Any normal Warriors offseason would be rife with some sort of drama or controversy or injury rehabilitation that would keep fans (and some executives) tense through the summer and fall.
But Golden State had finally won the championship that had long eluded the organization. The Warriors were on top of the basketball world for the first time in four decades.
Now what?
What usually happens when a team wins a title—and this is applicable to almost any major professional sport, whether it’s baseball here or soccer in England—is that the team invariably fractures in some way, not through ego (although that can happen) but through simple economics. When you win, the value of your best players skyrockets. And if one of your stars happens to be heading into free agency, you can all but bid him good-bye.
But the Warriors lucked out in this regard. All of their core players were already under contract at least through the 2015–16 season. David Lee, who had a season left on that July 2010 deal approved by a Lacob ownership group still under wraps, was traded to Boston for a couple of spare parts in Chris Babb and Gerald Wallace, who was traded three weeks later for backup Jason Thompson. They drafted freshman Kevon Looney, a gifted but unpolished power forward out of UCLA, with their first-round pick. They re-signed Leandro Barbosa and brought in third-year shooting guard Ian Clark, both on one-year deals. They gave former Chicago Bulls star Ben Gordon a look but waived him two weeks into training camp. Except for a couple of far-end bench spots, this would be the same Warriors team that had just won it all.
One issue, though, was quite pressing. Draymond Green was now a free agent. His fellow 2012 draft class members, Harrison Barnes and Festus Ezeli, were each first-round picks and thus signed four-year rookie deals, so they had one season to go before free agency. (The team did offer each player an extension before the 2015–16 season; each rejected their respective offer.) But as a second-round pick, Green had signed only a three-year deal back in 2012. The Warriors could still match any offer made to him, but Green was officially on the market.
From the start, both sides wanted to hammer out a deal that was mutually beneficial. Considering his low draft position along with an unexpectedly meteoric development, Green had been comically underpaid through his first three seasons in the league. In fact, he had yet to even crack $1 million in salary in a given year. On the day the Warriors won the championship, Green was the 12th-highest-paid player on the roster.
Now, Myers could make him one of the highest-paid power forwards in the league. Under the rules of the collective bargaining agreement, the most Golden State could offer him in a max deal was five years at around $93 million. The maximum Green could get from another club was four years at $69 million. How much the Warriors would ultimately pay Green had become something of a running joke inside team headquarters and especially once the team won the title. There was little concern that a deal would be reached; the open question was, for how much?
In the end, the two sides agreed to a deal that worked out well for both team and player. At five years and $82 million, Green would make $14.3 million in his first year and command the second-highest salary on the team. Taking a haircut of around $11 million gave the Warriors the kind of financial flexibility that would keep them from going too far into the luxury tax and allow them a measure of wiggle room to keep improving the roster going forward.
After a career year, Golden State’s emotional leader was finally getting a salary commensurate with his talents, and the team would have more space when the cap jumped the following summer. When Green video-called his mother to tell her the news, Mary Babers-Green put her hands over her face and immediately started crying.
The Warriors’ roster was now complete. They were, for the most part, the same collection of players that had trounced the league from beginning to end, except now they were a year more experienced and comfortable in Steve Kerr’s offense. In fact, they brought in another familiar face to help in that pursuit. Steve Nash, the two-time MVP who had played for Kerr in Phoenix, was hired as a player development consultant. Curry had played at Nash’s summer camp when he was at Davidson and had pumped him for info about playing like an NBA-level point guard back at a time when he was just getting fully acclimated to the position. Nash also knew about Bay Area basketball culture, having been a college star at Santa Clara University, located in Silicon Valley. Back then, as Netscape Navigator was revolutionizing the tech world, Nash would navigate the Santa Clara campus by dribbling a basketball in between classes to help him refine his ball-handling. (A year later, he switched to dribbling a tennis ball; the basketball just wasn’t challenging enough.) And 10 years before Curry excelled at Davidson, Nash himself was an undersized point guard—6-foot-3, same height as Curry—who was lethal with a pass or three-point shot but couldn’t garner the respect reserved for players in the elite conferences. Though he lived in Los Angeles, Nash would come north periodically to attend practices and offer insights as only one of the best players of the last two decades could.
