San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Warriors’ 3 seed not bad place to be
For the first time in three seasons, the Warriors are back in the playoffs.
Sure, they made the NBA’s inaugural play-in tournament last season. But they failed to advance as one of the final 16 teams, so that doesn’t count.
After a strong start to the season, there was little doubt the Warriors would return to the playoffs, but their seeding came down to the last day of the regular season. With a 128-107 victory at New Orleans on April 10, Golden State clinched the West’s No. 3 seed — which is somewhat unfamiliar territory, at least in recent years.
During their run of five consecutive NBA Finals appearances from 2014-15 to 2018-19, with three of those seasons ending with Golden State hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy, the Warriors were the best team in the Western Conference in each season except for 2017-18, when they were the No. 2 seed.
Teams with the third seed don’t have a lot of history winning the championship — only 15 of them have reached the NBA Finals. However, very recent history shows the No. 3 can win it all. Just ask last season’s champion.
Milwaukee swept No. 6 Miami, outlasted No. 2 Brooklyn in a seventh-game overtime thriller and took down No. 5
Atlanta in six games to reach the Finals. There, the Bucks overcame a 2-0 deficit to deny Phoenix its first title while winning just the second in their franchise history and first since 1971.
The Bucks are one of seven No. 3 seeds in NBA history to win the title: Two came in the 1970s and the others happened since 2002.
What would the Warriors’ potential path to a championship look like in these playoffs? Their first-round opponent is the No. 6 Denver Nuggets, who won three of their four meetings this season. Game 1 of the series was Saturday.
“Whenever you’re playing a guy like (Nikola) Jokic, one of the faces of the league, an MVP candidate, it’s going to be a tough matchup,” Warriors big man Kevon Looney said. “But as long as we’re healthy and everybody’s playing, I feel like we have a great chance of winning.”
The only time the Warriors went into the postseason with the third seed, it wasn’t a good run. They lost to the No. 6 Seattle SuperSonics, who won the opening-round series 3-1 in 1992.
Finishing third in the conference this season could be key.
Seeds lower than that perform considerably worse. Only two teams that weren’t a top-three seed have won championships: the fourth-seeded Boston Celtics in 1969 and the No. 6 Houston Rockets in 1994-95.
Only nine teams seeded 4-8 have reached the Finals, the lowest being the New York Knicks, who went in as the Eastern Conference’s 8 seed in 1999. They lost to the No. 1seeded San Antonio Spurs in five games.