Durant’s ghost will haunt Warriors if they lose
The Golden State Warriors are not necessarily doomed to defeat in the NBA Finals because they lost Game 1 at home to the Boston Celtics. Although Draymond Green’s suggestion that the Warriors “dominated the game for the first 41, 42 minutes” is certainly overstated, they were the better team for a long enough stretch to suggest that they can win games in this series.
But the way Boston exploded in the fourth quarter of Game 1 on Thursday puts the Warriors in danger of enduring a summer when the conversation revolves around a player who isn’t even on their roster: Kevin Durant.
For as much as the Warriors have restocked and reinvented since the 2019 Finals – what they’ve done this season to return to prominence is a very big deal – hindsight and history will not be as kind as it should be if they lose this series.
The legacy of this Warriors decade should be secure. They didn’t just win three championships, they changed the way basketball is played. They were devastated by injuries on their way to a potential fourth title, spent two years in the wilderness, then re-emerged back in the Finals with a formula that felt new on the margins but fundamentally true to their origins.
But if the Warriors can’t win this series, an alternate narrative will inevitably emerge for Green, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson. With Durant, they won two NBA titles. Without him, they blew 3-1 series lead to the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016, lost to the Toronto Raptors in 2019 and now could be facing a third Finals disappointment in non-Durant years against the sole title the Curry/ Thompson/Green core won by themselves in 2015.
Is that harsh? Perhaps, but it’s also the record and a real factor in how their dynasty will be framed historically – largely because, in each of those cases, Golden State was perceived to have the better team.
That’s a significant differentiator between the Warriors and LeBron James, who pretty much ended criticism of his championship record when he won the 2020 title with the Los Angeles Lakers. Even though James has a 4-6 record in the Finals, he only lost one he was expected to win: The 2011 Miami Heat collapse against the Dallas Mavericks. In some of those years, it was a credit to James merely to get a team to the Finals.
With Golden State, it’s harder to give it the benefit of the doubt just for winning the Western Conference. The Warriors’ loss to the Cavs was stunning, given their 73-win regular season and the commanding lead they let slip away in the series. Their loss to the Raptors was less surprising and more forgivable because of injuries, but Golden State was a significant betting favorite going into that series even without Durant. And though some of the analytics suggested that Boston is the better team this year, Golden State was again favored prior to Game 1 and had both home-court advantage and several days more rest heading into the Finals.
The Warriors also had a 15-point lead late in the third quarter, which began to evaporate when Curry got his normal rest and the combination of Jordan Poole and Andre Igoudala were responsible for generating offense during a key stretch of the game. By the end of Boston’s 3-point shooting barrage, which included seven consecutive makes in the fourth quarter and 21 of 41 overall, it was much easier to start nitpicking how the Warriors made it this far.
Was the Western Conference really that good in the first place? Is it sustainable for the Warriors to play two nonshooters in Green and Kevon Looney together in the front court when the Celtics have the size and defensive versatility on the perimeter to make life tough on Curry? Have Thompson’s injuries turned him into a niche player who isn’t that valuable unless he’s shooting the lights out? Can they truly rely on Poole to anchor a second unit without being a complete traffic cone on defense?
The simple reality is that the younger, deeper, bigger Celtics had a gear in Game 1 that the Warriors could not match on Thursday night. That didn’t seem like a fluke, but rather the delta between what the Warriors are now and what they were at full flight when teams had to account for Curry, Thompson and Durant all at the peak of their powers.
Those Warriors are gone and never coming back. The counterfactual discussion of what they would have been now if Durant had stayed is interesting, but ultimately irrelevant. When he chose to start over with Kyrie Irving with the Nets in Brooklyn, the Warriors did not accept that their window was closed and instead went into a different mode of franchise building that they largely handled well aside from the significant miss on picking James Wiseman at No. 2 in 2020.
Perhaps if the Warriors had been able to garner a useful asset out of that pick rather than a project center who has been too injured and underdeveloped to contribute much of value, they’d be in better position to match up with the Celtics.
But from the very beginning of this run to now, it has always been about Curry, Thompson and Green: Their talent, their intelligence, their unrelenting work rate, and, yes, their limitations. The next several days will determine whether they are still good enough to win a championship or their record will be on the table for critics to slice and dice into two distinct eras.
When the Warriors had the ability to stack the deck with Durant, they were basically unbeatable. Without him, they snuck out one title but probably do not reach the level of a dynasty.
In some ways, that would be an unfortunate turn of events for Golden State, given how tremendous it’s been for nearly a full decade. It’s hard to do even a fraction of what the Warriors have done – with Durant or without.
But if they suffer a third Finals loss as the favored team, it’s not an unfair conversation to pin on the Warriors’ backs. They still have games to change that fate.