extended the best start to an NBA season.

Rodney Hood responded with a shot that cut the Warriors" lead to one, but then with a chance to win the game, he missed a 3-pointer with 5.9 seconds left. Draymond Green grabbed the rebound, and Curry hit two free throws to seal the win.

"Just because we"re (undefeated) doesn"t mean we can just show up and blow teams out or guarantee a win," Curry said. "We have to actually do something about it."

So Curry used his crossover dribble to gain separation on Hood and hit the game-winner with 51.9 seconds left. He came to the Warriors sideline seeking to celebrate. So he turned to team security manager Ralph Walker and screamed, "That"s what I"m talking about!"

"He"s too stoic," Curry said of Walker afterward, smiling.

The Warriors" streak of 23 straight regular-season wins dating back to last season is now the third-longest in NBA history.

Without an injured Harrison Barnes and with Andrew Bogut on the bench having fouled out, the Warriors grinded out the win to start their seven-game trip, which thrilled interim coach Luke Walton.

"The other teams know that when we come to town, you"re going to have to take it from us," Walton said. "We"re going to compete, and we"re still hungry. Nothing"s going to be given away here."

The Jazz missed its chance. Utah took a 90-87 lead in the fourth quarter, but with the crowd on its feet, Curry checked back into the game with 6:36 left and immediately hit a game-tying 3-pointer.

Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry (30) drives around Utah Jazz"s Derrick Favors (15) and Raul Neto, center, in the first quarter during an NBA basketball game Monday, Nov. 30, 2015, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) (Rick Bowmer)

Shaun Livingston then hit his first 3-pointer with the Warriors -- in his second season with the team -- to give them the lead again, making it 11 shots from long distance in as many NBA seasons played. Livingston added a jumper that gave the Warriors a 95-92 lead.

"The games get close, and you can see the calmness in our guys," Walton said. "They don"t shy away from it, and it"s not just Steph. It"s everybody.

"The confidence is spread throughout everyone on our team. The more pressure, the bigger the moment, the more comfortable our guys feel."

After Derrick Favors" 3-point play gave the Jazz a 99-97 lead with 2:06 left, Curry tied the score with a step-back jump shot, and Green gave the Warriors the lead with a putback that had him pounding his chest.

"I think everybody"s just gotten used to us beating teams by 20 and then we have a close game," said Green, who had 20 points, nine rebounds and seven assists. "We"re not surprised. We know that that"s going to happen throughout the course of the season, but I think we responded well."

Playing their third game in four nights, the Warriors were energized by the hot shooting of reserve guard Ian Clark, who over a three-minute stretch in the second went 4 for 4 from 3-point range. His 12 points at halftime were the most of any Warriors player.

"Guys feel like they"re a part of something on our team," the Warriors" Andre Iguodala said. "Ian as soon as he got here, he felt like he was a part of something, so he"s playing at a really high level."

The Jazz, the team that waived Clark eight months ago, wouldn"t go away despite trailing 53-48 at halftime and falling behind by as many as 11 points in the third.

Utah cut the Warriors" lead to two points before Curry and Klay Thompson responded with back-to-back 3-pointers. Trevor Booker had a steal and dunk in the fourth that cut the lead to one point, as did Rudy Gobert"s one-handed dunk off a lob. Two Favors free throws gave the Jazz an 88-87 lead after he drew a foul that was the sixth personal for Bogut.

For more on the Warriors, see the Inside the Warriors blog at www.ibabuzz.com/warriors. Follow Diamond Leung on Twitter at twitter.com/diamond83.

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/warriors/ci_29185766/warriors-hold-19th-straight-win

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Hey, the Best Basketball Team Ever Is Playing Right Now

Stephen Curry and Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors during a game against the New Orleans Pelicans on Oct. 27, 2015 in Oakland, California.

Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

The Golden State Warriors will probably lose at some point, if not in this calendar year then the next one, or maybe the one after that. This is only sort of a joke. Last season the Warriors won 67 games, tied for the sixth-best regular season mark in the history of the NBA, and capped it off by winning their first NBA title. They have started the season on a record-breaking 18-0 run with a team thats better than last years in nearly every offensive category. The Warriors are scoring almost 116 points per game and beating teams by an average margin of 16. They are being discussed as possible threats to the Chicago Bulls vaunted 72-win season of 199596. At the start of the season this would have sounded far-fetched; right now the notion of this team losing even 10 games seems even more so.

