Been there, done that — again
Warriors’ latest championship shows experience, know-how still matter — a lot — when chasing titles
The fourth championship of the Warriors’ dynasty was won by a team paying $40 million to an all-time great shooter, $25 million to a power forward who lost all confidence in his ability to score and $33 million to a wing who was once considered a bust.
Of the six teams Stephen Curry has led to the NBA Finals, this was probably the most vulnerable, the least talented and certainly the one that was hardest to read.
And yet, when it was all over and they held up the trophy after a six-game dismissal of the Celtics, the lesson the Warriors delivered during these playoffs was blaring like a siren. For all their vulnerabilities, the accumulation of experience and championship DNA still matters in a league that never has been more talented and yet is also up for grabs in a way nobody has seen in this century.
The Michael Jordan-led Bulls’ run of the late 1990s gave way to the Kobe Bryant Lakers and the Tim Duncan Spurs, with LeBron James becoming the Finals foil with the Heat and Cavaliers, with whom he ran up against Curry for four consecutive years. This is how the NBA works: As one all-time great player recedes, another rises. Parity in this league largely has been a myth.
But the championship the Warriors won Thursday is a pivot to a different era of the NBA, one that’s more unpredictable, fluid and tremendously intriguing as the stars of the last decade decline and the great players of the next generation try to figure out how to win one of these things.
Within the context of modern NBA champions, this Warriors team was remarkably flawed. Curry is still Curry, but anyone comparing this group to the Warriors of 2015-18 should be sentenced to a week of memoryjogging on YouTube.
After more than 900 days without playing in an NBA game, Klay Thompson understandably did not return as the same player. Sure, he was still capable of elite shooting in a given moment, but his comeback was defined by uncharacteristic cold streaks, glitchy decision-making and decreased mobility.
Draymond Green, at age 32, is not the athlete he once was. He’s still one of the smartest players in the league, but playing center at 6-6, even a minor loss of bounce becomes a big deal. And it often was in these playoffs, where he struggled to do much of anything on offense most nights.
And then there’s Andrew Wiggins, who came out of 5½ seasons with the Timberwolves with a reputation as a player who didn’t fight hard enough, didn’t shoot particularly well and wouldn’t have the gumption to thrive under playoff pressure.
Wiggins, it turns out, was the Warriors’ second-best player in the postseason. He was legitimately terrific most of the time, not just with his scoring but with his sustained defensive intensity and willingness to mix it up physically on the glass. Wiggins’ effort was unquestionably the difference between the Warriors winning a championship and going home a few weeks ago.
When the final seconds ticked away in Game 6 and the Warriors had secured the title with a 103-90 victory, Curry’s thoughts immediately went to what the franchise had been through since losing the Finals to the Raptors in 2019. After Thompson’s devastating torn ACL in that series and Kevin Durant’s decision to leave for the Nets, the Warriors had the worst record in the league in 2020 and lost in the play-in game in 2021. Winning the title again seemed like a long shot.
‘‘We were so far away from it,’’ Curry said on ABC. ‘‘We were here five straight years and got three of them and then hit rock bottom . . . . You never know when you’ll be back here. To get back here and get it done means the world.’’
But the most important lesson to take from this NBA season is that it’s a league in transition. Many of the stalwarts of the last
decade, such as James, Kawhi Leonard and Anthony Davis, are either old or injured. The superteam model didn’t work for the Nets with Durant and Kyrie Irving. And young stars that have had a taste of playoff success, such as Luka Doncic, Ja Morant and Trae Young, just don’t have enough experience or help yet to make a legitimate push.
The Celtics almost got there with a team led by 24-year-old Jayson Tatum and 25-yearold Jaylen Brown, two outstanding individual scorers and defenders whose competitive focus was too inconsistent to beat a team as experienced as the Warriors.
Perhaps the Celtics will get back here, but it’s no guarantee. This is as wide-open as the NBA has been in a while, and we well might be entering an era in which a revolving door of teams competes for the title, depending on health, luck and who’s playing well.
That is a huge advantage for teams that know how to win — teams such as the Warriors, who largely stayed together for the last decade and retained the muscle memory of what it takes and how difficult it is to chase championships.