Curry, for his part, once again didn’t have to spend all summer rehabbing. Brandon Payne, approaching his fourth year as Curry’s personal trainer, moved to Emeryville for the summer (on Curry’s dime) so the MVP could maximize workout time. He started working out with a strobe light apparatus where you had to execute dribbling drills while flicking your hand over designated sensors that would light up at random, like playing a new-age version of the old Simon handheld light-up game. At Payne’s urging, Curry also started doing drills while wearing Eclipse goggles that acted as a constantly shifting shutter on his eyes, shapes getting sharp then cloudy with all kinds of peripheral movement in between. “Stroboscopic sensory training,” it’s called. Think of it as resistance training for both the eyes and reflexes, akin to a football player stretching with a Lycra band or a baseball player swinging a bat in the on-deck circle with a weighted doughnut. These are exercises that exacerbate and complicate normal athletic acts so that, when you remove those hindrances, the move becomes easier, muscle memory is more confident, and you’re less affected by outside stimuli. It makes the normal feel easier, more routine.
And with the arrival of Lachlan Penfold, a progressive sports science expert from Australia who was tapped to replace the departed Keke Lyles as head of physical performance, the team was diving headlong into new tech initiatives more than ever before. Some Warriors started doing sessions in saltwater-infused sensory deprivation pods that could mimic weightlessness and help with relaxation, recovery, and maybe even visualization. As Curry told ESPN, “It’s just me and my thoughts for an hour, playing Russian roulette of the mind.” The team also partnered with a San Francisco company called Halo Neuroscience, which made headphones that delivered slight electrical current into the wearer’s head to put, according to the company’s website, “the brain’s motor cortex in a temporary state of hyper-learning that lasts for an hour.” That could theoretically help with everything from dexterity to lower-body strength to explosiveness. There was little the Warriors wouldn’t consider trying.
It seemed, at least according to the predictions markets, that they would need every advantage to repeat as champs. As the season was ready to tip off, Cleveland, which had fallen in the Finals just four months earlier, was the odds-on favorite to win it all—a 28 percent chance, according to the website FiveThirtyEight. Golden State, at 18 percent, was a distant second.
But that was speculation for months down the road. For the moment, with opening night against New Orleans approaching, the Warriors seemed to have everything they needed for a run at back-to-back titles.
Everything, that is, except for their head coach.
• • •
The rigors of a long NBA season can take their toll on anyone. When injuries happen to players—think of Kyrie Irving’s broken kneecap from Game 1 of the Finals—it’s all too obvious, but the grind invariably affects other related parties, including coaches. So it was that Steve Kerr ruptured a disk in his back during the Finals and finally underwent surgery in late July. The pain had become too much. He couldn’t do yoga or play golf. And while it meant scuttling much of his remaining summer plans, the procedure would heal Kerr in time for training camp.
Five weeks later, Kerr’s health was deteriorating fast. The surgery had caused a spinal fluid leak and, with it, a flood of agonizing pain. Headaches, dizziness, irritability—this was not how he planned to spend the months after his first title as coach. An early September surgery fixed the leak but the pain persisted, so much so that it consumed his thoughts. Just a couple of days into training camp, Kerr knew that basketball couldn’t command his necessary attention.
In early October, a month after Kerr’s second surgery, the Warriors announced he would take an indefinite leave of absence. “We don’t anticipate the recovery process will be long term,” Bob Myers said, “but as of today, we don’t know the exact time frame. We’ll evaluate his progress daily.”
Kerr said he would remain as involved as his health permitted—attending practices and film sessions and such—but he wouldn’t return to the sidelines until the pain either had dissipated or was sufficiently manageable. “At this point,” he told the media, “I simply want to get healthy and back to my normal daily routine on and off the court.”
Alvin Gentry had been Kerr’s top assistant in his first season in Oakland, but the New Orleans Pelicans lured him south to be their head coach. Kerr opted not to hire a replacement during the summer, so Luke Walton, all of 35 years old and with one season of NBA coaching experience on his resume, was elevated to interim head coach for as long as Kerr was away. Walton would still have Ron Adams, Jarron Collins, and Bruce Fraser to collaborate with on the sidelines during games, and Kerr would still be around Oracle before games and during halftime.
But once that ball was tipped to start the game, Walton—just a couple of years removed from his own NBA career—was in charge.
