Make no mistake, that one hurts more than your "average" cataclysmic home playoff loss in a game that was led by 30+ midway through the third quarter. I don't mean that in the sense that the Warriors' odds of winning a championship, much less this first round series with an undermanned-but-unrelenting opponent, have taken a significant hit. However, you can bet your ass that their pride woke up this morning feeling like it absorbed every big shot in a 12-round slugfest with a bottle of tequila, and that's due - in part - to the identity of the opposition that, metaphorically speaking, proceeded to crack them over the head with it. Ever since Chris Paul & Co. delayed their dominance by one year in a contentious postseason series, the Warriors have pounded their chest just a little a bit more pompously in beating the Clippers. Though the roster for which they harbored such resentment has changed drastically, the spite with which they have shot their lights out over the past few seasons has far from faded. Patrick Beverly has talked...and talked....and talked himself into the role of demonstrative defensive nuisance that was left vacated by the departure of CP3, and Golden State has used that to fan alive a flame that probably should have died out once Blake Griffin got shipped off to Detroit.
I don't know whether the Warriors would admit to the following or not, but it's pretty obvious that the only thing they relish more than winning is doing so at the expense of the Clippers losing. Therefore, it stands to reason that the sting of being defeated in the most humbling, humiliating, and historical of fashion (well, since they blew a 3-1 series led to LeBron, anyway) would reverberate just a little more painfully with said loss having carved out a spot for the Clippers in the NBA record books. If you wanted to pull down the corner of the web page on which you watched the highlights of history being made in order to look at the big picture then you could craft a decent argument that the Warriors aura of invincibility is much more penetrable than in years' past. You could also use last night as proof in suggesting that the Clippers are the perfect destination for premier free agents, as their proposal of pieces young and old is laughably more intriguing than that of the self-important team they share a city, arena, and market with. However, I would rather take some time to appreciate last night for the aspect of it that the Warriors are most likely to dismiss, with that being the most unforgettable of role reversals in the otherwise one-sided rivalry that they went out of their way to resuscitate.
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