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SAN FRANCISCO — The highlights of the Stephen Curry 3-pointers, Robert Williams’ blocked shots and, now, Andrew Wiggins‘ dunks, continue to run as the premier moments in the 2022 NBA Finals.

Celtics coach Ime Udoka keeps trying to tell everyone they’re missing the point.

The Golden State Warriors are one win from claiming another title after a 104-94 Game 5 victory over the Boston Celtics Monday night. But the Warriors are not ahead 3-2 because they’re winning the anticipated battle of the series — Boston’s relentless and expertly constructed No. 1 defense going against the historic shooting wizard and his brothers in arms — but because of the exact opposite.

These Finals are being won at the other end of the court, the Warriors’ defense suffocating the Celtics and negating Boston’s game plan.

And that’s how fans who were pouring out of Chase Center Monday night explained it, too, after watching Curry go 0-for-9 on 3-pointers, the first time in four years and 233 games he didn’t make a triple.

“I know that’s the thing people notice at first, consistently, how well I shoot my ball, how I shoot my shots, that flair,” Curry said. “I can’t control the narratives however people talk about the game. When you watch the game, it’s not just about that. … I think we are [the] No. 2 defense for a reason.”

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Udoka, the Celtics’ first-year coach, did make some adjustments to his defensive game plan against Curry, namely having his big men crowd him more after screens and employing more switches to discourage the kind of shooting Curry had been displaying in the series.

But he spent more time before Game 5 worrying about Boston’s offense. And as he and his team take the five-hour flight back to the East Coast on Tuesday, he’ll be working on those issues more intently as he prepares for Game 6.

“Again,” Udoka said, repeating himself from last week when he was peppered with questions about Curry. “I don’t know if it was our defense as much as offensive struggles that hurt us tonight.”

When Curry scored 43 points in Game 4 … the Warriors had 107 as a team. Wiggins put up a sublime 26-point effort Monday, which probably could be classified as the best game of his pro career considering the stakes, and the Warriors scored … 104.

In Game 2, their other win, they scored 107. They are averaging 105 points per game in this series, 10 fewer than they scored in the Western Conference finals against the Dallas Mavericks. Golden State is shooting 45% in the series, which is good, but 7% less than the last round.

The Celtics aren’t shutting down the Warriors, but they are managing on that end.

When the Celtics lost Game 2, they scored … 88 points. In Games 4 and 5, they didn’t crack 100.

The defensively potent Celtics are on the verge of costing themselves a title … on offense.

The Warriors have dedicated themselves to playing rough — and not just because Draymond Green did some minor pushing during dead balls in the first few games. They are refusing to give Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, the Celtics’ primary ball handlers, much space.

The crowding is frustrating Boston. The turnovers, meanwhile, continue to come in droves.

In Game 5, Boston had 18. In a stat that has become ubiquitous, the Celtics are now 1-7 when they turn it over 16 times or more in the postseason and 13-2 with fewer.

The Golden State Warriors lead the Boston Celtics 3-2 in the Finals, with Game 6 Thursday (9 p.m. ET, ABC) in Boston.

GAME 5: GS 104, BOS 94
o Whatever it takes: How Warriors won G5

GAME 4: GS 107, BOS 97
o Curry’s epic game changes series
o Celtics, Warriors need their big men

GAME 3: BOS 116, GS 100
o C’s use size, quickness to regain control
o Curry in unfamiliar underdog territory

GAME 2: GS 107, BOS 88
o Steph was a problem for the Celtics
o C’s lament more third-quarter woes

GAME 1: BOS 120, GS 108
o Boston’s win one year in the making
o Celtics beat Dubs at their game

o Series keys | Experts’ picks | Odds

Every Boston player knows this; Udoka has displayed it in bold type on the scouting reports. Still, they cannot stop themselves.

“We’re hard to beat when we don’t turn the ball over,” said Tatum, who is closing in on the playoff turnover record after adding four to his total Monday to make it 95 in 23 games. “Clearly, we’re easy to beat when we do.”