His youthful enthusiasm drove him in those early weeks on the bench. Like Kerr, he helped run plays in practice but would engage almost as if he was still one of the guys. (He particularly enjoyed trash-talking Draymond Green, knowing that it would bring out the best in him come game time.) Walton’s style wasn’t a dramatic departure from Kerr’s, but his offensive approach allowed for more freelancing. The occasional bout of anxiety aside, Walton grew more confident as the season progressed and was masterful in keeping the players engaged.
And did the Warriors ever thrive. They won their first 24 games of the season, a feat no NBA team had ever accomplished. Tacking on wins from the final four regular-season games from a season ago, the 28-game win streak was the second-longest in league history, behind only what the 1971–72 Lakers accomplished. On Halloween night 1971 in Los Angeles, the Lakers, despite 38 points from Gail Goodrich, fell to Golden State by just four points. They then won their next 33 games, including a trio of victories over the Warriors. The Lakers didn’t lose for a 65-day stretch, though thanks to the passage of time from one season to the next, the Warriors’ win streak technically lived on for 249 days.
And even after their first defeat—a deflating effort in Milwaukee that capped off a seven-game road trip and followed a double-overtime win in Boston the night before—the Warriors still kept winning. They pushed their record to 29-1, then 36-2, then 39-4 after a Midwest road trip that included a 34-point thrashing in Cleveland followed by a 31-point win in Chicago before returning home. Golden State had won all 19 home games at Oracle Arena, with each one morphing into a joyous 20,000-person party before long. Nicole Curran, Joe Lacob’s fiancée, would lead the players’ wives and girlfriends in postgame tequila shots just off the court at the Bridge Club. It felt as if the Warriors had a legitimate shot to win all 41 regular-season home games, which no team had ever done.
For nearly three months, Golden State had played the most dominant stretch of team basketball since the Chicago Bulls, led by Michael Jordan at the peak of his powers, won 72 games against only 10 losses over the 1995–96 season. For two decades, that Bulls team (which also boasted backup point guard Steve Kerr) had been regarded as the best team in NBA history.
The Warriors were coming for that throne.
That they were doing this without their head coach on the sidelines to call plays, make substitutions, and devise strategy in real time says much about the groundwork Kerr had laid in just one season, about the competence of his coaching staff and that they could keep the team playing so well in his stead, about the players and their ability to internalize what Kerr had taught them and to execute almost as if on instinct.
Curry’s first half of the season was spellbinding, his numbers unlike anything he’d ever accumulated. After 30 games, he had already made 140 three-pointers and was essentially halfway to his single-season record of 286. He was averaging 30 points, 6.5 assists, and two steals. He’d scored 40 or more points seven times in his first 41 games. Having missed only two games in late December with a leg bruise, Curry headed into the second half healthy and full of confidence.
Green was also having a sensational start to the season. Many players, after having signed their first mammoth contract, drop off or perhaps exhibit slightly less motivation now that they’ve been paid. Not so for Green, who put up averages of 14.5 points, 9.5 rebounds, and 7.4 assists with Walton coaching games. His defense was elite, with 1.3 steals and 1.3 blocks per game, and Golden State’s opponents’ numbers were down across the board with him on the floor. He was shooting 41.4 percent on threes, but also facilitating and stretching the floor. The Green-Curry pick-and-roll became the most lethal play call in the NBA, literally undefendable if executed even marginally well.
And the “small-ball” lineup that had served the Warriors so well in the Finals now had a nickname—the Death Lineup, coined in late November by the local media—that was more than apropos considering the results. Though Harrison Barnes had missed 16 of the Warriors’ first 43 games due to a sprained ankle, the Death Lineup had played enough together to cement its reputation as the league’s most-feared five-man combo. Over that time, they played 95 minutes together across 20 games and produced the best Net Rating of any full lineup in the NBA. Per 100 possessions, the Death Lineup was outscoring the opposition by 60.2 points, an astronomical difference. Overall, the Warriors boasted three of the four most efficient lineups in the league.
Then, in mid-January, having won 39 of their first 43 games, Kerr announced to the team, nonchalantly during a prepractice film session, that he would be returning to the sidelines. He had tried everything to alleviate his pain—including medicinal marijuana—but only time had helped him reach a point where he could finally come back. It wasn’t a complete surprise to the team, as Kerr had joined them on the recent road trip, but the players were elated all the same. Seeing their coach in such a clearly compromised state had been difficult. It was part of their enduring motivation, not just to win but to win for him.
Now, Kerr was back. The Warriors were whole once more.
