Experience still counts big time in NBA
The fourth championship of the Golden State Warriors dynasty was won by a team paying $40 million to an alltime great shooter who was robbed of his prime by brutal injuries, $25 million to a power forward who lost all confidence in his ability to score and $33 million to a wing who was once considered a bust.
Of the six teams Stephen Curry has led to the NBA Finals, this was probably the most vulnerable, the least talented and certainly the one that was hardest to read.
And yet when it was all over and they held up the trophy after a six-game dismissal of the Boston Celtics, the lesson they delivered during these playoffs was blaring like a siren. For all of their vulnerabilities, the accumulation of experience and championship DNA still matters in a league that has never been more talented and yet is also up for grabs in a way that nobody’s seen this century.
The Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls run of the late 1990s gave way to the Kobe Bryant Lakers and the Tim Duncan Spurs, with LeBron James becoming the Finals foil in Miami and Cleveland, where he ran up against Curry for four straight years. This is how the NBA works: As one all-time great player recedes, another rises. Parity in this league has largely been a myth.
But the championship Golden State won Thursday night is a pivot to a different era of the NBA; one that’s more unpredictable, fluid and tremendously intriguing as the stars of the last decade decline and the great players of the next generation try to figure out how to win one of these things.
The NBA has dynamic young superstars in at least 10 markets from Dallas to Denver, Memphis to Atlanta, Cleveland to Phoenix and a few places in between. These playoffs proved that the gap between their ambitions and holding up the Larry O’Brien Trophy remains wide.
Within the context of modern NBA champions, the Warriors team that won it Thursday night was remarkably flawed. Curry is still Curry, but anyone comparing this group to the Warriors of 2015-18 should be sentenced to a week of memory jogging on YouTube.
After more than 900 days without playing in an NBA game, Klay Thompson understandably did not return as the same player. Sure, he was still capable of elite shooting in a given moment, but his comeback was defined by uncharacteristic cold streaks, glitchy decision-making and decreased mobility.
Draymond Green, at age 32, is not the athlete he once was. He’s still one of the smartest players in the league, but playing center at 6-foot-6, even a minor loss of bounce becomes a big deal – and it often was in these playoffs where he struggled to do much of anything on offense most nights.
And then there’s Andrew Wiggins, who came out of 5 seasons in Minnesota with a reputation as a player who didn’t fight hard enough, didn’t shoot particularly well and wouldn’t have the gumption to thrive under playoff pressure.
Wiggins, it turns out, was the Warriors’ second-best player in the postseason. He was legitimately terrific most of the time, not just with his scoring but his sustained defensive intensity and willingness to mix it up physically on the glass. Wiggins’ effort was unquestionably the difference between Golden State winning a championship and going home a few weeks ago.
When the final seconds ticked away in Game 6 and the Warriors had secured the title with a 103-90 victory, Curry’s thoughts immediately went to what the franchise had been through since losing the Finals to Toronto in 2019. After Thompson’s devastating torn ACL in that series, then Kevin Durant’s decision to leave for Brooklyn, the Warriors had the worst record in the league in 2020 and lost in the play-in game in 2021. With so much uncertainty surrounding their key guys, winning the title again seemed like a long shot even if they got healthy.
“We were so far away from it,” Curry said on ABC. “We were here five straight years and got three of them and then hit rock bottom and a long road of work ahead and trying to fill in the right pieces and right guys and you can never take it for granted. You never know when you’ll be back here. To get back here and get it done means the world.”
But the most important lesson to take from this NBA season is that it’s a league in transition. Many of the stalwarts of the last decade like James, Kawhi Leonard, Anthony Davis and Kyle Lowry are either old or injured. The super team model didn’t work in Brooklyn with Durant and Kyrie Irving. And young stars who have had a taste of playoff success like Luka Doncic, Ja Morant and Trae Young just don’t have experience or help yet to make a legitimate push.
The Celtics almost got there with a team led by 24-year-old Jayson Tatum and 25-year-old Jaylen Brown, two outstanding individual scorers and defenders whose competitive focus was too inconsistent to beat a team as experienced as Golden State.
Somehow, the Celtics came within two wins of a title while going just 6-6 at home in the playoffs. At the end, they just seemed exhausted, having never endured a playoff run this physically demanding. Tatum in particular seemed to collapse under the strain of superstardom at this level, making just 36% of his shots in the Finals.
Perhaps the Celtics will get back here, but it’s no guarantee. This is as wide open as the NBA has been in awhile, and we may well be entering an era where a revolving door of teams compete for the title depending on health, luck and who’s playing well at the right time.
That is a huge advantage for teams that know how to win – teams like the Warriors, who largely stayed together over the last decade and retained the muscle memory of what it takes and how difficult it is to chase championships.
At the end of the day, that was the difference for Golden State, a team that was not a juggernaut in the classic sense but had all the answers when it mattered most.
These were not two great teams in the Finals, but every title counts the same. If the NBA is now in a period where teams this flawed can win a title, experience might just be a separator. In a league with a lot of great players and promising futures, the present still belongs to the Warriors.