Watching the Warriors play in 2015 is like watching some beautiful, exotic cat absentmindedly torturing a trapped bit of prey. The outcome is such a certainty that youre there for the destruction, the tragicomic charade that the current victim has a chance. The Warriors are playing revolutionary basketball, but revolutionary in the content more than the formits what theyre doing, and whos doing it, more than how its being done. There are historical precedents for the Warriors style of play: The team employs the sort of brilliant ball movement and spacing that helped the Spurs run the Heat off the floor in the 2014 Finals, and their positional heterodoxy and relentless three-point-shooting hearken back to the Mike DAntoni Suns, the most important NBA team to never win a title.

What sets the Warriors apart isnt so much their system as their personnelweve simply never seen a combination of players like this. Two in particular stand out. The first is Stephen Curry, the NBAs reigning MVP and arguably the greatest shooter the sport has ever seen. Curry feels like a basketball glitch, an X-Men character mutated to win games of Around-the-World. What makes Curry impossible to guard isnt just his accuracy but his shot selectionhe takes shots no one has ever seriously considered taking, because no one could make them, until now. And watching him play is elementally thrilling: at 6-foot-3 theres something recognizably everyday about him that isnt there when watching LeBron James or Kevin Durant or Anthony Davis, players whose physical dimensions alone place them in the 99.9th percentile of human excellence. What Curry doesshoot the basketball at a hoopis something pretty much everyone who loves basketball has done at some point, and many of us still do. Hes the thing weve all wanted to believe was possible all along.

The other extraordinary piece of the puzzle is swingman Draymond Green, the Warriors second-most important player and a singular force in todays NBA. In 2009 Michael Lewis wrote a fascinating New York Times Magazine profile of Houston Rockets forward Shane Battier titled The No-Stats All-Star that discussed the way that the low-scoring Battier had become an indispensable NBA player not through prodigious box score lines but through a virtuosic mastery of situations. His mind thought in terms of whole possessions rather than individual opportunities, like some brilliant drummer: flawlessly consistent, understated, incessantly reactive. As Lewis wrote, When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worseoften a lot worse.

Draymond Green is the next evolution of this: Call him the No-Stats MVP. He is a player whose conventional numbers seem quotidian but whose impact is so immense that no one blinked an eye last summer when the Warriors signed the undersized power forward who scored fewer than 12 points per game to a five-year, $82 million contract. Green is the NBAs greatest Swiss Army Knife not named LeBron James, a player who defends all five positions on the court, is also currently shooting more than 40 percent from the three-point line, and increasingly looms as a triple-double threat. If Curry is the Warriors crown jewel, drafted seventh overall in 2009, Green is their heist, snatched up in a stroke of second-round genius. Green spent a full four years at Michigan State under Tom Izzo, and coming out of school he was seen as too small, too weird, too old. But, to borrow from Lewis milieu, in Greens case the Warriors saw other teams undervaluing of small, weird and old for what it was: a market inefficiency.

Curry and Green are matchup nightmares: The former is an unguardable offensive genius; the latter is a shape-shifter who disrupts game planning with his sheer existence. Together they are the lynchpins of Golden States most flatly unfair feature, namely the teams small ball lineup, known more colloquially as the death lineup or nuclear lineup. This fivesome consists of Green, Harrison Barnes, Andre Iguodala, All-Star shooting guard Klay Thompson, and Curry, a group whose speed and size flummox opposing offenses while tormenting defenses with five three-point-shooters who range from frighteningly credible to unconscionably great. This is the lineup the team customarily sticks in for the last six minutes of games, to rapidly build leads and finish off the opposition. According to Basketball Reference, in 14 games on the court together this year the group has outscored opponents by 90 points while playing a total of only 64 minutes; the Warriors have been blowing teams out so regularly that they havent needed to play more than that. This, perhaps, is the most incredible fact of the Warriors season so far: They are dominating the league to an extent never seen before while deliberately not playing to their full potential.

The aforementioned 199596 Bulls are the gold standard of NBA greatness, a 72-win juggernaut that featured the best player in the history of the sport on a psychotic revenge tour after being bounced from the playoffs at the end of a midseason comeback one year prior. In the 20 years since its been more or less unthinkable that a team could challenge this mark, but this isnt the case in 201516. Aside from simply how good the Warriors are, this years Western Conference doesnt appear to be the bloodbath of bottom-to-top excellence that its been in years past. San Antonio has been fearsome as of late but will likely step off the gas at points during the regular season; Oklahoma City has a new coach who has sometimes appeared overmatched and its superstar Kevin Durant is a constant injury concern. Perennial contenders like the Clippers, Rockets, and Grizzlies, meanwhile, are in varying states of disarray.

