By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

OAKLAND — Maybe the sky really is falling for the Warriors this time. Not that that’s a bad thing, in this instance.

Lost amid all the hoopla over Monta Ellis sitting down for a 12-minute discussion with the media after Thursday’s practice was the fact that Golden State coach Don Nelson said that he was going to continue, long-term, his two-game experiment with greater ball movement.

After two practices in which players were ordered to pass the ball a minimum of four or five times before shooting in half-court sets and two victories that featured none of the stagnation of the previous 20 games (15 of which were losses), Nelson declared an end to the days of allowing Golden State’s offense to dissolve into an endless procession of isolation plays for the likes of Corey Maggette, Stephen Jackson and Kelenna Azubuike.

“I wasn’t enjoying watching the team, the way that we were playing,” Nelson said. “I think the game of basketball should be fun, and you can only have fun if you move the ball and we play together. And I can only have fun coaching when my players do that. The ball basically was stopping too much, and that’s got to change. And it’s gonna change.”

Was the sound I just heard outside my window that of atmospheric debris smashing into a parked car? Or did the sanitation workers on my street just get a little careless with their driving?

That’s the problem: You can’t really tell the difference sometimes when it comes to Nelson, who seems to make as many pronouncements as Chicken Little — and sometimes sports a similar track record for accuracy.

Just last week, frustrated Warriors guard Marco Belinelli told Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport: “I can’t trust Nelson any more. . . . The things he told me haven’t come to pass.”

But with two of his best half-dozen offensive performances this season in the books, Nelson appears set to follow the same blueprint — at for now.

The obvious winners in such a scenario would include Belinelli, who has flourished in the victories against Oklahoma City and Milwaukee — scoring a combined 28 points in 39 minutes in hyper-efficient style (11-for-14 FG) — and Anthony Morrow, who had his first double-digit games (15 and 16) since his two-game outburst in November that first alerted many folks to his very existence.

“I think that’s great, because when we play like this, I think the game is fast,” Belinelli said. “We enjoy the game, we make passes to everybody.”

Nelson has historically felt that the Warriors lack passers; the abortive Chris Webber return last season was an attempt to address that concern. Without someone such as Baron Davis on the roster who can force a defense to leave a teammate open and then find them with a spot-on delivery, the hope is that a quickened pace and greater volume of passes will achieve the same, simple goal:

More open shots.

“I didn’t make them, but that’s the most open shots I’ve got all year, because we moved the ball,” Jackson said of the Warriors’ 119-96 win over Milwaukee on Wednesday. “The two times we moved the ball the most in the season, we won, so something must be right. . . . That’s how we’ve played the last two years: We moved the ball, we got open shots, we made plays for the next guy.”

Precious little of that was on display as the Warriors opened 5-15 with an offense based in large part around individual skills rather than a team concept.

Nelson himself admitted that part of the problem was his veterans calling their own number too often: “Well, we were isoing too much, and it wasn’t always the coach calling those plays. We were looking there too much, and we need to look for ball movement. Players have to understand that’s what’s going to happen.”

Understanding and adapting are two totally separate things, however. Jackson, with his ability to pass, should be able to rapidly find his equilibrium in the new system. Maggette, on the other hand, has shown no such proclivity. In addition, he’s spent the majority of his NBA lifetime — five full seasons with the Clippers — following the densely detailed stylings of Mike Dunleavy, Sr., a guy who is so regimented, Hans Gruber could’ve based an elaborate heist on his tendencies.

Can a guy whose game is so dependent on isolation plays — “It was a 98 percent iso team. They dropped it down, they posted up, they isoed. That’s all they did,” Jackson said of the Clippers — remake himself this radically? Can he drop a half-decade of conditioning on a dime?

“He’s the coach and this is what he wants to do, and I think as a player, you have to make adjustments,” Maggette said. “I think we’re really trying to do that. I think everyone is really buying into it. At the end of the day, you want to buy into whatever philosophy it takes to win. And the past couple games, we’ve won by this new philosophy. Hopefully, we can keep it up and just be a better team.”

On that last point, Nelson and Maggette agree.

“We want to be a good basketball team, I think is the main thing,” Nelson said. “And we haven’t been up to this point. So we’re working hard to become a better team. If that results in wins, that’s fine.

“But at least let’s play the game the right way.”

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net