This was a victory for team-building, for the NBA's new school of thought and, simply, basketball as a more beautiful game.
The Golden State Warriors, in winning their first championship in 40 years on Wednesday, put a resounding exclamation point on basketball’s transition into its “pace-and-space” future. The future is here.
The Warriors won by doing everything well, by being the complete team.
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They played league-best defence, with centre Andrew Bogut and forward Draymond Green anchoring from inside a scheme that allowed Golden State’s collection of long-armed wings to interchange at any pace they pleased and stifle the opposition outside. They were comprehensively smothering.
Offensively they were an artwork, MVP Stephen Curry orchestrating a motion-emphasising team that moved in tandem and produced shot after shot from open space. They were dizzying and destructive.
They were able to do these things because they had quality top to bottom and they had players familiar with each other and with the team’s aesthetic.
They had players like former all-stars Andre Iguodala and David Lee, who they didn’t even really need to count on until the finals and a new problem emerged and they were just the tools to resolve it. They had Shaun Livingston, who came off the bench and produced a versatile quality that will rank with some of the great role playing in finals history. They had Green, who played an undersized 6ft 7in power forward when they needed and a really undersized centre when they really needed.
They had, in short, something for everything.
Golden State’s flexibility, in that way, made them nearly unplayable. Their wealth of talent and stylistic fluidity allowed them to deconstruct all comers.
It has been, in many ways, an exquisite thing to watch. The Warriors took the torch the San Antonio Spurs had been holding for 15 years and poured kerosene all over it.
What was most stunning throughout their season-long march to the title is perhaps the totality of their triumph.
They started 21-2. It was clear by Christmas they were, at the least, among the elite few who could hope to win the title at season’s end. They finished well and away league best in the regular season at 67-15. They never faced a Game 7, going 16-5 in the play-offs. Across the year they finished 83-20, the best such start-to-finish showing since Michael Jordan’s 1996/97 Chicago Bulls finished 84-17 en route to the title.
The ESPN analytics website FiveThirtyEight’s all-encompassing Elo Rating measurement now pegs the 2014/15 Golden State Warriors as the second best team of all-time. There’s a long and loud debate to be had about whether they rank just that highly, but there should be no doubt they belong in the conversation. The newly crowned champs exhibited a rare form of team-wide greatness.
Ironically, what made them so all-conquering in 2014/15 may exactly be what makes it hard for them to repeat as champions next year or return to the top at all in the coming few years.
Being so reliant on team-wide quality, by definition, means there are more chances for kinks to emerge in the machine, more possibility this or that departure or this or that injury or this or that regression will be what undermines these Warriors.
With, say, LeBron James, there’s little doubt whatever team he plays for will be elite year to year. With roughly 10 or so important players, each to varying degrees a product of the talents around him, the system is simply harder to maintain.
Injury, in particular, may be their greatest threat to a long reign atop the NBA. In addition to being the best team this year, they were also the healthiest, and that’s not generally a consideration that can be taken for granted.
But Golden State are also a young team. Curry is 27, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green are 25 and Harrison Barnes is 23. The Andrew Boguts and Andre Iguodalas that were so crucial to this season will be gone either sooner or later, but with good health and deft roster management, the Warriors have a core with a chance at multiple championships. Whether they are prohibitive favourites for 2015/16 will much depend, of course, on the kind of team Cleveland ultimately build around James this summer.
That won’t concern anyone around the San Francisco Bay area for now, though. The 2014/15 Golden State Warriors have assumed their place in history, and they can enjoy that in perpetuity.
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