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I feel sorry for the Denver Nuggets. They don’t deserve what’s likely coming their way Friday night.

With 18 games remaining in a regular season that has been characterized by overt indifference and amid a stretch where they have lost five of their last eight contests, the Golden State Warriors have decided to — if I may steal a bit of 2018 parlance — “flip the switch”.

“It’s time,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said Thursday. “It’s time for us to turn it up, to lock in.”

“We’ve had to pace ourselves somewhat the last two seasons — and I think you can tell. That’s over with.”

That’s not public relations spin, either — the Warriors collectively came to the conclusion after a come-to-Jesus meeting following the team’s 33-point home loss to the Celtics on Tuesday.

The Warriors left that meeting with goals.

“We need to execute better,” Draymond Green said. “We need to defend better. And we need to get home court (advantage in the playoffs).”

Actually, scratch that.

“Don’t need to get home court, but we want to get home court.”

The Warriors are preposterously — perhaps unfairly — talented, they’re healthy, and now, after another embarrassing home loss, they say that they’re truly motivated to actually care about regular season games.

Pride, it seems, has kicked in for the back-to-back champions, and the pride of a champion is a powerful force.

I would not want to be the next team the Warriors face.

And as fate would have it, that next opponent is the team’s top challenger for the top seed in the Western Conference playoffs, the Nuggets, who sit in second place in the NBA’s superior circuit, one game behind of the Warriors.

Isn’t that convenient?

The Nuggets might have the second-best record in the Western Conference at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that they’re the second-best team in the West. The plucky upstart is yet to graduate to the vaunted status of “Golden State rival”. And they’re highly unlikely to achieve that status this year, either — given the team’s playoff inexperience, few around the league believe that Denver is a viable title contender.

All this to say that a motivated Warriors team should be able to run these guys off the court, the way they did when the two teams met on Jan. 15 in Denver, a 142-111 evisceration at altitude.

That win was part of the Warriors’ last stretch of engaged basketball — one that came after their loss to James Harden and the Rockets on Jan. 3 and spanned the six games leading up to DeMarcus Cousins’ insertion in the lineup. The Warriors won all six, averaging 133 points per contest with a gaudy plus—18.4 net rating.

When Cousins showed up for the Warriors’ game against the Clippers in Los Angeles and scored 14 points in 15 minutes, it appeared as if the NBA’s 29 other teams’ worst nightmare had come to life — the Warriors looked unbeatable.

Indeed, the Warriors won 11 straight games and 15 of 16, but perhaps that lulled the team into a false sense of security. Bad habits started to show up again, and those, paired with the team’s challenge of integrating the still-recovering Cousins into the fold and injuries have resulted in the Warriors winning only three games since the All-Star break.

The clear deficiency, as of late, has been on the defensive side of the court.

The Warriors have the league’s 25th ranked defense over the last month, allowing 1.13 points per possession since Feb. 8.

A glaring part of that problem has been Cousins, who is increasingly being targeted by opponents, particularly with pick-and-rolls.

But Green defended his teammate Wednesday.

“Our defense has been horse(excrement) no matter who’s in there.”

The issue behind the nowhere-near-championship-level defense, Green said, is effort — and that’s about to be rectified.

“We just gotta compete. We compete, can’t nobody beat us,” Green said. “And even sometimes when we don’t compete, people still can’t beat us.”

“But we haven’t been competing. It starts with competing at the level we need to compete. Then we can kind of get a better read on what’s working and what isn’t. But right now, we can’t get a read.”

The Warriors are also feeling the pang of sending Oracle Arena out on a high note. Golden State has lost five games at home by 20-or-more points this season, something that even a year ago would have been unthinkable.

Kerr said that the Warriors’ players suggested to the coaching staff that winning home-court advantage in the Western Conference should be a goal for the rest of the season. After all, that’s a much easier metric to track than “get better every day”.

But first, this team will have to re-establish that home-court advantage.

“We talked about this being our last season at Oracle, in Oakland, the very first night that we met, back in September, at our team dinner that we do every year before camp starts — it was a big part of our theme. And we’ve let our fans down many times this year, at home, particularly on nights that are big ones”, Kerr said.

“[That’s] Something we’ve discussed the last two days — what’s our purpose? Why are we doing this? I think we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our fans — particularly our fans in Oakland — to give them our best stuff over our last few months. It’s been lacking, and it’s disappointing, but we have a great opportunity ahead of us to close the season strong and to play well deep into the playoffs — it’s all right there for us.”

Maybe this is all lip service. Perhaps this motivation — like previous interactions this season — will fade after a nice spurt of play and we’ll hear this stuff all over again ahead of the playoffs, the team’s real season. Maybe the team’s Boogie conundrum will need more time to be solved. Perhaps it’s unsolvable.

All we know is that the Warriors plan on coming right to Oracle Arena Friday.

And that if that happens, the Nuggets are likely to get embarrassed. Poor guys.