NBA: The Defending Champion Warriors remain unbeaten setting a new NBA record with the most wins to start the new season:

Via NBA dot com’s Scott Howard Cooper:

Now what?

Will it be 34 wins in a row, in any stretch of the schedule?
Seventy wins in all in 2015-16, maybe even 73 for the full-season record?

Or this NBA stuff has become too easy and the Warriors will search for outside challenges? Stephen Curry will break 18 at Pebble Beach. The San Francisco 49ers will name Luke Walton coach — interim coach — and win the Super Bowl. Suddenly, nothing seems impossible.

They play without coach Steve Kerr nearly the first quarter of the season and minus center Andrew Bogut for six games, and wins pile up in historic ways. They fall behind the Clippers by 23 points on the road and not only rally to win late, but then play a good team — the Bulls — on the second night of the back-to-back in Oakland and win that too.

The Warriors let the possibility of the best start ever in the NBA build for several days … and then quickly end the suspense Tuesday night, letting the Los Angeles Lakers hang around Oracle Arena to watch the show.

Yes, Golden State tore through whatever that was masquerading as the Lakers’ defense for a 111-77 victory that moved the defending champions to 16-0, passing the 1993-94 Rockets and 1948-49 Washington Capitols for the record start. Yes, the next four opponents are the Phoenix Suns (Nov. 27, 9:30 p.m. ET, NBA TV), Sacramento Kings (Nov. 28), Utah Jazz (Nov. 30) and Charlotte Hornets (Dec. 2), meaning the streak could still go a while. Three of those four are on the road, yes, but the one home contest, against Sacramento, will be the second game in as many nights.

This has become about the big picture, though. It always has been in the sense that the end of the season is how title contenders will be judged, not the beginning. Walton, en route to becoming the first interim coach ever named Coach of the Month, has made it clear he will rest star players the deeper the Warriors get into the calendar. But the chance for historical context, to become one of the all-time greats, is now in front of them and probably becoming alluring.

That’s what happened with going for the record to start the season, after all, a place in the record books that grew into a conversation piece all around them as each win was checked off until it became motivation. The Warriors made it clear to each other in recent days they wanted 16-0. Something early in the season of a team playing for June had become undeniably important.

“It’s weird because if you’d quizzed anybody on the team at the beginning of the season, one, what the record was and, two, who had it, I’m pretty sure maybe one or two people might have known 15-0 and the two teams that held the record before us,” Curry said after 24 points and nine assists in just 30 minutes, a night of rest of sorts for him.

“But when you get to 11, 12 and you start to hear more about it, the opportunity’s in front of us so why not go after it. We were able to stay focused on the moment every game and get here to 16. I’m sure everybody knows the answer to that question going forward, which is pretty cool.”

So imagine the pull of becoming the second team ever to reach 70 victories or No. 1 itself, the regular-season target of bettering the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls’ mark of 72 wins. (The record streak of 33 in a row by the 1971-72 Lakers is also out there, but allows no room for error for two months. It’s not going to happen.) (Probably.) (Maybe.)

The Warriors need to finish 54-12 (.848) to get to 70, 56-10 (.848) for 72 and the tie with Chicago, and 57-9 (.864) for the record outright. Say they beat the Suns, Kings, Jazz and Hornets — a realistic outcome. The numbers at 20-0 become .806 for 70, .839 for 72 and .855 for 73. They played .817 ball last season.

“Anything’s possible,” Walton said. “We’re getting ready to go on a seven-game, 13-day road trip or something like that. So is it likely? No. But am I going to say it’s not possible? Of course not. Anything’s possible. But I don’t see that happening with the upcoming schedule that we have and players are going to start getting rested soon on back-to-backs as well. We’re not going to be having our normal rotations out there. At some point, we’re not going to make shots. Eventually we will lose.”

Seventy-three is way out there, with Walton tempering the growing excitement, but no longer an unimaginable number.

“We don’t think about it,” Curry said. “I think there’s an appreciation of how hard that is, after what we went through last year, winning 67, and the trend that we’re on right now. The challenge for us is, one, to obviously keep getting better. It’s still Nov. (25th). It’s still early in the year. We’ve got 66 left. But out confidence is high. We have to keep that going but still continue to develop our flow and our execution and our mindset as we go through the season.

“But 72 is a special number. Thirty-three is a special number as well. So there’s obviously still milestone that we can continue to go after. But you go after them by how you approach each day. We’re not going to win 72 on Friday. We’ve got to continue to just stay in the moment. When you stay in the moment good things happen because everybody’s just wrapped up in the process.” Good things like the best start in NBA history. Maybe even better things like the best record for an entire season. Because suddenly, anything’s possible.