Chase Center, the gleaming new home of the Golden State Warriors on the western bank of San Francisco Bay, was reportedly meant to resemble a reconstructed apple peel. Last night, Golden State accomplished something to give this bizarre visual metaphor a semblance of coherence. The Warriors’ pitiful 2019-21 losers have been reincarnated as victors. The discards have been recycled, and the detritus of previous seasons has been converted into a magnificent win. The past is now the present; the apple peel is reconstructed. The Warriors have returned.
Despite the familiarity of the story’s conclusion, there is something unique about this Warriors championship. Draymond Green said on the victory podium at Boston’s TD Garden, when asked to reflect on how his perspective of himself and his teammates had changed throughout these finals, “I didn’t learn anything about myself; I already knew I was resilient.” Last night’s conclusion of the NBA Finals by the Warriors was replete with the familiar: lightning scoring sprees, electrifying offensive transitions, lethal long-range shooting and collective savvy off the ball, bouncing energy, and tentacled elusiveness. Nevertheless, even though the Warriors already understood who they were, this series will be remembered for altering our perceptions of them. Similar to the Golden State title teams of 2015, 2017, and 2018, these Warriors were precise, efficient, vicious, and relentless. However, they were also oddly likable. This is a significant departure for a franchise that, in recent years, had come to represent everything negative about the current NBA. The depth of the Warriors’ pandemic-era decline and the uncertainty that once surrounded their biggest stars’ chances of revival are sufficient to make this championship a genuine feelgood story – not quite a victory for the underdog, but a glowing tribute to what tech billions, the greatest shooter in basketball history, and simple perseverance can accomplish.
Narratives of redemption abound during finals week. From Giannis’s conquest of the free-throw demons in 2017 to LeBron’s defeat of his hometown anxieties in 2016, the victories of the majority of finals MVPs in recent years have been portrayed, in one way or another, as courageous victories over adversity. This time, the championship team as a whole, as opposed to a single player, was written off: no one gave this version of the Warriors, without the spectral authority of Kevin Durant and with Steph Curry and Klay Thompson returning from lengthy injury layoffs, much of a chance to add a fourth title to the three already won under Steve Kerr’s watch. The reasons for this near-universal disapproval are not difficult to fathom, since the Warriors have had the uncommon distinction of being both fiercely loathed and very awful at basketball during the past two seasons.
The national animosity towards the Warriors stems mostly from the team’s unrelenting success, particularly the two consecutive championships won by the Durant-led superteam of 2016-18. The Warriors – data-driven, unemotional, technocratic, bombing their opponents from beyond the three-point line, and lured into an ever-deepening partnership with Silicon Valley – appeared to be emblematic of the separation between various segments of American society since the turn of the millennium. Loss in the 2019 NBA Finals to Kawhi Leonard and the Toronto Raptors ended the three-peat, but the defeated squad received little pity. Warriors investor Mark Stevens (current net worth: $4.5bn), a member of the coterie of tech moguls and venture capitalists who own the team, shoved Raptors guard Kyle Lowry during a “frank” sideline exchange of views in Game 3 – a gesture that seemed to sum up the air of arrogant, moneyed entitlement that had settled over the team and its fans since the breakthrough championship of 2014-15. With the move to a glittering new arena at the start of the 2019 season, the Warriors’ transition from a team of the people to the sport’s new establishment was complete. The Warriors are best remembered for their “We Believe” upset of Dirk Nowitzki’s Dallas Mavericks in the first round of the 2007 playoffs. The Oakland-based squad abandoned the “bad” side of the Bay to embrace the puffer-vest-clad San Francisco tech elite.
Additional robotic success awaited. The VC Warriors, though, began to do something they were not accustomed to: they began to lose. A lot. Durant moved to Brooklyn; Curry fractured his hand and missed an entire season; Thompson tore an anterior cruciate ligament and an Achilles tendon and missed four. As a result, two years were spent in the wilderness. The Warriors entered their flop period, finishing last in the Western Conference in 2019-20 (with a 15-50 record) and failing to qualify for the playoffs despite a little improvement in the regular season in 2020-21. The league adopted, almost permanently, to postseasons devoid of Golden State’s unique brand of long-range wizardry: teams built around big guys muscling in the paint – your Jameses, Davises, and Antetokounmpo’s – returned to vogue. Resurgent and glorious once more, the likeability of these Warriors is mostly a consequence of how far they had fallen, how much they had suffered, and how deeply they “sucked,” to use Green’s artistic expression. But it also speaks to the resurgence of a franchise that has proven it can succeed with young players, without relying on the mercenary brilliance of a free-agent superstar like Durant.
