Well, the Golden State Warriors were fun while they lasted. But Friday night’s series-deciding loss to the Lakers in the Western Conference semifinals feels like a crossroads moment. In a basketball sense, it feels like the Day the Music Died.
A pity, because for the previous eight years we were treated to something refreshing and unique. The Dubs played small and fast and fired from ridiculous distances, and looked like they were having a great time doing it. They won four NBA titles and made two other Finals, and the show was made all the more compelling by the fact that for a time the ringleader, Stephen Curry, looked like a middle schooler amid a really cool field trip.
Curry’s still great, even at age 35. But his overqualified sidekick, 33-year-old Klay Thompson, looks cooked, his legs having been ravaged in recent years by ACL and Achilles injuries. And the other foundational piece, 33-year-old Draymond Green, offsets his elite playmaking and defense with idiocy in the extreme. You will recall that during a training-camp workout before this season he punched out teammate Jordan Poole, which didn’t exactly set an ideal tone for Golden State’s championship defense.
Perhaps not surprisingly they went on to have an odd regular season, one in which they were great at home (33-8) but awful on the road (11-30), leaving them the West’s sixth seed. Their hope had been that they could incorporate some of their recent high draft picks into the mix, that they could rebuild on the fly.
But one of those picks, James Wiseman, was so bad that they shipped him to Detroit in midseason, and the others, Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody, were hit and miss. Kuminga could not crack the postseason rotation, and Moody was pressed into service only because Poole, who had been bestowed a four-year, $123 million contract last offseason, struggled mightily.
Still, there were some observers who thought they might have one more run in them. They outlasted Sacramento in the first round, but the Lakers were too big, too deep, too tough. And according to The Athletic, Golden State wants to more or less run it back. While Shams Charania and Anthony Slater reported that while general manager Bob Myers might choose to move on, the organization would like to keep Thompson and Green around because, Charania and Slater wrote, “they show no signs of steep decline.”
Really?
Thompson had a strong regular season, but looked creaky the last three games of the Lakers series, missing 20 of his 27 3-point attempts and scoring just 27 points. Green, for all of his (shall we say) eccentricities, is a unique and valuable player, but he too has a ton of miles on his odometer.
Another Athletic staffer, Tim Kawakami, suggested that the Warriors, pressed for ways to improve, might test the market for Poole. His value is surely at a low point, however, given his hefty contract and the fact that he missed 16 of 17 3-point attempts while scoring 29 points over the last five games of the series against the Lakers.
So they will have to be creative. And we will have to wait and see if they can push the sun back up into the sky, as the late, great Vin Scully used to say.
The roots of the Warriors’ free-flowing style go back to the ‘80s. That’s when Milwaukee coach Don Nelson, bereft of effective bigs, trotted out smallish lineups featuring a point forward, Paul Pressey, as well as studs like Sidney Moncrief and Marques Johnson (not to mention the criminally underrated Mickey Johnson). Nelson went on to employ the same philosophy with the RunTMC Warriors of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s – “TMC” standing for Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin – and the possibilities of smallball were fully explored by the Steve Nash-led Suns in the Aughts.
The idea, Phoenix coach Mike D’Antoni said at the time, was to hoist a shot before seven seconds had evaporated from the shot clock, and Nash was the perfect maestro. He pushed the pace, probed the defense – Brett Brown, the former Sixers’ coach, always compared him to Wayne Gretzky – and kept others involved.
Everybody, from stars like Amar’e Stoudemire and Shawn Marion to journeymen like Boris Diaw and Tim Thomas, seemed to enjoy their best seasons playing alongside Nash. And seemed to enjoy playing, period. Entertaining as it was, though, those Suns could never quite get over the hump.
San Antonio could. The Spurs, in earning the last of their five titles, in 2014, arrayed all manner of shooters around Tim Duncan while skateboarding Miami in the Finals, avenging a gut-punch loss to the Heat in that round a year earlier.
The Warriors were just ramping up right about then. They have done everything their stylistic predecessors did, only better – more creatively, more rapidly, more explosively. A good bit of that gets back to Curry, one of the most unique players in league history. Who else shoots that well from that deep, whether off the dribble or off a screen? What other player his size (6-2, 185) invades the lane so often and lives to tell about it? Where else has a star become so synonymous with a franchise (not to mention a gleaming new building)?
Unique player, unique team, unique time. Seems like that’s over now, though. A shame. Went by fast. Sorta like the team itself.