What the Golden State Warriors accomplished Monday was, as it had been most nights of the NBA season, amazing. Not because they won and did so in emphatic fashion—12 months ago they were a juggernaut, Kevin Durant made them a cyborg, and their victories typically have been inevitable. Rather, they played like one of the two most unselfish teams in the history of basketball, taking into account the Olympic quality of their roster and how they still meshed naturally. This wasn’t a precondition to them winning the NBA Finals. It was necessary, however, to making their journey entertaining to a general audience.
Golden State defeated Cleveland 129-120 to win the NBA Finals in five games, capping an historic 16-1 playoff run. This was destined to be one of the game’s all-time great squads: The Warriors added a former MVP in his prime, the silky and oft-unstoppable Durant, to a team that set the league record for regular season victories just a year before. Historically, such a move has not guaranteed instant success. Professional basketball has featured artificially constructed “super teams” since 1968, when the Los Angeles Lakers, a near perennial Finals participant (and loser to the Boston Celtics), added reigning MVP Wilt Chamberlain to a roster featuring future Hall of Famers Elgin Baylor and Jerry West. But the Lakers had deficiencies, including some in their newly acquired star’s game. By the time the group won its first NBA title in 1972, Baylor was out of the league and Chamberlain was an older, defensive-minded player. There have been other examples of successful organizations adding stars but coming up short: The Houston Rockets traded for Charles Barkley in 1996 after winning two of the three previous Finals, but lost in the conference finals to Utah and never advanced further with him on the team. Putting together a star-laden roster from scratch has had its own pitfalls: LeBron James’s first two seasons as a leader of so-called “big threes” (in Miami, with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, and in Cleveland, with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love) ended with Finals losses.
What the Warriors created was unique. Its three best players last season were still young and already among the NBA’s 20 best. Together they had won a title and followed it with the best 82-game win-loss total ever. It took a combination of injury (a hobbled Stephen Curry, the two-time MVP) and suspension (Draymond Green, the team’s engine) for the Cavaliers to have just the chance to win last season’s Finals—which, to their wholly deserved credit, they somehow did. The Golden State Warriors were already a championship team. And then they added another one of the league’s true superstars.
But the recipe wasn’t to manufacture a title out of one-on-one basketball; in addition to Curry and Durant being two of the best shooters in history, Klay Thompson, now more of a complementary piece, once scored 37 points in a quarter—12 minutes! The Warriors had so much firepower that even defense hawks would say OK, that’s enough. They could’ve played like an all-star team if they so chose—each February, the best players from the league’s eastern and western conferences play 48 minutes of video-game ball, with zero defense—and probably been favored to win it all.
Instead, they played like the single most creative team ever, alternating between graceful and ferocious and rarely looking anything but beautiful. Durant was a terrifying addition to Golden State for more than just his scoring chops: He is an unselfish player, an otherworldly ball-handler for a person of his height (6-foot-9), and an excellent passer. His various skills, all world class, allowed the Warriors and their deadeye shooters to space the court and move freely even more than they did in recent years. Some fans, critical of the high-scoring game favored by the best modern teams and encouraged by modern rules, reminisce about the 1990s and the way Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen would snuff out the opposing team’s best offensive tricks. But those teams played offense, too. Based on points-per-possessions statistics, the 1992 and 1996 Chicago Bulls were the third- and sixth-best offensive teams ever, according to the formula used by basketball-reference.com. The 2017 Warriors are tied for first. The difference? The Warriors heaved 2,563 three-point attempts this season; those Bulls teams took 1,843 over the two seasons. And the Warriors played with a faster pace.
It was a pace actually eclipsed by the “Showtime” Lakers of Magic Johnson in 1987, who are tied with Golden State in the offensive rating metric. But don’t mistake speed for a lack of defense. The Warriors were better than the Lakers in this regard; in fact, they were among the best in the league this season, ranking second in points-allowed-per-possession numbers. Some of Durant’s best plays of the Finals against Cleveland happened on the defensive end of the floor; he grabbed 11 defensive rebounds, blocked five shots, and had three steals in a 132-113 Game 2 win.
In this is part of what made Golden State special, not just predictable. Yes, the team was so obviously dominant that the ultimate outcome of the season was barely in doubt. The Warriors appeared unbeatable, sucking the intrigue out of who might have challenged them at the end. Had Durant remained in Oklahoma City with 2017 MVP front-runner Russell Westbrook—where they took the Warriors to seven games in the conference finals—the league would’ve had a quartet of great-to-possibly-historic teams, including the San Antonio Spurs, jostling for victory. But Durant made his decision. The least he and the Warriors could’ve done is to have made their conquest remarkable to watch, won with maximum effort and selfless play. This wasn’t an all-star team; it was a team of all-stars.