Despite the sheer brilliance of this first month of the season, something tells me Golden State wont break 72 winsthe league is tougher and smarter than it was 20 years ago, and at some point the Warriors freakishly good fortune in avoiding injuries has to run outalthough 70 wouldnt shock me. In the meantime they are trying to be something just as special: the most purely fun basketball team that has ever played. To non-partisans the 199596 Bulls werent all that charming; they were a defensive bludgeon playing a quixotic half-court offense chasing their fourth title with all the warmth of a ruthless corporation snuffing out small businesses. The Bulls played basketball in order to win; at the risk of sounding corny, the Warriors feel like they play the game for the joy of playing, the winning coming as a happy byproduct of being so freakishly good at it. For anyone who loves basketball, theyre the best version of ourselves weve ever seen.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/11/steph_curry_s_warriors_are_playing_the_best_basketball_ever.html

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Agents of SHIELD postmortem: Are the Secret Warriors on the way?

Warning: This story contains major spoilers from the season finale of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Read at your own risk.

There were casualties aplenty in the season finale of Marvels Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his team faced off against the Inhumans.

In a bid to get the Inhumans to side with her in a war, Jaiying (Dichen Lachman) tasks Gordon (Jamie Harris) with stealing a quinjet to attack Afterlife, making it appear as though S.H.I.E.L.D. took the first shot. After Raina (Ruth Negga) subsequently tries to warn Skye (Chloe Bennet) that her mother is dangerous, Jaiying murders her, making Skye realize the truth. Unfortunately, its too late to warn S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Inhumans infiltrate the aircraft carrier with a plan to kill the entire organization with the Terrigen crystals.

But what Jaiying could never account for is Cals (Kyle MacLachlan) love for his daughter. Instead of turning into Mister Hyde and killing Coulson, Cal joins S.H.I.E.L.D. to make sure Skye doesnt fall victim to her mothers nefarious plans. Cal ultimately kills Jaiying, sparing Skye from having to do the task herself after her mother tries to suck the life out of her.

As the battle between Inhumans and S.H.I.E.L.D. comes to a head, Fitz (Iain de Caestecker) accidentally kills Gordon, who drops a lethal crystal, but Coulson dives to catch it, unafraid of the consequences. As Coulson begins to petrify, Mack (Henry Simmons) comes to the rescue and chops off his armthe producers did warn that Mack had an ax and Coulson would lose something important! In the end, Coulson and Skye ultimately launch what appears to be the Secret Warriors program.

Elsewhere, Ward and Kara torture Bobbi and plan to kill Hunter as recompense for Mockingbird selling Agent 33 out to Hydra. But Bobbi takes the bullet marked for Hunter and decidedly walks away from S.H.I.E.L.D.though shes not the only one as May decides to take a hiatus with Andrew. On the plus side, the incident makes Simmons realizes her true feelings for Fitz, and they plan to go on a datebut h**l be waiting a while since the mysterious Kree stone sucks Simmons up into it. Oh, and Ward becomes the new head of Hydra after accidentally killing Kara. What does this all mean?! EW caught up with Executive Producer Jeffrey Bell to get the scoop on next season: (Also, Elizabeth Henstridge discusses Simmons disappearing act here, Brett Dalton talks Wards Hydra turn here and we go behind-the-scenes to see how they chopped off Coulsons arm here.)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Are you setting up Secret Warriors for next season?JEFFREY BELL: I would say setting up is perhaps an over statement. Certainly were tipping our hat to a woman named Daisy Johnson talking to Coulson about a secret group of powered people.

Any secret organizations within organizations dont tend to make people happy. How secret would this actually be because of what incidents theyve faced before?On the one hand, this whole season on the S.H.I.E.L.D. level was about the price of secrets. When youre doing a spy show, secrets are your bread and butter. There is always good conflict and tension when there are secrets. Having said that, we just played out, Oh, I have a secret that I cant tell you about, so I think well work very hard so we dont replicate these people in S.H.I.E.L.D. have a secret and these people dont know it. Having secrets ultimately causes a lot of pain for people and it rarely works out, as our U.S. government is learning from the Snowden stuff. Well find a way to make secrets a great texture to next year.

What does this mean for Skye in regards to the team now that shes stepping up elsewhere?Some people will be excited and some people will be a little intimidated or threatened by that. Any time a person grows or steps out of the role that theyre perceived to be a part of, its a problem. What happens when the student reaches the level of master or teacher? Theres a lot of good fodder for us next season with that.

Simmons has disappeared! What happened to her?Oh, this weird alien rock seemed to dissolve and consume her and come back together. No one was more shocked about that than us. [Laughs]

Is it safe to say that Fitz will do everything in his power to get her back?I wouldnt limit it to Fitz. Everyone will be very upset and concerned after they figure out what happened. I would suspect our team would not take this lightly and will do everything they can to figure out what happened.

