In November 2018, in the midst of what would become a streak of four straight losses and a week off the infamous Draymond Green-Kevin Durant explosion, Steve Kerr told reporters that his Golden State Warriors were finally getting a taste of “the real NBA.”
“We’ve had such a lovely existence the last four seasons,” Kerr explained. “This is the hardest stretch we’ve been on. This is the real NBA. We haven’t been in the real NBA in years. We’ve been in this dream. So now we’re facing a real adversity and we’ve to go out ourselves. “
Kerr’s point was fair enough. The last threads of Kevin Durant’s era were ripping apart. The wounds were emerging. Maybe the fairy tale part of the story was over. But that Warriors team, despite a bit of “adversity,” was still a great team of all time. They were probably the best team in the league and the clear favorite to win it all.
At no point was this season like that. I don’t care what the odds have said at various times, or even what they will say to open the Finals, either against Boston or Miami. And yet here they are, in their sixth final in the last eight years. For the Warriors, this is the real NBA, where an imperfect team has to establish edge advantages, or at least closer, because Durant is gone and the Splash Brother superpowers of the past have been eliminated and recycled into real ones. human parts.
It just makes this success more impressive.
Do you want adversity? Let’s start with Curry, who had by far the worst regular shooting season of his career before missing the last three weeks with a sprained ankle.
How about Draymond Green, who missed two months from early January to mid-March with a bad record on his back, a period during which the Warriors looked like a positively mediocre team.
Klay Thompson missed more than two calendar years with a broken ACL and broken Achilles and shot 38.5 percent of 3 more than 32 regular-season games on his return, which, like Curry, marks the record. lowest of his career.
These guys aren’t the players they were before, or at least they weren’t this season. That’s not to say they’re not great yet. All of this is relative to the impossibly high standard they have set. Curry was the second All-NBA team. Green would have been the Defensive Player of the Year if he hadn’t been hurt. But it is not the boys who were in the early chapters of the dynasty.
Those guys from 2014-19 were from another world. Those guys could erase all the sins they had previously committed with a five-minute nuclear stretch of three-point firing that evoked images of Michael J. Fox turning into the wolf.
They are still a threat, one night, of having one of those nights. Thompson did so on Thursday, hitting eight 3s en route to 32 points. But you can’t depend on that anymore. The Warriors were the 16th ranked attack in the league this season.
Those first two postseason races with Durant on board, the Warriors outscored their opponents by a total of 23.6 points for every 100 possessions. This Warriors team entered the game in the fifth game on Friday with a net high of 4.8, and that’s against a Denver team that lost its second and third best player and a Grizzlies team that didn’t count on Ja Morant during the last three games of the series. .
Thompson is not close to the defender, nor the constant shooter, who was before the injuries. Curry is 34 years old. Gone are the days when Golden State was ending a member of the Hall of Fame bordering on Andre Iguodala, at the height of his defensive and playing powers, as a sixth man. This version of Iggy is a shell of his old and has not played since Game 3 of the first round.
You hear about “championship DNA” and that’s what it looks like; a fireball launcher continues to gain to an elite level after dropping from 100 mph with the radar gun to 94 or 95, which is still great, but not 100.
I don’t necessarily mean that it’s easy to win when you have three of the best shooters in history throwing shots from all over the building, or when an all-time defense can, and often does, stifle the lives of opponents. almost a call-up, but it is certainly not the challenge this team has faced this season, when the margin of error was less than at any other time in the previous qualifiers.
The Warriors have always been, and still are, an extremely skilled team, but this team has had to find other less spectacular ways to win. Curry has made up for his 3-point struggles by penetrating – and finishing in the paint better than a 60 percent 3 to 10-foot clip in the playoffs, by far the best number of his career. Kevon Looney had 22 rebounds in the 6th game clincher over Memphis, and 18 rebounds in the 5th game clincher over Dallas. Jordan Poole is shooting 53 percent during the first three playoff series of his career.
And what about Andrew Wiggins? He was considered one of the worst league contracts in Minnesota, and has become an All-Star of these Warriors, thriving as a side scorer and taking over from Thompson as a designated defender against the elite perimeter scorers.
This is how you win without superpowers. Everyone participates. This includes the reception, which he changed to Wiggins and made some key signings. They discovered a gem in Gary Payton II. They resisted the need to swap Poole or Jonathan Kuminga, or even a Moses Moody or James Wiseman, building their bridge into the next era without sacrificing the championship potential of the current core. After all, the Warriors, though with fewer fireworks, are making an offensive postseason score in line with the Durant years.
The Warriors still need four more wins for a fourth championship in the Kerr era, and in fact, this is an organization that hopes to win it all. If they lose in the Finals, this season will not be considered a success. But from the outside, it is impossible not to classify this achievement right there with the best of this era, no matter how this next series goes.
When Durant left and Thompson came back super rusty and Curry and Green started to show signs of aging, it was, at least to me, that it started to seem like the Warriors needed a big exchange to get back to the championship conversation. How dare I question any team with Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson, let alone one coached by Steve Kerr. For years, the fascinating skill of this team has largely masked his brave, hard-minded, fiercely proud, and competitive nature, but now these traits are more obvious and necessary than ever. These guys are just winners. Simple and straightforward. And they are not finished yet.