A testament to a real NBA team: Applauding Golden State’s triumph

With seven minutes left in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, LeBron James hit a 34-foot three-pointer to give Cleveland the lead, and all of a sudden historic improbability began to look like a startling reality.

At that moment, it really felt like James’s cape might have been long enough to carry his wounded, talent-challenged gang of misfits all the way to the biggest upset in NBA Finals history.

And then Stephen Curry said ‘no’.

Immediately after LeBron’s 34-footer so downtown it was from Fisherman’s Wharf, Curry dribbled up the court and reminded everyone that while LeBron’s star is bright enough to occasionally make those impossible threes, Curry makes the impossible from deep seem routine.

A majestic step-back 26-footer from Golden State’s golden child gave the Warriors the lead, and they never relinquished it again in the series. It was the first of three triples Curry hit in the final term, each more breathtaking than the one that preceded it.

Golden State’s title credentials and hardness had been questioned after the first three uneven games of the series, but in the fourth quarter of Game 5, Curry showed that his team was perfectly tough enough, and his demonstration of hardness came with an impossibly soft touch.

For all intents and purposes, the Finals ended that night in Oakland. This battered, fatigued Cleveland team didn’t have two heroic performances left in them, let alone two cross-country flights. They had to compensate for a talent deficit by trying to pick the less lethal of several Golden State poisons on offer, and inevitably they ended up in the emergency ward of Splash.

The Cavs face-guarded Klay Thompson and double-teamed Curry on the pick and roll – they forced the other Warriors to beat them. In the first three games, Golden State’s role players couldn’t get the job done. Andre Igoudala and Harrison Barnes shot with no confidence, Andrew Bogut (remember him?) did nothing but clog valuable space, and Draymond Green had a nervous breakdown in front of a global audience.

Eventually though, as the series wore on, Cleveland’s smoke began to dissipate and their mirrors began to smash. Removing Bogut spaced the floor and increased the tempo, allowing Golden State to play the game on their terms.

The defining image of the series became Draymond Green at the top of the key with paddocks of space in front of him with a 3-on-2 begging. In the first three games that picture was a precursor to passivity, bricked shots and turnovers. In the final three it was the flash of light Cleveland saw just before they died.

LeBron James might be Superman, but these Warriors are The Avengers. The individual brilliance of Stephen Curry is undeniable, but it is accentuated by those around him. Curry took over Game 5, but he got by with a little help from his friends. While Curry was hitting those ungodly triples in the fourth quarter, Draymond Green was playing defiant defence, Klay Thompson was drawing Sandra Bullock-type gravity on offence, Harrison Barnes was crashing the offensive boards, and Andre Igoudala was doing a little bit of everything, as is his custom.

On the other side, Matthew Dellavedova’s lob passes to Maryborough, J.R. Smith’s head-scratching fouls, Iman Shumpert’s aversion to hitting layups, and Mike Miller’s retirement home brochures weren’t providing LeBron with the same comfort.

Lost in the justified furore surrounding LeBron James’s heroism is the fact that he’s not the player he once was.

In a sport where players reach their athletic peaks in their mid-to-late 20s, LeBron will be 31 on December 30. His efficiency has slowly but surely dropped, and while he remains the best the game has ever seen finishing at the rim, he looks exceedingly mortal driving into traffic these days.

In the Finals, James averaged 36 points, 13 rebounds and 9 assists. Six years ago, in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Orlando Magic in another six game series, he averaged a 39-8-8. The difference is that against Orlando he shot 49% and got to the line 16 times a game, while against the Warriors he shot under 40% and averaged ONLY 11 trips to the free throw line.

LeBron used to have the athletic majesty to combine unspeakable raw numbers with impeccable efficiency – but as he has aged, that correlation has become curved.

LeBron wore down as the Finals went on, getting visibly fatigued in fourth quarters, and essentially not playing defence because of his energy-depleting responsibility on the offensive end. 25-year old LeBron might have been able to beat these Warriors, but 31-year old James couldn’t do it without help that he was never going to get. That’s not an indictment on James as a basketball player – it’s a reminder that he’s a human being.

Irrespective of his inefficiency, James was still probably the MVP of these Finals (although I would have given it to Curry – a devastatingly efficient 26-6-5 and the most influential player for the winning team).

As Jeff Van Gundy and Zach Lowe have pointed out, if you replaced James with Carmelo Anthony on this team, would the Cavs have even made the playoffs? The answer is almost assuredly no – and given Anthony’s history with Shumpert and Smith, we can say that with some authority. Entering Game 6, the Cavs with James off the court in the Finals were scoring at an impossibly bad 54 points per 100 possessions. By comparison, Toronto scored at DOUBLE that rate during the regular season.

James did everything humanly possible for his team and while his failure was unfair in respect of his individual efforts, in the broader scheme of things it was largely reassuring. Golden State’s triumph over James was a satisfying reminder that basketball is a team sport.

To go forward in this series, Cleveland had to send basketball 15 years backwards, so to see Golden State eventually fossilise the Cavs’ archaic isolation ball and gang rebounding was to see modernity prosper.

Andre Igoudala should not have won the Finals MVP (although he was excellent – see Tristan Rayner’s fury at the wrong choice of MVP), but his victory was poetically symbolic of what Golden State stands for.

A series of interchangeable parts, Golden State is a team defined by its ability to largely defy definition. They are amorphous – a team that can beat you with suffocating defence, explosive offence, playing big or running small.

Igoudala is essential to this identity – a chameleon who adapts to his role, whether it’s playing lockdown wing defence, freelancing passing lanes, pushing the pace, initiating the offence, wreaking havoc in transition, or knocking down spot-up corner threes. (Or bricking copious free throws).

His willingness to sacrifice his starting position at the start of the season set the tone for the team’s selfless ‘whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ identity. Aristotle would be so proud of you, Andre.

Whether it was Igoudala or David Lee relenting their roles as starters, Andrew Bogut going from defensive player of the year candidate to not playing at all in the final two games of the season, or simply Steph Curry showing pure, unadulterated elation and not the faintest hint of envy at Klay Thompson’s third quarter 37-point explosion against Sacramento, selflessness defined this team all season, and the Basketball Karma gods rewarded Golden State with the greatest gift of all.

There’s a popular anachronism in NBA discourse that ‘the team with the best player’ will generally win.

The 2015 Golden State Warriors are the argument to the contrary, suggesting that ‘the team with the best team’ will win, and win they did.