WARRIORS: ‘WE AIN’T DONE’
Champion Golden State already eyeing repeat
The goal was enormous: Return to the NBA’s mountaintop.
Now, with that monumental task complete, the NBA champion Warriors already have a new target: staying up there for a while.
The victory cigars hadn’t been extinguished after the title-clinching win at Boston, the last celebratory bottles of Moët & Chandon hadn’t been emptied, and the topic — Can the Warriors win it again next season? — was already coming up. They have been installed by FanDuel Sportsbook as the favorites for the 2023 NBA title, and with Finals MVP Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green all returning, it would be foolish to think their chance at a fifth championship in nine years isn’t very real.
“It still has not been proven, that when we’re whole, that anybody can stop it,” Green said.
That’s true, and that’s why it makes sense for the Warriors to carry the burden of being favorites into next season. They know what it takes; they have as many championships in the last eight seasons — four — as the rest of the league combined. The last run that was better than this was put together by Michael Jordan and the Bulls, winning six in an eight-year span of the 1990’s.
Warriors coach Steve Kerr played for the Bulls during some of that run, has led Golden State to those four titles and now is a nine-time champion overall.
“They are all unique. They are all special,” Kerr said. “I think this one may have been the most unlikely just from the standpoint of where
we’ve been the last couple years. A lot of unknowns.”
Indeed, there were questions.
The Warriors answered them all. No, the core wasn’t too old. Yes, Thompson would come back from more than 900 days on the sidelines with injuries. And absolutely, Curry can still be unstoppable in the biggest moments.
They took that core and fortified it with a new group of talent. Among those on that list: 27-year-old Andrew Wiggins, the 2014 No. 1 pick who has come into his own and was nothing less than a star in the NBA Finals; Jordan Poole, who will turn 23 this weekend and will celebrate as a champion who has blossomed after facing off against Curry in practice all the time; and Jonathan Kuminga, the 19-year-old who got into 86 games and is raved about by teammates.
“And we ain’t done,” Thompson said early Friday while appearing on Green’s podcast, The Draymond Green Show. “That’s the beautiful thing about it. We got these young bucks behind us and we got the same squad coming back? That’s scary for the NBA.”
Green concurred. “It is very scary,” he said.
They earned that championship moment, after going through an NBA Finals loss in 2019 to the Raptors and then two seasons with a combined 54-83 record, a million miles away from being the team that the Warriors demand they be.