Warriors' Kerr on being down 2-1 to Grizzlies: 'Our moment of truth'

For just the fifth time all season, the Golden State Warriors have lost back-to-back games.

It's hard to criticize a team for not having battled adversity when they didn't encounter any, but the Warriors cruised to a 67-win season and won their first five playoff games without much issue. With Game 4 looming Monday, on the road against a Memphis Grizzlies team that has frustrated with their swarming and savvy team defense, the Warriors are entering uncharted territory.

Can they fight with their backs against the wall? Will their shots start dropping, or do offensive tweaks need to be made? Will they panic, something they swore they wouldn't do after a Game 2 loss but may feel more open to after Saturday's defeat?

That's a greater number of questions than the Warriors are used to facing.

"Our moment of truth," head coach Steve Kerr said of the Warriors' 2-1 series deficit.

While Golden State's a very good team, they're also relatively young, with their top-four players in playoff minutes all age 26 or younger. This same core got just one playoff series of experience a year ago, and even Kerr, by all accounts a terrific coach, is in his rookie season.

"They're learning," Kerr said. "It's part of the process. You see teams go through this all the time in the playoffs. It's the only way to figure it out, to go through the pain of losing a game like tonight."

Kerr's right, and there's good reason that few teams make the leap from first-round also-ran to champion in a single season. The Grizzlies, meanwhile, are in the playoffs for a fifth consecutive season and had a run to the Western Conference finals with nearly the same rotation just two years ago.

"We understand what our strengths are, and of course at the end of games we're not going to panic," Marc Gasol said of his team's composure. "We might not play great or we might not make the shot or we might make mistakes or we might get really slow. But we're going to stay in the moment."

That composure level almost didn't matter Saturday, with the Warriors' talent and speed winning out for a stretch and a 15-point Memphis lead evaporating to four points late. Memphis hung on, but it served as a warning that the Warriors juggernaut can fire into gear on a moment's notice.

Steph Curry isn't going to struggle from the field forever, and the Warriors are going to start knocking down shots eventually. Golden State is 4-of-18 on wide-open threes over their two losses and 4-of-16 on triples that are simply classified as open, shots they hit 42 percent and 40.3 percent on respectively in the regular season. They haven't hit this few threes in back-to-back games since last year's playoffs.

The trouble with waiting for their shooting to improve is that the Warriors only get one more loss - it's not just the moment of truth for the players, but for regression to the mean, too. They can help themselves by getting back to moving the ball more - their passing totals have been far below their regular-season average so far - and work to get out to a better start, but the time to make corrections is running thin.