When the Celtics get sloppy on offense, they regularly look to the officials for answers. Regardless of the accuracy of the calls, it’s not a trend that typically helps them. On Monday, they drew two technical fouls, including one from Udoka, who usually tries to get his players to stop whining and get back on defense after they don’t get a preferred whistle.

Udoka was nearly ejected in the fourth quarter when he pointed at referee Tony Brothers in anger and Brothers confronted him instead of tossing him.

“Probably something we shouldn’t do as much,” Udoka said of the complaining. “And we all did too much.”

The Warriors were routinely in the top five in defensive efficiency between 2015 and 2017 when they won their first two titles with this core. But they finished outside the top 10 in three of the previous four seasons, even when they reached the Finals in 2018 and 2019. They rededicated themselves to it over the past year, with current defensive coordinator and newest Sacramento Kings head coach Mike Brown leading the effort.

The defensive push includes improvement from Wiggins, who has proven to be a potent stopper since getting traded to Golden State, and from Curry, who has gone from being a defensive weak spot to a player who can more than hold his own. This has been a common discussion point over this season, but has never been more valuable than these past two weeks.

It seems the Curry matchup the Celtics are having more difficulty with isn’t when he has the ball, but when the Warriors guard is on defense.

“They were trying to attack [Curry] over and over again and he held up pretty well,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “The key to our game is defense.”

Fatigue could be playing a role, too. After going seven games the past two rounds, the Celtics will have to do it again to win the title. In a telling stat, Tatum is shooting 56% in the first quarters during the Finals but just 24% in the fourth, including 2-of-10 over these past two losses.

But Boston’s issues go deeper than that. The Celtics often have struggled to execute under pressure offensively throughout the season. It’s a flaw that has been frustrating for a team that is so close to its ultimate goal. It’s dangerously close to being a fatal one.

“We’ll regroup and bounce back,” Tatum said, referencing a tone he has gone to as the Celtics have faced elimination games throughout this run. “I’m sure of it.”

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Chicago group Meth are known for their big and burly scorched-earth mash-up of mathcore, noise rock, and ambient music, which they execute with surgical precision. At the center of their dissonant sprawl is vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Seb Alvarez, who started Meth as a solo project before developing the current six-piece iteration. The band put out a compilation of old B sides and demos two years ago, but they haven’t released an album of new material since 2019’s Mother of Red Light. Since 2020, Alvarez has turned his focus toward a new vision: Virgin Mother. As he did with Meth, he launched the project on his own before transforming it into a full-on band, but that’s where the similarities end. Virgin Mother is an experimental-leaning beast whose glitchy maelstrom swaps Meth’s calculated sensibilities for punch-drunk ecstasy.

That anything-goes mindset is at the heart of the three EPs Alvarez plans to self-release this year. The first, last month’s Marrow, is a breakneck slice of buzz-saw hardcore that recalls east-coast peers Full of Hell; it features Alvarez on guitar in a lineup that includes members of Frail Body and the Number 12 Looks Like You. The second and latest, Dialect, which Alvarez describes to me over email as a “complete step out of my comfort zone,” stays true to Virgin Mother’s MO of experimenting with new genres. Its four songs transport you to a whole other plane of brutal sound, a warped mind-meld built on propulsive programmed beats, miscellaneous junkyard samples, and a gnarly array of textures, tones, and patterns designed for eardrum-bursting effect. For Dialect, Alvarez leaves the speak-scream vocalizations to friends from Knoll, Retirement Party, and Sender/Receiver while he wrangles knob-twiddling din and synth splatter. The aural horror of “Sunder” (with its nails-on-chalkboard squeal) and “The Thing About the Quiet Man” recalls the harrowing clatter and shriek of early Wolf Eyes; on the beats-driven “Prominent Person(s) Dead in Plane Crash” and “Melt,” Alvarez and company channel the thumping techno-damaged doom-and-gloom grind of the Body. With the third EP, Woe, slated for August release and a full-length, Mourning Ritual, set for late September, Virgin Mother are becoming a force to be reckoned with in the noise and metal communities—and they’re doing it at a furiously prolific clip.

