For three quarters on Sunday afternoon at Chase Center, Brandin Podziemski looked like he was trapped in the wrong universe.
The shots that normally fall with rhythm and certainty kept bouncing away. The lanes felt crowded. The timing was off by half a beat. And with Golden State missing Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler III, Kristaps Porziņģis and Draymond Green, the Warriors didn’t have the luxury of waiting for a supporting character to “eventually” arrive.
Then the fourth quarter opened, and it was like someone cut to a different movie.
Podziemski transformed from out-of-sync to unstoppable, scoring 15 of his 18 points in the final period and spearheading the Warriors’ late surge in a 128–117 win over the Denver Nuggets. He didn’t just heat up, he went full supernova: 6-for-6 shooting in the fourth, with the kind of clean, immediate shot-making that makes an arena stop thinking and start believing.
If the first three quarters were Bruce Banner pacing in a lab, the fourth was the Hulk bursting through the wall.
The numbers read like a comic-book origin sequence. Podziemski finished with 18 points, a career-high 15 rebounds and nine assists – one assist shy of a triple-double – while the Warriors detonated from deep with 21 made threes in total. Against a Denver team powered by Nikola Jokić’s towering triple-double (35 points, 20 rebounds, 12 assists), Golden State won the game the way the Warriors always dream of winning it: with movement, volume, and a fourth-quarter spell where the rim looked like it had magnets.
This is where the “two-faced” part comes in, at least as a shooter. Through the first three quarters, Podziemski was searching. But he never disappeared from the game. He rebounded. He pushed pace. He kept making connective reads that held the Warriors’ offense together while the main engine sat in street clothes. In a matchup that threatened to tilt the moment Denver climbed back, his impact didn’t wait for his jumper to cooperate.
And when it finally did cooperate, it did so with dramatic flair.
The most cinematic stretch came as Golden State slammed the door with a decisive finish, outscoring Denver 35–16 over the final 13 minutes, fueled by the kind of Podziemski run that turns a box score into a story. He scored 12 of his 18 points in the final five minutes, the exact kind of late-game burst that feels less like “shot-making” and more like a switch being flipped in the middle of a chase scene.
Afterward, Podziemski gave it a name that fits the way it looked: “flow state.” He described the sensation as the game slowing down, the last couple of threes feeling almost like slow motion.
That’s the factual version. The fun version is this: somewhere late in the third, in the tiny gap between one missed three and the next defensive possession, you could imagine the off-screen montage. The locker-room hallway. The phone buzzing. The timeline doing what timelines do. The mentions chirping. The doubters typing in all caps.
Did he actually check Twitter? No idea, and it wouldn’t be fair to claim he did. But the fourth quarter played out like he’d read every last tweet and decided to answer them all at once.
The Warriors, as a team, did the same. Denver can live with Jokić being brilliant; Denver cannot live with Golden State turning the game into a three-point storm. The Warriors outscored the Nuggets 63–24 from beyond the arc, an outrageous gap that made everything else feel secondary, even Jokić’s masterpiece.
Podziemski was the face of that swing, the unexpected hero in a lineup missing its headliners. For one quarter, he played like a character who’d been written into the script as “spark plug,” then rewrote his own role into something bigger: the closer, the catalyst, the guy in the final act who walks through the smoke untouched.
In the NBA, everybody gets got sometimes. Everybody misses. Everybody runs into a cold stretch that makes the game feel loud and unforgiving. What separates the memorable nights from the forgettable ones is what happens after the struggle, whether a player stays stuck in it, or turns it into fuel.
On Sunday, Podziemski did the Marvel thing.
He didn’t just find his shot.
He found his other self.
