THEY RULE, BUT ...
The Warriors clearly are the NBA’s best, but there’s a catch.
The Golden State Warriors are so good that people are debating whether they are the greatest team in NBA history. These premature evaluations have some arguing that the 2016-17 Warriors, who should win the NBA championship soon, are indeed the best. Ever. Of course they are wrong. Look, the best phone today is better than the block of granite we used to be tethered to back in the day.
The best high-definition television is significantly better than the 100-pound monstrosity that used to hog up half the living room back in the day. (Though I do wish my iPhone had a turntable.)
And the quality of cars these days — and the space age robotic trickery with which they are assembled — makes the best one you can buy far superior to those beautiful beasts that used to keep shade tree mechanics in business.
Almost everything is better than it has ever been.
But not the soon-to-be NBA champion.
Not yet, anyway. In a couple years …? Maybe.
The Warriors, who have won a record 207 regular season games in the past three years, are the standard. The obstacle. The unstoppable force. Are they the immovable object?
Predications and projections that they will win every NBA championship for the foreseeable future are interesting considering that Golden State has yet to even win two titles in a row.
But this year’s Warriors squad is better than the one that Cleveland toppled in the Finals a year ago.
The issue, though, isn’t that the Warriors are so good, it’s that they are so much better than the rest of the NBA.
This is the widest gulf between the best and the rest since Moses Malone led the 76ers to the 1983 title with a 12-1 playoff mark.
Philadelphia’s lone loss during that playoff run was to a Milwaukee squad that swept Boston’s BirdParrish-McHale triumvirate out of the postseason.
Philadelphia didn’t put together a dominant run, however. Those Celtics represented the Eastern Conference in each of the next four Finals.
When injuries and age hit, the 76ers came back to the pack. But the pack was strong. That isn’t the case right now. Think of how much better the Rockets must get to even be mentioned with the 1982-83 Celtics, whose 56 wins were one more than this year’s Rockets, yet the fewest for Boston between the 1979-80 and 198788 seasons.
The Rockets, finished with the third-best record in the league, behind Golden State and San Antonio.
The Spurs beat Houston 4-2 in the Western Conference semifinals. Because of the way the series played out — the Spurs lost Tony Parker to an injury in Game 2, and Kawhi Leonard to one in Game 5 — the Rockets’ brass believe they should have advanced.
It would hardly have mattered, as the Rockets would have been fortunate not to have been swept by the Warriors in the conference finals, which is what happened to San Antonio.
There is no other team in the league that the Rockets could imagine being swept by.
And there is no team in the league that the Warriors can’t sweep.
The 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, the squad that set a record with 72 wins — a mark the Warriors broke last season — had the best player of alltime and the No. 1 offense and defense
in the NBA.
But as talented as the Bulls were, their competition differentiates their situation from Golden State’s.
That year, the Bulls faced a future Hall of Famer in every round of the playoffs.
The Warriors swept through the Western Conference having faced just one certain Hall of Famer, 39-year-old Manu Ginobili, who played a mere 20 minutes a game in the series. Not to mention, Ginobili’s Hall of Fame induction will be more about his longevity, his international play and the Spurs’ team accomplishments, than it will be for his individual greatness.
(Side note: Leonard played in only one game of the series, and with just two All-Star Games in his six seasons, he is a long way from an invite to Springfield, Mass.)
Finally, in the Finals the Warriors are up against LeBron James, a transcendent talent.
Even if closing out the Cavaliers proves to be more difficult than the first six-plus weeks of the playoffs have been for Golden State, there doesn’t seem to be much the rest of the league can do to push the Warriors off the NBA mountaintop.
Maybe it is too soon for all of that “best ever” talk.
But odds are, we’re going to have to have that talk.
Not just because the Warriors are very good, but because the rest of the league teams are … bleh.