Warriors 81 Sixers 89

The Warriors dropped to 5-8 after another disappointing loss, this time to the Philadelphia 76ers on an early afternoon Sunday game. The Warriors new acquisition wasn't available for the game this afternoon, but we'll likely see him Tuesday against Washington, and at that point we should be able to get a better gauge on how this team will start to perform down the stretch. Until then however, we'll take a look at what happened tonight.

Early Starts
The Warriors simply have a knack for not showing up at the beginning of early contests. Although I have no data to support this, I'm willing to bet that over the last 3 seasons, any game that starts before 4pm PT we have come out and lost every 1st quarter, and quite possibly most of those games we've lost. Granted, this afternoon we played a pretty solid team (not Memphis for instance), but that early poor start is a killer in these types of road games. We still had a chance to win it later in the game, but the 1st quarter start didn't help.

Rebounding and Possessions
If you do some simple math you can see that whoever has more possessions is given more of an opportunity to succeed and go on to win. Although the 76ers actually shot a worse percentage than we did today (40% compared to about 44%), they had way more possessions, and therefore more shots which eventually led to more points. This really hasn't been a problem yet this season but it's interesting to point out a game before Crawford gets here and we start to play even smaller ball. We're going to need to shoot much higher percentages (ie more fastbreaks) if we're going to continuously be out-rebounded on any given night.

The Youngsters
We saw a mixed bag from our youngsters today. Randolph certainly had his moments, and I'm definitely glad to see him getting regular minutes, but he needs to have some more self control. He's making a TON of rookie mistakes. Morrow was absolutely invisible in the first half. He may have only taken one shot by my count, and this is partly his fault. If he knows he's the best shooter on this team then he's got to demand the ball, at least a few times throughout the game. Some of this also falls on the fact that we have no PG and Jackson happened to look elsewhere this afternoon. Again, I hope this all changes once Crawford gets here, and I hope Crawford will be ready and willing to set guys like Morrow up, particularly early on in games. Andris had a quiet game for the first time this season. No double double, no foul trouble, it's really hard to explain. Let's hope this was a fluke. Lastly, I thought Brandan Wright had an excellent game. He was a big spark plug in the 3rd and it helped us get back into the game with some momentum. I'd like to see him rebound the ball a little better but any consistent contribution from him at this point would be great.

Top Performances
1. Brandan Wright- Had a solid game off the bench with 10 points, a block, and 2 boards in 14 minutes of action. He also had a +10 for the game, the highest of any Warrior.
2. Ronnie Turiaf- I love this guy. What a great signing to give us some big depth off the bench. He had 2 points, 3 boards, and 5 blocks in 20 solid minutes.
3.Our Defense- We held our opponent to under 40% shooting on the afternoon, and under 90 points as well. We just couldn't grab enough boards to give us enough possessions to compensate on the other end.