Treasure the invincible Warriors, the NBA’s greatest villains in decades
Just who will be left to hate when the Warriors are no longer the Warriors?
The unfairness of the Warriors is settled fact. Two intheir-prime MVPs, All-NBA role players, and a top-tier coach will always be good enough to form a dynasty. A one-time-only spike in the salary cap that grants a 73-win team special access to add a superstar after blowing a 3-1 lead in the Finals is the type of teen-comedy nonsense that turns fallen rivals into insufferable villains. The rich kids lost a fight, so Adam Silver bought them a Porsche.
It takes more than a loaded roster to make a team truly hateable, though. In order to really get under the league’s skin, a team needs to be exasperating. It needs to be a hydra — shut down one star, another springs up to drop 40. And all that winning, exasperation, basic unfairness needs to add up to a track record that the team can lord over the rest of the league, responding to each and every insult with sports’ most insufferable comeback: “Scoreboard.”
Golden State has that, obviously, but this may be the last time the villains feel quite so villainous. The league-wide assumption is that this will be Kevin Durant’s final season in Golden State. Maybe he goes to the Knicks to try his hand at consecrating the cursed hardwood at Madison Square Garden; maybe he blesses the up-and-coming Nets. If he does leave, whichever team lands him should be instant contenders, and the Warriors will be, well, the same core that won 73 games without Durant. Not demolished, but no longer complete.
Stephen Curry played a miserable game Sunday, 3-14 for 12 points, his first off game of the playoffs. For any other team, even a typical 1seed, this would have made them ripe for an upset. Instead, Durant and Klay Thompson combined for 65 points in a comfortable 12-point win.
Thompson carried the Warriors early, scoring 27 in the first half. The Clippers took a brief lead in the third quarter, going up 82-77, before Thompson ripped off a series of tough shots. Durant didn’t blow the doors off the way he did in Game 3, but he was in every play, finding the creases in the defenses, or bashing through it when necessary.
This has been the way things work for the Warriors for three seasons now. They don’t need all
their parts humming at once. It’s not totally clear that there are enough shots for everyone to go off at once. The greatness of this team rests in how many players it has who can completely take over a game.
You don’t need to be an MVP to stop the show. Lou Williams, the Clippers’ sixth-man, snatched Game 2 away from the Warriors by going off for 36. But Williams isn’t just any sixth-man — he’s the best bench player in the league, and teams don’t typically have more than two or three. The Warriors have four, at least, and until a few days ago they had five.
Before going down with a season-ending quad tear, DeMarcus Cousins was rounding into form. After his return, Cousins was actually a net negative on Warriors lineups when he played. Even if he was still not the Boogie he was during his season-plus with Anthony Davis in New Orleans, and he he did not make the team better overall, the signs of Cousins being a positive contributor during this latest championship run were there.
Like Thompson and Draymond Green, Cousins provided the Warriors with a different option, should teams key in on one or two or three of the other Warrior options. This happens in a playoff series, a team going impossibly small to match Golden State’s famed Death Lineup — and this season Cousins would have been there to punish them for it. Now he’s out, but the Warriors are no more beatable, just a hair less opulent.
The league has never seen anything like this in the salary cap era, and more specifically the repeater luxury tax era. LeBron’s Heat and KG’s Celtics and the various superteams that have formed were and are restricted by the cap. None were gifted an MVP-sized salary cap spike.
Stars will change teams this offseason, and teams like the Nuggets and Bucks should improve with another year of experience. Fans certainly love to turn against LeBron, so maybe the Lakers stand in for a while. But nothing like the Warriors is on the horizon, nothing that unites fans across the league against an evil empire. That will make the playoffs more entertaining, especially the later rounds, but it will also leave the league without a final boss to put the new champion through hell.
So here’s hoping KD does ride out of town. (And here’s hoping, too, he lands in New York.) Good riddance to the Invincible Warriors. We’ll miss them dearly.