Matt Steinmetz

For the second straight year, the Boston Celtics came into Oracle Arena and beat the Warriors. On Wednesday night, the Celtics were terrific for much of the fourth quarter and took advantage of a strange Golden State lineup to earn a 99-86 win.

The Celtics handed the Warriors their first loss at Oracle last season on April 1. The Warriors started the 2015-2016 season by winning their first 36 games in Oakland.

LINK TO “WARRIORS WRAPUP,” THE POSTGAME SHOW ON 95.7-FM.

The Warriors led 79-78 with seven-plus minutes left but that’s when everything fell apart and fell apart in a big way. The Celtics outscored the Warriors 15-0 to take a 93-79 lead and that was pretty much that. The Warriors committed eight of their 18 turnovers in the fourth quarter.

On the floor for a good chunk of that run was: Stephen Curry, Ian Clark, Patrick McCaw, Andre Iguodala and James Michael McAdoo. That’s not the kind of lineup you’d expect in an important game (the Spurs are creeping) in the final six minutes. But coach Steve Kerr said it was about getting his players rest, particularly amid this tough stretch of eight games in eight different cities.

LINK TO “SAL AND STEINY PODCAST,” NO. 91: Warriors’ struggles without Durant, advice for young people starting out in media, March Madness coming.

The Warriors went just 6-for-30 from 3-point range, and Curry once again struggled, going just 2-for-9 from beyond the arc. Over the past six games, Curry is 17-for-68 from beyond the arc — just 25 percent. For the season, Curry’s 3-point percentage has dropped to .397, which would be his worst shooting season, by far, in his career from beyond the arc.

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Warriors fans know that Andre Iguodala comes in fits and spurts. When he’s good, he’s been really good. And when he’s been bad, well, he still has been relatively OK — because he’s able to help a team in multiple ways.

The issue, though, with Iguodala is that he sometimes doesn’t impact games consistently enough. He tends to float a little bit. And there have also been times when he’s been downright reluctant to shoot the ball. But without Kevin Durant, Iguodala may have to try to interject himself a little more when it comes to scoring.

That’s what he did in the Warriors’ 119-111 win over the Hawks in Atlanta on Monday. Iguodala scored a season-high 24 points, to go along with five rebounds and four assists in 34 minutes, just one night after logging 30 minutes against the Knicks.

LINK TO ‘WARRIORS WRAPUP,’ THE POSTGAME SHOW FROM WARRIORS AT HAWKS.

The Warriors (52-11) also got contributions from backups Ian Clark and David West, both of whom chipped in with 10 points each.

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Sometimes it’s easy to look back on a season and pinpoint or figure out exactly when something went wrong … or what went right. The problem is, when you’re actually going through that period, in real time, during the season, you may not actually realize it.

Last year, the Warriors lost to the Cavaliers in seven games, and their enduring an autopsy that goes on to this day. You can look back and find some causes for the defeat, or so it goes.Clearly Draymond Green’s one-game suspension altered the series, but that’s not what we’re getting at.

We all knew when that happened, trouble was brewing for the Warriors. Not just because they’d be without Green for a critical Game 5, but because we knew something else was happening: The players who remained were getting worn out

When the Warriors won 24 games last year to start the season, it got the year off to a resounding start. They kept up a record-setting pace as the season went on at some point the idea of winning 73 games — or one more game than the 1996-97 Bulls (72-10) — came into the equation. Whether they talked about it or not or whether it entered their minds only once in a while, that notion likely affected the way they played.

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