Kevin Durant’s Injury Changes Everything For The Golden State Warriors

Kevin Durant sustained a knee injury on Tuesday night. Despite their last two seasons of success without him, losing Durant changes everything for the Golden State Warriors.

The Golden State Warriors‘ game against the Washington Wizards on Tuesday night should’ve just been another regular-season game for the Dubs and Kevin Durant. The Wizards are good and pose a real challenge, but even a loss wouldn’t be disastrous.

After all, the San Antonio Spurs are playing well, but still are four games behind Golden State. This game really shouldn’t have meant much at all to the Warriors by Wednesday, much less for the rest of the season.

Then, early in the first quarter, Marcin Gortat throws Zaza Pachulia out of position to grab a rebound. Pachulia lands on Durant’s knee in probably the worst possible way and everything about the Warriors’–and 29 other NBA teams’–season changes.

All of a sudden, a game that should’ve been just another win or loss on an 82-game list of them becomes one of the biggest NBA developments of the season. Durant was having an incredible season and Golden State was light years ahead of the rest of the Association with him.

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Without him things aren’t so rosy. The results are already evident, with Golden State losing that game against the Wizards 112-108. The Dubs are already planning on signing Matt Barnes to replace their superstar, which is sort of like replacing a mountain with a molehill.

Durant missing significant time is certainly a worst-case scenario for Golden State. KD is obviously a vital cog for whatever team he’s on. The Oklahoma City Thunder have rebounded from losing Durant fairly well, but they had months to re-tool their roster, not days.

Luckily, Durant is only slated to miss about four weeks of play with a bone bruise, according to ESPN’s Marc Stein. Still, the impact of losing him will matter, even if he does only miss a month.

The short-term impact is manifested in a lack of scoring. Golden State leads the NBA in points per game with 118 of them coming per contest. Durant supplied more than 25 of those each and every night. Where are those points going to come from now?

Golden State Warriors

Stephen Curry could, theoretically, bump up his volume. Curry averaged more than 30 points per game last season, compared to 24.8 this season.

It’s no easy task to just suddenly begin dropping 30 points on a nightly basis, especially considering it had taken months to figure out how Curry and Durant would co-exist.

Last season, Harrison Barnes scored just less than12 points per game for Golden State. Barnes is obviously gone now, as are almost all of the other auxiliary scorers the Warriors used last season.

Marreese Speights added 7.1 points per game, Festus Ezeli contributed 7.0 points, Leandro Barbosa averaged 6.4 and Andrew Bogut put up 5.4 per game. All of those players were jettisoned to make the necessary cap space to add Durant.

Now the Warriors have Andre Iguodala, Pachulia, Ian Clark and JaVale McGee all averaging around six points per game.

Iguodala was here last season, meaning it’ll be partially up to Pachulia, Clark and JaVale to make up for the scoring done by Barnes, Speights, Ezeli, Barbosa and Bogut last year and by Durant this season.

Those three aren’t going to combine for 25 more points per game, making the addition of Barnes and increased scoring production from Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson necessary going forward.

Even aside from the obvious offensive impact, Durant had been a vital cog on defense for Golden State this season.

His height had allowed him to help protect the rim, and although Draymond Green is still the best Warrior on that end Durant held opponents to worse-than-average field goal percentages within six feet of the basket.

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Golden State needs to find ways to account for his loss on both ends.

Matt Barnes averaged 7.6 points and 5.5 rebounds in 25.3 minutes per game in a stint with the Sacramento Kings earlier this year, but he shot under 40 percent from the field and made the Kings worse by being on the floor.

Every single Warrior will need to step up to work to fill in for Durant in the coming weeks, but Steve Kerr might have the hardest job.

After carefully crafting a scheme around the Warriors newest acquisition, he now must reconfigure things to survive without him, while hopefully needing to reintegrate him at some point in the near future.

The depth problems that have been whispered about the Warriors all season now matter more than ever, and teams like the Spurs, Houston Rockets and Utah Jazz are suddenly looking around and wondering what’s keeping them from the NBA Finals.

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The answer might still be the Warriors, but there’s far less certainty now than at any other point this season. It all rests on how serious Kevin Durant‘s injury is, and how quickly he can get back into the swing of things.