You measure the Warriors' heartbeat with their Stephoscope

Curry puts down a rebellion in Sacramento, now tries to squelch the Lakers.

The Sacramento Kings shot at the real kings in the first round of the NBA playoffs. They missed.

The energy of their youth dissipated into aimlessness. The support from their truly exceptional home crowd was no longer a prod but a vise. They had a two-point lead at halftime of Game 7 and wound up losing by 20.

They had celebrated the end of a playoff famine that began in 2007. Now they discovered the depths of playoff pain. Fortunately, there’s a large support group if they need it.

The Kings became the 27th team to engage Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors in a playoff series. They became the 23rd to lose, thanks to this 120-100 synopsis of what the NBA’s best franchise means. Curry wound up with 50 points; Kevon Looney snagged 21 rebounds, 10 on the offensive board, and he joined Wilt Chamberlain and Nate Thurmond with his third 20-rebound game in the same playoff series. The Warriors proceed to play the resurrected Los Angeles Lakers, beginning Tuesday.

Much was said about the Warriors’ ability to handle a Game 7. In truth, that particular knack is beneath them. This was only Curry’s fifth Game 7, and he has lost two of them, including the 2016 championship to LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers after Golden State had a 3-1 lead and the homecourt. Curry has averaged 33.4 points in those games.

No, the Warriors like to finish up their matches before the 18th hole. They like Game 5s, and they really won this series by edging the Kings, 123-116, as Curry scored 19 of his 31 in the second half. That gave Golden State a 3-2 lead and the luxury of letting down their guard at home in Game 6. Challenges are routinely accepted in Golden State’s world. After all, the Warriors wiped out a 3-1 deficit in the 2016 conference finals against Oklahoma City, with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.

They’ve seen fire and they’ve seen rain. In one season they lost only nine games. In another they won only 15. Looney had hip surgery after the Warriors drafted him 30th, or last, in the first round and played 21 minutes his rookie season. Klay Thompson is back after tearing his ACL and his Achilles tendon. Curry had his ankle reconstructed, sprained it five times in the 26 games after he returned, and had surgery again. Some folks had trouble envisioning Curry braving an entire NBA season. Nobody but nobody envisioned the deceptive strength and the freakish cardio-vascular power that makes him impossible to track without GPS. He can strike from parts of the court that nobody ever guarded before he came along. That’s one reason why the Warriors are so serene. A 15-point deficit with five minutes to go means nothing with Curry around.

Curry shoots the three-pointer at a .4275 clip for his career. That’s fourth alltime and second in his own family, behind brother Seth. The top two are Joe Harris and Luke Kennard, but they, and Seth, are pretty much 3-point specialists. Curry repeatedly drove past the Kings and scored inside, even though he also found time to drain 90 three-pointers, 10 more than anyone else in the first round.

Curry’s dad Dell was known as a remote shooter, too, before three-point thinking had fully evolved. With Milwaukee in 1999, Dell shot 47.6 percent from deep, leading the NBA. But in 16 years, Dell averaged only 1.1 three-point buckets. Steph averages 3.8 for his career but made 4.8 this season.

Then again, Steph took 19 percent of his shots from the three-to-10-foot range (Basketball-Reference.com), which was a career high, and took nearly 44 percent from inside the line, which was a high since 2017.

Before that, the ABA brought the 3-point shot into the world, mostly as a novelty or a tool of desperation. In 1976, Indiana’s Billy Keller shot 35.2 percent from there. But he was an outlier. He took 349 long shots, and only five other players in the league took 100 or more. The 3-pointer was, in almost all situations, a bad shot, a low-percentage play. There was no “adjusted” or “real” field goal percentage, because no one had imagined that it was a better long-term strategy to miss a three than to make a two. Now you have Joe Mazzulla, the Celtics’ coach, telling his guys to “do the math” and eat as many threes as they can stomach. But too much of that can be a chairlift to disaster. The Kings, with few other tricks in their bag, missed 19 of 22 threes in Sunday’s second half.

Because Curry has expanded the battlefield, he has given space to everyone else, and his hyperactivity makes him immune to constant double-teaming. All that does is create the 4-on-3 situations, with Draymond Green the quarterback in the middle, that have defined Steve Kerr’s offenses. Kerr, of course, rode his shot to 16 seasons, 128 playoff games and five championships as a player, but his 3-point skills were basically an ornament. He took 1.8 long attempts per game.

Curry lifts the burden off everyone else. Thompson has clearly been reduced by the injuries, but he only has to be himself in short bursts. Jordan Poole can come and go. Andrew Wiggins is more essential, but no one expects him to take over. Green is the next most valuable player, as his 21-point outburst in Game 5 showed, but Looney now does Draymond things, with a civil tongue.

Looney came to UCLA from Milwaukee, where he was compared to Durant, as are most high school players with a 7-foot-4 wingspan and a clue. He was the defensive anchor and rebounder during that 2014 season, which culminated in a Sweet 16 appearance. With the Warriors, Looney illustrates how NBA players can redefine themselves, can find their own wings when they’re freed. Mostly, Looney shows up. He has appeared in 192 consecutive regular-season games. This day and time, when perfect attendance citations are used to wipe off one’s shoes,  that makes Looney basketball’s Ripken, at least behind Brooklyn’s Mikal Bridges.

The Lakers-Warriors series will possibly feature seven games in 13 days. Whether that suits James and Anthony Davis might determine who wins. Thanks to Davis and Jarred Vanderbilt, a Looney-like figure who has led the Lakers’ defensive metamorphosis, Curry’s lanes to the hoop will be narrowed. The new Lakers will gladly play on the Warriors’ racetrack.

And James, of course, understands the escalating rhythms of a playoff series in a way the Kings couldn’t. This should be great basketball theater, as long as everyone remembers who is most likely to close the show. 

.