Straight off the pregame show on TNT:

Charles Barkley: I’m telling you, the Clippers are going to be a surprise team in the West. And C-Webb just bet me, we’re going to bet a nice dinner, that the Clippers are going to have a better record than the Warriors, which is a no-brainer. The Clippers and Oklahoma City are BOTH gonna have a better record than Golden State.

Chris Webber: Oh, wow. The Clippers are real good at being terrible. They’re very consistent, every year. I’ve got Golden State having the better record.

CB: Every now and then, an ugly girl wakes up pretty.

Now, I know Charles is a veteran Warriors-hater — who can forget his promise that Dallas would beat Golden State in the We Believe playoff series? — but this just borders on the ludicrous. The Clippers, with Blake Griffin missing six weeks? The Thunder, who are still even younger than the Warriors?

Hey, Chuck, let me know where I sign up, buddy.

– Geoff

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

Warriors center Ronny Turiaf has an easy fix for Golden State’s problems when it comes to securing defensive rebounds:

“Plain and simple, go get the ball,” Turiaf said. “That’s it.”

Except that hasn’t been it, of course. Not by a long shot.

Including last night’s horrific 20-offensive rebound performance for the Indiana Pacers in their 127-210 victory, Golden State has chalked up a defensive rebound rate (DRR) of just 67.0 percent through its first 26 games.

The DRR — a team’s defensive boards divided by the sum of a team’s defensive boards and the opponents’ offensive rebounds — is a rough ratio of how many defensive rebounds a team gets (it doesn’t include team boards, so it’s not as exact as you would want).

At 67.0, Golden State ranks last in the NBA by a wide, wide margin. There’s a chart to illustrate that point below, but here’s some specifics as well: The Kings are 29th in the league at 70.5 percent and the league average is 73.1. The top-ranked Spurs are at 77.8.

Consider: Even if the Warriors closed half the gap between their DRR and the league average . . . they’d still be the league’s worst, at 70.05. So the data begs the question:

How bad are the Warriors, historically speaking?

Well, how about this: They’re the second-worst defensive rebounding team this century.

OK, I realize the 21st century is only in its ninth year, but still, the last time a team posted a DRR lower than 67.0 was in 1999-2000, when the Dallas Mavericks — put together and coached by familiar, white-haired adherent of small ball by the name of Don Nelson — pulled down 66.1 percent of their opportunities.

In an attempt to solve that team’s failings — both on the floor and at the ticket office — Nelson and new Mavericks owner Mark Cuban brought in a 38-year-old Dennis Rodman. Though the Worm helped somewhat — Dallas’ DRR in 12 games with him was about 3.5 points better than in the 70 without — it wasn’t enough to make it worth dealing with his particular brand of crazy.

I’m sure that Rodman would be game to pull down more NBA coin, but let’s assume for the moment that a washed-up, 47-year-old ex-husband to Carmen Electra isn’t the answer for Nelson & Co. this time around.

What can the Warriors do to solve this problem, which keeps biting them at critical junctures (such as the…

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…