In November 2018, in the middle of what was to become a four-loss streak and a week off the notorious failure between Draymond Green and Kevin Durant, Steve Kerr told reporters that his Golden State Warriors were finally getting a taste. of the “real NBA.”
“We’ve had such a fascinating existence for the last four seasons,” Kerr said. “This is the most difficult section we have been to. This is the real NBA. We haven’t been in the real NBA in the last few years. We were in that dream. So now we are facing real difficulties and we have to get out of it ourselves. “
Kerr’s opinion was fair enough. The last threads of Kevin Durant’s era were being erased. Injuries occurred. Maybe the fairytale part of the story is over. But this Warriors team, despite the little “trouble”, was still a great team of all time. They were certainly the best team in the league and the undisputed favorite to win everything.
This has never been the case. I don’t care what the odds say at different times or even what they say about opening the finals, whether 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 take advantage of – or at least closer to – margins, because Durant is gone and Splash Brother’s superpowers from the past have been pulled out and recycled into real human parts.
This only makes this achievement more impressive.
Do you want trouble? Let’s start with Curry, who had the worst regular shooting season of his career before missing the last three weeks with a sprained leg ligament.
How about Draymond Green, who missed two months from early January to mid-March with a bad drive in his back, a period during which the Warriors looked like a positively mediocre team.
Clay Thompson missed more than two calendar years with a torn ACL and a torn Achilles and shot 38.5 percent of three of the 32 games in his regular season since his return, which, like Curry, is the lowest score in his career.
These guys aren’t the players they were before, or at least they weren’t this season. That doesn’t mean they aren’t great yet. All this is in relation to the impossibly high standard they have set. Curry was the second team in the All-NBA. Green would have been Defender of the Year if he hadn’t been hurt. But they are not the boys they were in the first few chapters of the dynasty.
These 2014-19 boys were from the other world. These boys could erase all the sins they had committed before with a five-minute 3-point nuclear shot that evoked images of Michael J. Fox, who becomes a wolf.
They are still a threat to have one of these nights every night. Thompson did so on Thursday, scoring eight 3s on the road to 32 points. But you can no longer count on it. The Warriors were the league’s 16th ranked striker this season.
These first two post-season series with Durant on board, the Warriors surpassed their opponents with a combined 23.6 points per 100 possessions. This Warriors team came into play 5 on Friday with a net rating of plus 4.8 and it is against a Denver team that misses its second and third best player, and a Grizzlies team that did not have Ja Morant for the last three games in the series.
Thompson is not close to the defender, nor to the regular shooter that he was before the injury. Curry is 34 years old. Gone are the days when Golden State ran the Border Hall of Fame in Andre Iguodala, in the midst of its defensive and playmaking forces, as the sixth man. This version of Iggy is the shell of his previous self and was not played from game 3 of the first round.
You hear people talking about “champion DNA” and here’s what it looks like; a fireball that continues to win at the elite level after falling from 100 mph on the radar 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 greatest archers in history throwing blows at the whole building, or when the defense for all time can and often does suffocate the lives of opponents almost on call. but it’s certainly not the challenge this team faces this season, when the margin of error was lower than at any other time in previous playoff series.
Warriors have always been and still are a highly qualified team, but this team had to find other, less spectacular ways to win. Curry made up for his fight with 3 points, penetrating – and finishing – the fight with a better than 60 percent clip of 3-10 feet in the playoffs, the best number in his career. Keven Looney made 22 fights in the clincher of Game 6 over Memphis and 18 fights in the clincher of Game 5 over Dallas. Jordan Poole shot 53 percent in the first three playoff series of his career.
And what can we say about Andrew Wiggins? This is a man who was considered to have one of the worst contracts in the league in Minnesota, and he became an All-Star for these Warriors, thriving as a minor scorer and taking on Thompson as a certain defender against elite goal scorers on the perimeter.
Here’s how to win without superpowers. Everyone gets involved. This includes the front office that trades for Wiggins and made some key signatures. They found a gem in Gary Peyton II. They resisted the desire to exchange Poole or Jonathan Cumming, or even Moses Moody or James Wiseman, building their bridge to the next era without sacrificing the championship potential of the current core. At the end of the day, the Warriors, albeit with fewer fireworks, gave a rating for the post-season offensive in line with Durant’s years.
The Warriors still need four more wins for the fourth championship in the Kerr era, and indeed this is an organization that expects to win everything. If they lose in the finals, they will not consider this season a success. But from the outside, it’s impossible for this achievement not to rank right there with the best of this era, no matter how the next series goes.
When Durant left and Thompson came back super rusty, and Curry and Green began to show signs of aging, at least it seemed to me that the Warriors needed a big deal to get back into the championship talk. How dare I question any team with Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Clay Thompson, let alone one coached by Steve Kerr. For years, the mesmerizing skill of this team has largely masked his rough, hard, furiously proud and competitive nature, but now these traits are more obvious and necessary than ever. These guys are just winners. Clear and simple. And they are not ready yet.
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