As I predicted last week, the Warriors lost a few in a row during a tough stretch against Denver, Houston and Orlando.

What I didn’t expect is that they would take the defending Eastern Conference champions to the wire without Anthony Morrow. And that they would come within a few different bounces of the ball from knocking off the Rockets. Shame on me, I guess, for assuming that the Warriors wouldn’t be able to hang with teams that are deeper, more experienced, and generally more talented.

Call me crazy, but I really don’t think it matters anymore how good the opponent is – the Warriors play a different breed of basketball that makes it hard to determine how they will perform on any given night.

Let me explain: conventional wisdom would tell you that the Magic have the best record in the eastern conference and have a huge size advantage over the Warriors, and thus should handle them easily. Instead, the Warriors (and Monta Ellis specifically) were able to drive to the lane, get Dwight Howard and Marcin Gortat in foul trouble, and force Orlando to play the quick tempo. Luckily for the Magic, Vince Carter is comfortable with that pace and was able to carry the Magic throughout the 2nd half.

Their up-tempo game is a slightly different version than the one used by the 2008 Warriors. The Warriors of yesteryear created fast-break points by relying on Andris Biedrins and Ronny Turiaf to block shots. This year, the Warriors are scoring an incredible amount of points off of steals. Tonight against the Nets, Monta Ellis added four steals to put him back on top of the lead league, and C.J. Watson added five steals of his own.

Steals are incredibly exciting. For that reason, I’ll be paying close attention to pretty much every Warriors game for the rest of this season. If they are out of contention, they’ll still have a shot to win on any given night against any team in the league if they can play their style of basketball. They can get big men into foul trouble, they can hit three pointers, and they can cause turnovers.

Here’s the downside: they can also turn the ball right back over. The Warriors now lead the NBA in turnovers, with 16.6 per game. And they still will struggle to grab rebounds. That was the case on Monday, when Kevin Durant and the suddenly interesting OK Thunder dominanted the boards 57-37. The rebounds are not just coming from big men – rookie James Harden (6’5) had nine boards along with his career high 26 points.

The next few games against mid-level eastern conference teams will say a lot about where the Warriors are headed this season. We already know that they won’t be a top contender in the west, but they’ll need to run off a few wins here in a relatively easy stretch in order to stay in contention at all.