He chose to give up on tonight's game and try out a lineup.
He wanted to see how a combination like Davis and Gafford would work on the floor, or perhaps give young Grimes some playing time and see how the youngster performed on the playoff stage...
In the end, with the Thunder offering almost no resistance, the Golden State Warriors managed to hold onto their lead until the final buzzer.
When the game ended, the Warriors had won Game 4, 124–115, bringing the series score to 1–3. That kept the Western Conference Finals going and gave them a brief chance to catch their breath...
For Golden State, this was absolutely a victory worth celebrating.
But...
Although they had won the game, public opinion still overwhelmingly favored the Thunder.
The reason was simple.
In the first three games, the Warriors had lost two of them far too easily.
And in the third game, despite holding such a huge lead, they had still allowed the Thunder to come back and win. That was more than enough to show just how large the gap between the two teams was.
Perhaps by now, in most people's eyes, the gap between the Thunder and the Warriors was even greater than the gap between the Thunder and the Nuggets.
Objectively speaking, judging by what these four games had shown, that did seem to be the case.
But in reality, the Golden State Warriors might not have been all that much weaker than the Nuggets. Their bigger problem was their inconsistency.
They didn't have an interior star like Jokic, a superstar who could dominate the paint and keep producing steadily even against a defender of Davis's caliber.
The Warriors' undisputed leader was Stephen Curry.
Curry was an outside player, a star whose game relied on lots