Golden State beat Indiana by 12 that night, then walloped San Antonio by 30 two nights later. Curry averaged 38 points between the two games and made 14 threes in all. With Kerr again in charge, the Warriors stood to become a bigger, better version of the monolith that was taking the league by storm.
Over the next month or so, the Warriors won 13 of their first 14 games with Kerr back on the bench, pushing their record to an obscene 52-5. In the span of five days in early February, the Warriors were honored at the White House by President Obama, returned home to beat Oklahoma City despite 40 points and 14 rebounds from Kevin Durant, then attended Super Bowl 50 the next day in nearby Santa Clara. The week after that, Curry, Thompson, and Green all played in the All-Star Game in Toronto.
Then came a game that defined Golden State’s scintillating season.
• • •
In late February, the Warriors trekked to chilly Oklahoma City for a nationally televised Saturday night showdown. It was the final leg of a tiring, seven-game road trip and tempers were running a little high, especially for Draymond Green. Of any player adapting to Kerr’s return, it was Green who endured the most difficult transition. As players like Curry, Thompson, and Marreese Speights had benefited from Kerr’s return, Green’s assists, usage rate (a metric that conveys how much of an offense is run through a specific player), and overall scoring all suffered noticeable drop-offs, while his turnovers and fouls went up. Most obvious was that Green’s three-point shooting dried up. Under Walton, 33.1 percent of Green’s shots came from beyond the arc. Since Kerr had returned, that number plummeted to just 22 percent.
Heading into play against OKC, Green was clearly dissatisfied with his game, and the first half against the Thunder hadn’t gone well. He missed all three of his shot attempts and had two passes picked off, including a baffler with just a minute left in the second quarter when he tried to hit Brandon Rush in the left corner. André Roberson picked off the pass and handed the ball to Russell Westbrook, who dashed down the court for a layup.
The Warriors went to the locker room down 11, and Green exploded on Kerr. “I am not a robot!” he screamed at the coach. As ESPN later reported, when Kerr told Green to have a seat and calm down, Green went ballistic: “Motherfucker, come sit me down!” Green said he wouldn’t shoot the rest of the game if Kerr wished it so. His frustration of the past month, over his diminished role, had finally boiled over. And because locker room doors are not hermetically sealed, sideline reporter Lisa Salters heard the loudest of Green’s rantings and reported a portion of said screed on the nationwide ABC telecast when the second half commenced. It was an unprecedented moment in the Kerr era, but not for the Warriors franchise. This kind of blowup was par for the course under previous coaches. Such incidents had derailed seasons in the past, and it was now an open question whether the 2015–16 squad would suffer a similar fate—as millions at home watched along.
Golden State went on a 6–0 run to start the third. Then catastrophe nearly struck: Curry drove the lane and dished off to Barnes for a layup, but not before Westbrook jumped and landed on Curry’s left ankle at an awkward angle. The MVP limped off to the locker room with head trainer Chelsea Lane and security guard Ralph Walker. The Warriors nervously awaited his return, should it come at all.
Curry missed five minutes of game time and Golden State was only down seven when he returned. He swished a trifecta of threes over the next four minutes and the Warriors were only down five headed to the fourth.
With just a few minutes to go, Golden State made its move. When Westbrook, despite shooting a miserable 2 of 12 in the second half, converted a nifty layup with 4:51 left to put OKC up by 11, Kerr called on the Death Lineup. From that point to the end of regulation, the Warriors outscored the Thunder, 18–7. Durant’s three with 15 seconds left looked as if it might seal a win for the Thunder, but a Klay Thompson finger roll with 12 seconds left cut the lead to two.
Westbrook then rushed the inbounds pass to Durant, who was swarmed by both Barnes and Andre Iguodala. As the two Warriors kept from fouling him, Durant heaved the ball downcourt. After Thompson deflected the pass, Green saved it from rolling out of bounds. With 3.4 seconds left, Thompson corralled the ball and passed to Iguodala, who pulled up from 20 feet to tie the game but was fouled by Durant with less than a second on the clock.
Iguodala made both free throws, and the game went to overtime.
The Thunder scored five quick points in 33 seconds, but a Curry drive to the hoop with 4:13 to go forced Durant to commit his sixth foul and sit out the remainder of the game. Curry then came down and hit one three—to tie his single-season mark of 286—then another for the record as he fell to the ground to tie the game at 110 with 2:29 to go.
