JaVale McGee came up huge against Portland — and man, does it feel weird to be saying that.

I haven’t been blogging about the playoffs so far this year, for a couple of reasons. One of them is a desire — which I think I share with the whole of Dub Nation — to do everything differently from the way we did it last year. The loss in Game 7 of the Finals left a bad taste in our mouths that will not be cleansed until and unless our team hoists the trophy again.

Which does tend to take a little bit of the fun out of things. Long gone are the carefree, overachieving Warriors of 2014–15. With the addition of Kevin Durant, this year’s team carries a heavy burden of high expectations, and anything short of a title will be considered an abject failure.

They’re still entertaining to watch, though. In Game 4 of the opening-round series against Portland, they dropped 45 first-quarter points on the Blazers in a blinding blitzkrieg of basketball brutality. They completed the sweep three quarters later and now await the winner of the Utah Jazz/LA Clippers series.

Along the way they’ve had to deal with a bit of what constitutes adversity in the current state of things, playing two games without Durant and — more to the point — losing head coach Steve Kerr to a recurrence of complications from his back surgery at the beginning of last season. Kerr is out indefinitely, which is a bit worrisome. Yes, they’ve won plenty of games without him before, starting the 2015–16 season 24–0 and then 39–4 under assistant Luke Walton. But being without your Maximum Leader in a tight playoff series — assuming there’s going to be one — is different.

Still, on the spectrum of possible things to worry about at this point in history, it’s pretty minor. So I’m going to do my best to leave all that baggage aside and enjoy the rest of these games for what they are: games. Right?