Virgin Mother’s Dialect is available through Bandcamp.

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SAN FRANCISCO — One game after an epic 43-point and 10-rebound performance, Stephen Curry watched his all-time streak of 233 consecutive games with a made 3-pointer come to a stunning end in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday night.

Curry went 0-for-9 from 3, but the Golden State Warriors picked their star up and secured a pivotal 104-94 win over the Boston Celtics at Chase Center.

Curry, who finished the night with 16 points and eight assists, amassed his all-time streak of 233 games with a 3-pointer made over the regular season and playoffs. Now he returns to Boston for Thursday’s Game 6, looking to clinch another world championship and start a new 3-pointer streak.

“Whether Steph gets 43, 10, 4, or whether he finishes with 16-for-22 shooting — a win is a win,” teammate Draymond Green said.

“… He was 0-for-9 from 3. He’s going to be livid going into Game 6, and that’s exactly what we need.”

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Since 2013, Curry has had only nine games in which he failed to hit a 3-pointer. But his track record has been to bounce back big time from rare outings like these. The most prolific 3-pointer shooter in NBA history has averaged 4.4 3-pointers per game and 46% 3-point shooting in the next game after not making a 3, according to ESPN Stats & Information research. That includes a then-NBA record 13 3-pointers in November 2016 against the New Orleans Pelicans.

The last time Curry did not make a 3 in a game was on Nov. 8, 2018, against the Milwaukee Bucks.

“Keep shooting,” Curry said of his mentality when he comes off games like this one. “Very simple. Like there’s never — I’m not afraid to go 0-for-whatever because I’m going to keep shooting and taking shots that you normally feel like you can make. And I’ve responded well when I’ve had games like that from the 3-point line.

“But I’ve never — I don’t think I’ve ever been happier after a 0-for-whatever type of night, just knowing the context of the game, the other ways you tried to impact the game and the fact that you had four guys step up in meaningful ways to help us win offensively.”

Curry will trade the streak for a win in the NBA Finals that puts the Warriors one victory away from their fourth title in eight seasons.

He was thrilled to watch Andrew Wiggins produce a critical double-double for the second straight game, finishing with 26 points and 13 rebounds. And Klay Thompson picked up the 3-point shooting slack by making five and finishing with 21 points.

“We’re never stressed or worried about No. 30,” Thompson said. “He has done so much and elevated this franchise to a place where it was hard to even imagine that he has leeway, and he can have a bad night. I just know he’ll respond. He’s one of the greatest competitors I’ve ever been around. And he’s a perfectionist, like myself. I know he’ll be thinking about the shots he missed. And that’s a good thing, because Thursday, hopefully, most of the time, he regresses to the mean, and it’s scary when he does.”

Curry owns the two longest streaks of consecutive games with a made 3-pointer in the regular season and playoffs at 233 (2018-22) and 196 (2014-16). Jordan Clarkson is third all-time with 101 consecutive games (2020-21).

“The man is a magician with the ball in his hands,” Thompson said. “He just redefined what the point guard position is capable of … he really is a transcendent talent that we’ll never see again.”

Even though Curry’s streak was snapped, he was still sending a message in his postgame news conference when he arrived to the podium in a T-shirt that read “Ayesha Curry CAN Cook.” That was in response to a Boston establishment that had written the message “AYESHA CURRY CAN’T COOK” on a board outside its doors.

What Boston really doesn’t want to see in Game 6 is Chef Curry cooking again. Curry said “there’s a fire burning” after Game 5.

“Of course it bothers me as a shooter,” Curry said. “You want to impact the game that way. But thankfully that’s not the only thing that you do out there on the court.”

“Obviously, track record says I shoot the ball better the next game,” Curry added. “Looking forward to that bounce-back.”

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