Back and forth they went until OKC set up for a potential game-winner. Tied at 118 with 10 seconds left, Westbrook drove on Thompson and tried to bank in a 14-foot pull-up jumper that went askew and into Iguodala’s arms. He threw a pass out to a waiting Curry. Kerr opted not to use his last timeout and instead let Curry and the Warriors engineer their own fate.
With 3.5 seconds left, Curry dribbled across the midcourt line.
With 2.5 seconds left, Curry pulled up from 37 feet away.
With 0.8 seconds left, Curry’s shot sailed through the netting.
“Curry, way downtown, BANG! BANG!” yelled Mike Breen on the broadcast. “Oh, what a shot from Curry!”
The MVP ran to his bench, then aimlessly toward the far end of the court, screaming and pumping his arms and doing a shoulder-shimmy. Curry had scored 46 points on just 24 shots. His 12 threes tied the single-game record, matching Kobe Bryant and Donyell Marshall in that esteemed club. Watching from his home in Charlotte, Brandon Payne was flush with pride, having seen that kind of shot from Curry a million times in practice. “As soon as he let it go,” Payne says, “I knew it was good.”
Final score: Golden State 121, Oklahoma City 118.
It was the most audacious performance of Curry’s career, and while it might seem silly to suggest that shot saved a season for a team whose record was 52-5 heading into that night, the suggestion is not entirely without merit. Between Green’s halftime meltdown, Curry’s apparent ankle injury, and the fact that the Thunder (41-17) were no slouches themselves, you never know where the season could have headed. It was certainly Golden State’s biggest win since Game 4 of the 2015 Finals. And once again, they had survived the awesomeness of Durant, who fouled out with 37 points and 12 rebounds. After the game, ESPN’s Ethan Sherwood Strauss tweeted, with a whimsical eye toward the unknowable machinations of a coming offseason sure to be dictated by Durant’s free agency, “I can’t even fathom KD and Curry existing as a joined force.”
Green missed all eight of his shots but did compile 14 rebounds and 14 assists. After the game, his numbers started trending back upward again until season’s end, and his attitude noticeably improved in the weeks that followed. That precipitous drop in percentage of Green’s shots from three-point land? For the rest of the season after the halftime incident, 33.6 percent of his shots were three-point attempts, an even higher clip than when Walton was in charge.
The team downplayed the incident, with Kerr telling reporters two days later, “It’s the NBA. Every team I’ve ever been on has had stuff like this. Every team. Championship teams or not, it happens.”
• • •
Aside from all the ancillary dramatics that night, the win came the same night that the Warriors clinched a playoff berth, the first time since the 1987–88 Lakers that a team had done so before the calendar flipped to March. (Technically, the deed was done an hour before Curry’s overtime three, by virtue of San Antonio’s win in Houston 450 miles south, but Golden State didn’t need to know.)
More important, the Warriors kept winning, including 15 of 17 games in March. They entered April with a 68-7 record, and with five wins over their final seven games they could eclipse Chicago’s once-thought-unbreakable record of 72 regular-season wins. Even more incredibly, the Warriors were still undefeated at Oracle Arena, winning all 36 games they’d played there. Overall, they hadn’t dropped a regular-season game in Oakland since an overtime loss to Chicago in January 2015. An NBA-record 54 home wins in a row had followed that misstep.
Maybe the Warriors should’ve known a down night was in the offing when Kerr’s attempt on April Fool’s Day morning to prank Draymond Green into thinking he would be sitting out that night didn’t go well. “I didn’t get much of a laugh and Draymond glared at me,” Kerr said. “I told him I was going to give him the night off because he needed to rest. He just glared at me and I said ‘April Fools’ and nobody laughed. . . . They usually go over better than that, but just crickets.”
Joke bombs notwithstanding, the Boston Celtics prevailed that night at Oracle, 109–106, as both Curry and Barnes missed potential game-tying threes in the final 10 seconds. Turnovers (22 of them) doomed the Warriors, but as frustrating as the loss was, Boston was a playoff-bound team that could win on the road in any arena any given night. “It’s a weird feeling,” Curry said of losing at home after so long. “We’ve just got to be able to move on from it.”
Four nights later, coming off an easy rebound win over Portland, Golden State dropped a stinker at home to the lowly Minnesota Timberwolves, who came into the game just 25-52 on the season. They had some undeniably talented young stars in the making—former No. 1 overall draft picks like Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns—but it was a team the Warriors should’ve easily beaten. Instead, they fell in overtime, 124–117.
