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It’s hard to remember a team in recent history that won the NBA Finals, yet faced so many disparaging remarks about their title.
Despite owning the best record in the league last season – while playing in the brutally competitive and deep Western Conference – and then going on to win the championship, the Golden State Warriors struggled to win respect for what they achieved in 2014-15.
During the regular season, the popular narrative for detractors was that teams like the Warriors – built on perimeter shooting – don’t win the championship.
As the playoffs started, the Warriors’ lack of Finals experience, and a reliance on ‘small ball’, also became points of contention.
History now shows all those concerns lacked merit, as Golden State compiled a historically great regular season, with a 67-15 record, before going on to win the championship, losing just five games in the post-season.
Additionally, point guard Steph Curry was named the season’s MVP, Steve Kerr was the runner-up for the Coach of the Year award, and general manger Bob Myers was nominated as the Executive of the Year.
From start to finish, they were the best team in the league, and were deemed to have the best player, the second-best coach, and the best management decision-maker. Any way you want to cut it, the Warriors’ season was an overwhelming success.
Yet questions remain over Golden State’s victory, with many feeling the team got ‘lucky’, particularly in the playoffs, when they faced teams weakened by injury, or had the supposed fortune to avoid other talented teams altogether.
Cleveland Cavaliers fans will be the first to remind you that their team strongly challenged the Warriors in the NBA Finals – eventually losing in six games – despite being without two of their top-three players in Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving. They’re not just two of Cleveland’s best players either; we’re talking about two of the best players in the league, so the Cavs fans make a valid point.
Meanwhile, even the Warriors’ path to the Finals was deemed relatively easy.
They beat the eighth-ranked New Orleans Pelicans 4-0 in the first round, then defeated the Memphis Grizzlies 4-2 in the second round, with Memphis’s star guard Mike Conley nursing a serious facial injury. They then faced a surprise opponent in the Houston Rockets during the Western Conference Finals, and spanked them 4-1.
Breaking those opponents down, you can’t blame the Warriors for drawing the Pellies in the first round, for that’s the reward for dominating the regular season: you play a lowly ranked team first up.
In the second round, Conley is arguably the Grizzlies’ most important player, so the Warriors certainly copped a break by combating him when he wasn’t at full fitness.
As for getting the Rockets in the Western Conference Final, the Warriors could only play the opposition in front of them, and it’s not their fault other teams failed to advance that far when they probably should have.
But try telling the Los Angles Clippers that.
Clippers coach Doc Rivers told Grantland: “You need luck in the West. Look at Golden State. They didn’t have to play us, or the Spurs.”
Wags everywhere joined in, too – just one small example:
Warriors lucky they ain't play Spurs
— Rxshvne • (@_roshaneJoel) June 17, 2015
In the same feature, Clippers shooting guard JJ Redick said: “Golden State was the best team in the league, but they also had everything go right for them. They didn’t have one bad break.”
I don’t think the Warriors feared playing the Clippers, and perhaps if the Clips concentrated on not choking against Houston, they wouldn’t feel the need to put their own personal asterisk against Golden State’s title. As Warriors shooting guard Klay Thompson so eloquently – yet provocatively – stated: “I wanted to play the Clippers last year, but they couldn’t handle their business.”
Fair point.
Curry summed it up best: “I apologise for us being healthy, I apologise for us playing who was in front of us. I apologise for all the accolades we received as a team and individually. I’m very, truly sorry, and we’ll rectify that situation this year.”
However, Golden State definitely dodged a bullet by avoiding the defending champion San Antonio Spurs, who lost to the Clippers in the first round in a classic, seven-game series, due to a seeding quirk.
Facing the Cavs in the Finals without two All Star-calibre players can only be labeled fortuitous as well.
So on top of the Conley injury, it’s hard to argue the Warriors didn’t have some luck.
To be fair though, every single team that has lifted the Larry O’Brien trophy has had a little bit of good fortune. Whether it’s a significant injury to an opponent, not facing an opponent altogether, crucial referee decisions going your way, or simply your own health, luck is a key ingredient to winning the title, and the Warriors certainly had theirs.
There was also an undercurrent of opinion that implied the team merely rode some brilliant shooting all the way to the title.
It’s an absurd comment to make considering the Warriors played 103 games in total, and won 83 of them. With a sample size that large, a hot streak ceases to be a streak, and is simply the norm.
So let’s put that one to bed right now: Golden State didn’t simply catch fire and ride some hot hands to the championship.
Apart from the fact such a narrative is an insult to the excellent offence the Warriors ran all season, it also ignores the fact that the Dubs’ backcourt of Curry and Thompson are elite-level shooters, and will be for their careers.
The form on Curry’s jumpshot – in particular – is textbook, and there is a reason most of the greatest shooters of all time have such classical form: the textbook is designed to teach you the fundamentals that will give you the optimal technique to achieve the optimal results.
Curry’s shooting is the key to everything the Dubs do on offence, even on the rare possessions where he doesn’t touch the ball, and that marksmanship from the perimeter is not going anywhere.
The bottom line is that I expect the Warriors to shoot just as well this year, and therefore for the team to perform just as well.
It remains to be seen whether they will receive the same amount of luck though.
Hopefully the Warriors will get to face the Clippers and Spurs in the playoffs this season. The Clippers, so they can shut their arrogant mouths up. The Spurs, because it would be an amazing series, considering San Antonio’s impressive off-season.
And should the Warriors get past the Spurs, no doubt a rematch with Cleveland in the NBA Finals awaits them. Hopefully the Cavs will be at full fitness on this occasion, because the true winners in that match-up would be us, the fans.
Will the Warriors be lucky again this season?
I have no idea. But I do know they’ll be just as good.