May has taken what I assume to be a temporary hiatus. Are we going to see her back, and can she ever actually be normal?Thats a good question. One of the things that we talked about with our finale was though there was a lot of plot, there were also a lot of emotional resolutions. Weve given May an emotional resolution. Its not riding off into the sunset to live happily ever after, but its at least a moment of contentment and to consider the possibility of whats next. We love Blair Underwood and he came in and fit very nicely into our universe. The possibility to tell some more stories next year, if that works out, is exciting to us. Whether that means we see a very happy, content May or not is to be determined.

I feel like theres still a lot more story to be told with Lincoln and Skye. Do you plan to hang on to Luke Mitchell for a while?We loved Luke this season. We have a lot of ideas for Luke. The writers are getting back together in about three weeks to start shaping the next season. He was a nice addition this past season, so hes definitely being considered for all that.

Bobbi has decided to give up on S.H.I.E.L.D., but since the spin-off is not moving forward, can we expect her and Hunter to be back on this team or will we see some parallel storytelling for a bit?When she said, I cant do this anymore, we intentionally made that very ambiguous. Does it mean her and Hunter, or does it mean S.H.I.E.L.D.? The whole intention of the possible spin-off was we love these people as characters and feel that theyre a great part of our universe. When they return, we expect to have great stories for them both as a couple and within the larger team, whether theyre part of it or parallel. Twenty-two episodes makes for a long season, so there are opportunities to split people off and bring them back together.

The Terrigen crystals are basically out there in the world now. How dangerous could this be to Inhumans and humans alike? And is this your indication that we havent seen the last of the Inhumans on S.H.I.E.L.D.?This was a way for us to remind people that anything can happen at any time. Anywhere in the world, this sort of thing can happen without going so far as to dropping a Terrigen bomb and turning a whole group of people at one time. The idea that the possibility is out there allows us a lot of story opportunities for next year. And for the audience, it teases the promise of more Inhumans next season.

Because youve already delved into S.H.I.E.L.D. vs. Inhumans this season, do you want to take on a different villain next season?I dont think of Inhumans necessarily as villains. With Jaiying, this is a woman who got sliced apart by someone who called himself S.H.I.E.L.D. even though he was really Hydra. Then she moved her group to the middle of nowhere to be left alone and S.H.I.E.L.D. showed up again. She certainly was justified in whatever she was feeling. We used a very small corner of the Inhuman universe. Its not so much about this community as an antagonist as it is about individuals who dont know whats happening with them as we move forward.

The description for next season says Coulson embarks on a deadly new secret mission to protect the world from new threats in the wake of S.H.I.E.L.D.s wars with Hydra and the rogue faction of Inhumans. What can you tease about these new threats?Theyre hinted at in the last couple of episodes. The Kree rock would be a good place to start. Any time you end a season with an image of something, in our minds, thats the promise of there being more story to be had. It seems to open up a new world of questions.

Those new threats also include Ward and his Hydra faction, Im sure. Is he just dead set on revenge? And is there no redemption for him at this point?I love Dostoevsky, and one of the things that I love about his books is that nobody is too high that they cant fall and nobody is too low to ever be redeemed. It takes a long time. I would say no one is ever beyond redemption., nor is anybody above a horrible turn. Ward is a complicated figure that some people think is a victim and some people think is a psychopath. It does seem, at the end of the season, that he doesnt want to reconcile with Coulson and the team after the death of Agent 33God forbid he take any responsibility for that. In blaming them for what happened and in his desire for closure, h**l be a pretty good adversary.

Is that the last weve seen of Cal for now?Cal is in a good place for now. He had a great season. He got to live a happily ever after in a beautiful way. We would never write off the idea of finding more story for him down the road, but we had a great time with Kyle this year and feel like that was a story that ended nicely. At least for now, well put that down.

Are you guys already in discussions about what new characters you might be bringing on for next season?We are. This year, we had a slew of antagonist. We had Whitehall, we had Ward, we had Cal, we had Jaiying, we had Gonzaleznot a bad guy, but certainly an antagonistwe had Raina, we had a bunch of people who came and went at different times over the course of the season before we got all together at the end. That seemed to work well. The idea of some familiar faces with some new faces is something to look forward to. I also think finding some new Marvel characters to pull into the universe would be cool. Fans seems to respond when there are characters from the Marvel comics and Marvel Cinematic Universe. Well also continue to create our own mythology as weve done. Its a whole new world.

Marvels Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will return to ABC this fall.

Source: http://www.ew.com/article/2015/05/12/agents-shield-season2-finale-secret-warriors

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