Kurtenbach: Warriors-Rockets is mutually assured destruction

Welcome to the playoff series of mutually assured destruction.

The Warriors and the Rockets might be tied at 1-1 in their first-round matchup, but no one has really won anything.

Because the damage to both teams will be so catastrophic by the time this series is over, in as few as three more games or as many as five, there will be little reason to celebrate.

The Warriors are out to break the Rockets’ will.

The Rockets are out to physically break the Warriors.

Oh, and I guess there are basketball games to win, too.

Through two games, both parties are succeeding. (If you can call execution “success.”)

The Warriors keep exposing the Rockets as unready for primetime. They want this young Rockets team –  winners of 52 regular-season games — to question whether they should be in the playoffs. So far, it’s nearly a fair question. A competent operation in Houston would have blown out Wednesday’s game by halftime. Instead, one could argue that the Warriors threw away that game — there were more than a dozen opportunities to make Houston seriously sweat in the second half, which Golden State did not take.

The Rockets, meanwhile, are out for blood and found just enough mental strength to pull away halfway through the fourth quarter in Game 2.

And in that win, they might have flipped the series by flipping Jimmy Butler.

Rockets guard Amen Thompson upended the Warriors’ wing in the first quarter of Wednesday’s Game 2 — an unfortunate (and unintentional) crescendo play to a bumper-car start to the game.

No one was going to come out of Houston unscathed. The Warriors’ bad luck is that their season-changer just so happened to be the one to take the fall.

And what a fall it was: Butler came down directly on his backside so hard it was felt vicariously in living rooms across the country. We’re all going to be sitting funny for a bit after that one.

Butler? Well, we’ll see.

The extent of Butler’s injury wasn’t known after Wednesday’s game, but he’ll undergo medical imaging on Thursday. If the Dubs doctors don’t like what comes back, Butler’s season—and, in turn, the Warriors’—could be over.

As unimpressive as the Rockets might be, it is exceptionally difficult to see the Warriors beating the No. 2 seed in the West sans Butler.

At the same time, I’m not going to stand on a soapbox and complain about the physicality of this series. Are the Rockets playing like goons? You bet. Is it extrajudicial? Absolutely.

But this is the playoffs, and physicality is a hallmark of the far better version of basketball played after game 82 (or 83… or 84…).

The Warriors are doing their best to match Houston’s force — such is the code of champion teams — but the Dubs simply aren’t as long, strong, or mean as Ime Udoka’s Rockets, who would rather take their opponent down than raise their own game.

If this series goes seven games, that final contest might just be a knife fight at center court.

There should be some steam released between now and Saturday’s Game 3. And so much of what the Rockets have done in this series will not fly at Chase Center in San Francisco. That brand of “basketball” does not travel because — right or wrong — games are officiated differently depending on the venue.

But that might not matter for Houston, because Butler went flying on Wednesday,

Without Butler, the Warriors are right back where they were in November and December: They’re lost at best, and a known entity of mediocrity at worst.

Actually, they’re worse than whatever they were before Butler arrived, because they don’t even have the possibility of a good Andrew Wiggins game to delude themselves with.

And the idea of a Jonathan Kuminga breakout went out the window when the fourth-year pro — benched for the last three games — floated through 20-plus minutes of action Wednesday.

The Warriors finally needed him in the only role he’s willing to play — focal point — and he played an entire second quarter without doing anything worthy of committing to memory. You could have easily convinced me that he was on the bench for most of the quarter.

Former Alabama coach Nick Saban’s motto with players was “force me to play you.” Don’t like your opportunity? When you get one — and you’ll get one — make it impossible for me to not give you another, and another, and another.

Kuminga was so lackluster on Wednesday that he forced Warriors coach Steve Kerr to put him back on the bench. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Warriors (once again) nearly made it a respectable game when Kuminga was sitting.

I don’t expect anything from the forward, so it’s impossible to call his effective no-show disappointing, but he was roundly outplayed by Pat Spencer (11 points) and Brandin Podziemski, who was playing through a nasty bout of food poisoning.

It was such an inauspicious game that it legitimately raises the question of whether Kuminga has a role for the remainder of this series if Butler is not able to play.

And if the Warriors are asking that question, isn’t this series already over?

“We’ll see how it all plays out,” Kerr said. “If Jimmy’s out, we’ll have to rethink everything.”

Including predictions that might have been made in this column space after Game 1.