Kerr: Warriors 'not really pushing' for 73 wins
The Golden State Warriors have sent some mixed signals when it comes to how aggressively they plan to pursue an NBA-record 73 wins this season.
Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, and Harrison Barnes have all publicly said that they want the record, though Curry made sure to qualify that by saying he wouldn't want it at the expense of a championship. Head coach Steve Kerr, meanwhile, has already seemed to contradict himself on the subject a couple of times.
Kerr said in early March that resting players down the stretch would take precedence over breaking the record, set 20 years ago by the Chicago Bulls team on which he played. Later in the month, though, he called the chase for 73 "enticing," and said his players had earned a say in whether they would play or rest going forward.
On Monday, with the Warriors needing a modest 4-1 finish to secure the best regular-season record in history, he tried to clarify where, exactly, he and his team stand.
"We're not really pushing for this," Kerr told USA Today's Sam Amick. "All we've said is, 'Yeah, it'd be nice to get. We'd like to get it.'
"But if I were pushing for it, I probably wouldn't be resting Shaun Livingston and (Andrew) Bogut, and I'd be playing our starters more. We're just playing it out. I don't understand if people are going to say that we're pushing for this. I don't think that's the right word to use. We'd like to get it, but we're still resting people and trying to get us set up for the playoffs."
That may not be the most convincing argument, given that Bogut is nursing a rib injury, Livingston has rested for just one game in the past 42, and three of the Warriors' five starters played more than 42 minutes last Wednesday on the second night of a back-to-back, but that's Kerr's story and he's sticking to it.
For now, anyway.