Where do Warriors fit in among NBA dynasties?
The days when one NBA franchise dominated the league for decades, not merely seasons, ended in the late 1960s, a time when former Warriors coach Don Nelson and his Boston Celtics teammates favored longer hair, wore short shorts and high tops, and were known to smoke cigars and cigarettes in the locker room.
Presided over by legendary patriarch Red Auerbach, the Celtics captured 11 championships in 13 years (1957-69), including a streak of eight straight (1959-66). With Bill Russell blocking shots and triggering their highoctane offense, they ran rings around the competition and established the gold standard for NBA dynasties.
Defining the elements of a dynasty in the modern era is a more difficult task for a number of reasons, among them the fluidity of rosters, size of the league (now 30 teams instead of eight), importance of salary-cap management and financial burden of escalating player salaries.
“It’s just so hard to keep teams together,” said Hall of Famer Jerry West, whose Lakers teams were repeatedly victimized by those great Celtics clubs. “You have to deal with the salary cap, and the player salaries are exorbitant. Then there is also the fact of managing people, keeping the locker room together. It’s very, very hard.”
Almost as hard is finding folks who agree on what exactly constitutes a dynasty. This is water cooler chatter, apparently, even for the luminaries.“I don’t know the answer to that,” said Charles Barkley, in a rare loss for words. “The Spurs won five titles, the Showtime Lakers won five, the Bulls won six. So I really don’t know.”
That being said — or not said — the criteria most often cited consists of some combination of the following: Number of titles, conference and NBA Finals appearances; continuity of the rosters; the span during which the championships were won.
Then there are the intangibles, the gut checks. If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck …
So do the Warriors make the cut?
If they win a second consecutive championship and third in four years, they make their case. Besides claiming two rings and reaching the championship series four straight years, their play has revolutionized the game, rendering once-dominant big men into lesser roles in fast-paced, switch-everything, small-ball schemes.
Nelson, who coached the popular Run TMC Warriors, gives the current squad bonus points for winning with style. “A lot of teams (in the modern era), including some of my teams, went small and played fast,” he said from his home in Maui, “but none of us ever won a championship. The Warriors play a beautiful game, and their championships validate the way we like to play.”
Apart from his old Celtics
— and we’ll leave them alone because relics are entitled to their rest, and because no team will ever duplicate their dominance — these are the teams that have accounted for the modern dynasties.
Otherwise known as the Michael Jordan Era, the Bulls won three consecutive titles twice — 199192-93 and 1996-97-98. The kicker? That two-year interruption occurred during Jordan’s temporary retirement and his experiment in baseball’s minor leagues. Remarkably, while Air whiffed at those curveballs, he never lost a championship series.
And just imagine. What if the band played on? Was there any team capable of upending a squad of Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Toni Kukoc, Dennis Rodman, and coached by the quirky, brilliant Phil Jackson? If the Bulls had stayed together, those old Celtics would have heard footsteps.
This was the league’s
golden era, as grand as it gets, with Magic Johnson and Larry Bird dueling for MVPs and the Lakers/ Celtics rivalry driving the league to unparalleled success. Tape-delayed games were replaced with live primetime telecasts.
Then-Commissioner David Stern altered the Finals format to 2-3-2 to ease the burden of the annual Boston-LA shuttle.
But as majestic a period as it was — and again, huge props to that compelling Bird-Magic narrative — the numbers give the edge to the Lakers. Pat Riley’s squad reached the Finals seven times in 10 years, winning five titles to the Celtics’ three.
Titles in 1981, ’84 and ’86. Five Finals appearances in seven years. Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Cedric Maxwell, Danny Ainge, the late Dennis Johnson. A temporarily healthy Bill Walton coming off the bench on the 1986 team that ranks right there with the best of all time. This one’s easy. Just think about the ducks …
With Gregg Popovich, Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker thriving in an unusually lengthy marriage despite a climate of increasing player movement, the Spurs won five titles from 1999 to 2014 and were legitimate contenders every season.
No, they never captured back-to-back championships, but as West suggests, “You don’t have to win it every season, but you have to enjoy sustained success.” More than any franchise these last two decades, that would be the Spurs.
When Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal arrived in 1996, a collective gasp was heard around the league. With the two superstars, a deep roster and an iconic coach, the Lakers appeared invincible for the foreseeable future.
And they were, for a while, winning three straight championships (2000-02) and advancing to the Finals for a fourth consecutive time before the strained relationship between Shaq and Kobe resulted in the massive center’s trade to the Miami Heat.
Kobe continued to insist he could win without Shaq, and after the acquisition of Pau Gasol and an improved supporting cast, his Lakers prevailed two more occasions that decade (2009-10).
It was short, but sweet, and featured Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, and this generation’s oneman dynasty: LeBron James. The Heat reached the championship series all four years LeBron was in Miami and secured back-to-back titles (201213). The good times ended with a Finals loss to the Spurs in 2014 and LeBron’s stunning return to his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers several weeks later.
The late Chuck Daly presided over one of the league’s most prolific offenses in his early seasons as head coach, but similar to Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni, he switched up and adapted to the defensive talents of draft picks Dennis Rodman and John Salley. Just like that, the Pistons morphed into the Bad Boys, a bruising, relentless team that was led by Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars and Bill Laimbeer and blamed for ruining a beautiful game (see Lakers, Celtics). Making matters worse, they ended the Lakers’ dazzling reign with their first of two titles (1989-90).
So back to the Warriors of Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, Steve Kerr, with the final word coming from their legendary former consultant.
“I think a dynasty team is one that gets to the Finals numerous times,” West added. “If the Warriors get to the Finals again, it will be an incredible run for them. You feel like they would win. You could say that this is a team that is building a dynasty. But if they get to the Finals and win, I think you would have to say it is a modern-day dynasty.”