After falling behind 12-2 in the opening minutes of Game 6, the Warriors’ decisive triumph was bolstered by a soaring 21-0 surge. It seems fitting that a series distinguished by the remarkable volatility of its scoring patterns – Boston’s comeback in the fourth quarter of Game 1 will be remembered fondly – was capped by the longest run in an NBA finals game in fifty years. Not Curry or Thompson, but Jordan Poole and Andrew Wiggins orchestrated a series of monster threes, thunderous dunks, and key blocks to wrest control of the game — and the championship – from the Celtics. These up-and-coming Warriors are not only skilled but also likable, and the influence appears to be spreading throughout the club. Despite playing below par in this series, Thompson demonstrated enough to suggest he’s on the path back to his 2015-18 form. Even Green, the team’s warhorse, appears revitalized. The old belligerence is still there – the elbows, the shoves, the buttocks thrust aggressively into the lane – and the trash talk remains unrivaled, even in victory (there was a typically chesty description of the NBA as “the Warriors invitational” on the victory podium last night), but the effect is now curiously endearing: to see the man doing his thing again after these few years away is like watching an old uncle get angry at a malfunctioning television remote.
And then there’s Curry, who, after 13 seasons in the NBA, is still springy and boyish at the age of 34 – the man with the mouth guard always hanging out of his mouth and the ball constantly flying through the net. Despite the greatness of the Warriors’ next generation, this victory was founded on Curry’s incredible performances in Games 4 and 6. After a Game 5 without a single Curry three-pointer – a true collector’s item – the maestro’s hands returned last night: not for the first time in the NBA finals, and certainly not for the last, the game’s second half became its kind of athletic weather system as a delicate, relentless downpour of three-pointers fell from the fingertips of Wardell Stephen Curry II. Curry has also been lethal without the ball in these finals, elevating his teammates even when he has shot poorly: in Game 5, Curry’s teammates shot 63 percent from the field when he was on the court, compared to 22 percent when he was off the court, continuing a series-long trend. If these Warriors have become instantly likable, it is in part because they take such clear pleasure in working together.
Kerr deserves a significant portion of the credit for the Warriors’ restored sense of unity and cohesion after Durant’s departure. It is simple to make fun of Kerr’s political advocacy – the sense of holy duty that accompanies his repeated interventions on gun control, racial justice, and Donald Trump’s presidency. Given his shameful neutrality during the height of the NBA’s problems with China in 2019 (a stance he has since claimed he regrets), it is as easy to question the sincerity of these political pledges. However, in a country where numerous prominent professional athletes are actively opposed to progressive causes, Kerr’s very public display of his political beliefs is vastly superior to the alternative. In addition to being an exceptionally effective coach, Steve Kerr is an impressively articulate, even-tempered, and decent presence in the sport — the anchor that keeps a franchise populated with super-egos grounded in a hazy sense of reality.
This championship for the Warriors crowns the third great team of the Kerr era. The 2014-15 winners were a group of young perimeter rebels that overthrew the established order of basketball and forever altered the sport’s style of play. The two-time winners of 2016-18 were the team of dominance, a death star that reduced opponents to dust in a dreary, inexorable march to victory. This year’s Warriors are the rejuvenation squad, a group bursting with the united joy of recovery from an fatal illness. It is still abundantly evident that neutrals have many reasons to despise the squad from the reclaimed San Francisco waterfront. Their approach to the game has not changed, nor has their combined mastery of the three-point shot. And they are still a franchise developed for the enjoyment and enrichment of Amazon and Palantir’s early-stage investors. Despite all of this, however, this Warriors team feels unique, less blatantly unfeeling than Durant and the company’s back-to-back champs. If the unique genius of America is a talent for continual reinvention – a penchant for the second act, adaptation coupled with creativity – then the Warriors may be the most quintessentially American NBA champions to date.