The loss kept the Warriors at 69-9 on the year. They had four games left and no margin for error if they were to capture the wins record. Their path wouldn’t be easy. After hosting San Antonio, they’d hit the road for Memphis before facing San Antonio again. A potential 73rd win would come at home versus Memphis in the season finale. The Grizzlies had been hammered by a rash of injuries and were a far less intimidating iteration of the team that took a 2–1 series lead over the Warriors in the conference semifinals a year earlier. Out of the playoff hunt, Memphis was playing solely for pride.
The Spurs, meanwhile, would be a tougher foe. Playing without Andrew Bogut, the Warriors labored through a frustrating 87–79 loss in San Antonio back on March 19. It was a typical Spurs win—gritty, low-scoring, and eminently perplexing for their opponent. Curry had his worst game of the season, finishing with just 14 points on 18 shots; he missed 11 of 12 threes. Klay Thompson had 15 points on 20 shot attempts and missed six of seven threes. It was the Warriors’ lowest-scoring game of the year and second-worst shooting performance. By the time they returned, the Spurs were 39-0 at home on the year and winners of 48 straight at AT&T Center. The Warriors had still not won a regular-season game in San Antonio since 1997. To have any chance of reaching 73 wins, they’d have to break a 19-year losing streak.
But first things first. At Oracle, the Warriors handled the Spurs with relative ease, 112–101, for their 70th win. Curry led all scorers with 27 points and, after the win, addressed the idea that the Warriors were forgoing rest and potentially sacrificing playoff health in the chase for 73. “Two teams in the history of the game have reached where we are now,” he said. “This is our journey. The goal is to win a championship and nobody should sacrifice that for anything in this regular season, but if you’re able to play and feel like you can go out and give what you got and continue to build momentum into the playoffs, then we’ll do it.”
Golden State’s 71st win was far harder than expected, necessitating a comeback from nine points down with five minutes to play. But threes from Curry, Barnes, and Iguodala fueled the late rally, and Green’s putback off a missed Curry layup with one minute to go was the deciding bucket. Green made all three of his shots in the fourth quarter en route to a team-high 23 points on the night. Despite 18 lead changes and a measly six turnovers from Memphis, Golden State survived.
Win No. 72 was another classic Warriors-Spurs matchup, but Curry was more than up to the task, unlike in that dispiriting loss in March. Behind 37 points from the MVP, the Warriors improved their scoring in each quarter as the game progressed—from 14 to 21 to 27 to 30—and won, 92–86, for their first regular-season victory in San Antonio since Bill Clinton had just taken his second oath of office. (The victory also capped Golden State’s road record at 34-7, the best in NBA history.) After the game, Kerr paid homage to the late tennis pro Vitas Gerulaitis by adapting his most famous quote: “Nobody—and I mean nobody—beats the Golden State Warriors 34 straight times on their home floor. Nobody!”
And on April 13, 2016, Golden State crushed Memphis, 125–104, to cap off its historic regular season with an unprecedented 73rd win against only nine losses. In a mirror image of his captivating late February game in Oklahoma City, Curry again finished with 46 points on 24 shots, this time in less than 30 minutes on the court. In making 10 of 19 threes, Curry ended the year with 402 three-pointers, improving on his old mark of 286 by a brain-numbing 41 percent.
Five years to the day after news leaked about Bob Myers’s hiring as assistant general manager just hours after I stood in the rafters above Oracle Arena for a glimpse at motion-capture cameras that promised a better kind of basketball analysis, the Warriors had ascended to unprecedented heights. “I’ll say the same thing I said 20 years ago: I don’t think this one’s ever going to be broken,” said Kerr, a reserve guard on the 1995–96 Chicago Bulls squad that won 72. “We wanted to get this record. The guys wanted it.”
Kerr noticed how the Warriors’ play had dropped off as the regular season rolled toward its conclusion, how they had become so reliant on threes, even as their success rate remained at a high level. The turnovers, as evinced by the home losses to Boston and Minnesota, had started creeping up to unacceptable levels on too many occasions, but it’s hard to point out such minor flaws when you’re winning game after game. Sometimes a coach has to decide not just when to point out mistakes but when not to point them out, when calling attention to them could be a net negative. So Kerr let it slide.
The Warriors had cemented their place as one of the all-time great passing teams in NBA history. They finished the regular season with 2,373 assists (the 16th-best single-season mark ever) and were only the second team of the past 20 years to join the ranks of the top 100 single-season assist totals. They had 43 games of 30 or more assists, the most in 31 years. (Next closest was Atlanta, with 18.) They had 13 games of 35 or more assists, more than any team in 28 years. (Behind them? Minnesota, with just three.) Kerr’s motion-dependent hybrid offense, even more potent in its sophomore season, had transformed the Warriors into an eighties throwback, reminiscent of an era when 125-point games were not uncommon. (Golden State also posted 18 of those outbursts, more than anyone since 1990–91.)
The historic number of assists was a by-product of the Warriors’ extreme offensive efficiency but also their focus on corralling missed shots. The defense wasn’t as sharp as the season before—the Warriors dropped from first in Defensive Rating to a three-way tie for fourth—but they led the league for the first time ever in defensive rebounding, which meant more opportunities for scoring in transition. In the past, when the Warriors led in overall rebounding, it was usually paired with their also leading in offensive rebounds, which meant they benefited from missing a whole mess of shots. This time, the Warriors were just 21st in offensive boards, a testament to their high shooting percentage.
The Death Lineup, hampered early on by the Barnes injury, played only 172 minutes together across 37 regular-season games. Among all five-man lineups that played at least that many minutes, the Death Lineup was the best in the NBA, posting a Net Rating of 44.4. It was the highest Net Rating for any five-man lineup going back to at least the 2000–01 season.
The Warriors averaged 13.1 threes per game, the most in NBA history. Their 1,077 threes made them the first team to ever top a thousand. And of the 17 teams that previously had averaged at least 10 per game, the Warriors had the best shooting percentage (41.6 percent) of any of them. Both in volume and in efficiency, Golden State had not only exploited a glaring market inefficiency but managed to redefine the inherent lethality of the three-point shot.
Curry was the biggest single reason why. No one had ever made 300 threes in a season, yet Curry finished with a ridiculous 402. (The YouTube video featuring all of them has a runtime of nine and a half minutes.) It was the third time in seven years he had set the single-season record for threes. The combined long-range shooting of Curry and Klay Thompson (276 threes) accounted for more than 20 percent of the Warriors’ total offense in games they played together. The NBA had never seen two teammates so consistently good from long range over the course of a season.
But Curry’s season was about much more than his long-range game. He posted the highest-ever True Shooting Percentage of anyone averaging 25 or more points. He had the highest Effective Field Goal Percentage of any 30-point scorer in history—better than any season for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, or Wilt Chamberlain. And since no one had ever averaged 30 points while playing fewer than 35 minutes a night, Curry’s Player Efficiency Rating (the best metric for evaluating a player’s overall contributions) came in as the eighth-highest mark recorded. Only Chamberlain, Jordan, and LeBron James had ever accumulated a higher PER over a season. He was the first player since Allen Iverson to lead the NBA in both scoring and steals and became just the second player ever—after two-time MVP (and future Golden State consultant) Steve Nash—to finish a season shooting at least 50 percent from the field, 45 percent on threes, and 90 percent on free throws.
“We talk a lot about how we’re blessed to have each other to get to play with every single night,” Curry said after the win, “and as long as we stay focused on continuing to get better, continuing to do things that have gotten us to this point, who knows how far we can take this thing?” Klay Thompson said the Warriors appreciated how hard the playoffs would be, having won the title a year before: “We know what we’ve got to do to win.”
And Draymond Green, who embraced the chase for 73 wins more vocally than any of his teammates, was downright jubilant after the game. After the final buzzer, he cradled the ball in his arms, refusing to let it go for anyone. When asked what the night meant for him, Green replied in his usual understated way. “It means that I’m a part of the best team ever,” he said through a wide grin, “and not many people can say that.”
That reply was wholly indicative of the Warriors’ confidence level by that point. They felt invincible, maybe rightfully so. They’d handled every top competitor in the league with ease. A championship seemed inevitable.
As Joe Lacob—who had been criticized for weeks since boasting to the New York Times Magazine how the Warriors were “light-years ahead of probably every other team”—rushed from the court to the celebration going down in the Warriors’ locker room, he held in his hands a printout of the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle. Over a full-page image of an exultant Curry, the headline declared BEST EVER.