By: Ben Leonard

The Warriors have played stellar basketball all season long, and Saturday was no exception. Stephen Curry had a field day against the Dallas Mavericks’ defense, dropping twenty-nine points in leading Golden State to their fifteenth consecutive victory. He spread the ball around well, adding eight assists and grabbing three rebounds. The Mavericks came into Saturday with a respectable 17-8 record, yet Golden State made them look like they were the woeful 76ers. To add insult to injury for Dallas, the Warriors did this without center Andrew Bogut, who missed Saturday’s contest with knee tendinitis and flu-like symptoms. Dallas is now 0-5 against the top seven teams in the Western Conference.

Golden State quickly jumped out to a commanding 39-18 lead at the end of the first quarter, largely due to the scoring prowess of Curry, who added twelve points on five of nine shooting in the period. The Mavericks appeared sluggish in their perimeter defense in the incipient stages of the game, yielding five three pointers to Curry and Klay Thompson in the first quarter alone. On the other hand, the Warriors locked down the Mavericks’ perimeter offense, allowing Dallas to make just one of four from long range in the period.

After jumping out to such a sizeable lead, the Warriors seemingly took their foot off of the gas in the second quarter. Despite slowing down the pace, Golden State still outscored Dallas 27-26 in the period. The decline was largely due to inevitable regression to their hot three point shooting, as they could not maintain their unsustainable 50% shooting from long distance. In the second quarter, the Warriors transitioned offensively to attack the porous interior of the Mavericks’ defense.

Holding a 66-44 halftime lead, the Warriors appeared primed to coast to an easy victory. The Mavericks gave little more resistance in the third quarter, but did outscored Golden State 24-21. In a strange moment with 4:47 left in the third, Marresse Speight’s shoe fell off while on offense and flew to the left wing. He passed the ball out to Draymound Green at the top of the arc, who then passed it to Curry on the left wing. Curry dribbled over, picked up Speight’s shoe, and attempted to throw it to Speights, but Mavericks’ center Tyson Chandler blocked it, trying to give the Mavericks a four-on-five advantage. Coach Steve Kerr tried to argue the move’s legality, but evidently there is no rule regarding shoes once they fall off. The game went on, and the play may have fired up a quiet crowd of 20, 317 in Dallas, but it didn’t affect the game’s end result.

The fourth quarter was a different story for the Warriors, who allowed Dallas to outscored them 30-18 in the fourth quarter. However, it was too little too late for the Mavericks, despite the best efforts of former Warrior Monta Ellis, who had eight points in the quarter. Ellis finished with twenty-four points against his former squad, but it wasn’t enough to surmount his team’s early deficit. He added five assists and three steals in a losing effort. Golden State will now travel to New Orleans to play the Pelicans on Sunday afternoon.

Featured Image: By Keith Allison from Owings Mills, USA (Stephen Curry) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons