The champagne is making my eyes tear up from 50 feet away.
Up ahead, past the blob of slow-shuffling media and beyond a hallway lined with sepia-toned photos of past Golden State greats—Wilt Chamberlain, Tom Meschery, Al Attles, Chris Mullin, Rick Barry, and finally Nate Thurmond—the Warriors are bouncing around their locker room as they celebrate the fifth championship in franchise history. There’s enough Moët champagne to run up a six-digit tab, even as bottles of Stella Artois, Blue Moon, and Corona are passed around by team employees. Players mingle with their wives, kids, and parents. Executives and coaches hug each other like they’ll never let go. Only those on the inside truly know the full measures it took to finish out a title run that the NBA largely treated as a fait accompli.
If only it were that simple. Sure, the Warriors ran off a 67-15 regular-season record—same as in 2015, when they also rolled toward a title—that was replete with memorable performances. In November against New Orleans, Stephen Curry set the NBA record with 13 threes in one game. In December against Indiana, Klay Thompson scored a career-high 60 points despite playing fewer than 30 minutes in the game. In February against Memphis, Draymond Green recorded the first triple-double in league history that didn’t involve double-digit points (12 rebounds, 10 assists, 10 steals). On any given night, you were apt to see some feat that no basketball fan had ever witnessed.
But there were also stumbles along the way. San Antonio stomped them on opening night by 29 points. They blew a 13-point fourth-quarter lead in Cleveland on Christmas Day. And after Kevin Durant went down in late February with a sprained knee ligament, they lost five of their next seven games, their worst sustained stretch of play in Steve Kerr’s three years as head coach. With a month to go in the season, they had slipped to second place in the conference standings. Golden State had played eight games in eight different cities in 13 days of travel that spanned the continent from one coast to the other. They were injured, exhausted, and the season was suddenly in limbo.
But in one of the most stunning stretches of late-season play in the modern era, the Warriors won their next 14 games, with Durant returning for only the last of those. Then with Thompson sitting out the season’s penultimate game—and Kerr resting Curry and Green in the fourth quarter—Golden State finally dropped one, to the Utah Jazz, but had already locked up home-court advantage through the playoffs. The loss was meaningless. With Durant healthy again, the No. 1 seed in their pocket, and a mere 16 wins separating them from ultimate redemption, the Warriors set about taking back what they felt was stolen from them a year ago.
Their approach was different this time around. With no chase for 73 wins bearing down on his players, Kerr more closely heeded the advice of his training staff and made a concerted effort to manage in-game minutes and plan scheduled rest for players up and down the roster. “Every season is different unto itself,” Kerr said before that Utah loss on April 10. “This season reminds me a lot of our first year when the last few games we already had the one-seed locked up. . . . We are trying to do the same thing this year in terms of monitoring minutes and making sure we are healthy and rested. Similar to two years ago, but very different from last year.”
Just so long as the season resulted in a very different ending from 2016.
• • •
As the blue and yellow confetti rained down inside Oracle Arena, Kerr embraced general manager Bob Myers with tears in his eyes and unconditional joy in his heart. This postseason had been the most painful of his entire NBA career. In missing the first 43 games of the 2015–16 season with a fluid leak in his spinal column that caused chronic pain and daily migraines, Kerr ceded in-game bench duties to Luke Walton. But with his upstart assistant now the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, Kerr desperately wanted to get through all 82 regular-season games without issue.
Not only did he coach every one, he missed just a single practice.
But there were good days and bad. Sometimes the tell was that he wasn’t wearing a tie on the sidelines. He always deflected when anyone asked about his health. Especially on the road, Kerr would find himself cornered by well-wishers who just wanted to check in and see how he was doing: You doing good? How ya feeling? He always smiled and assuaged their concerns. It was more manageable, yes, but always lurking. After coming home from the grueling mid-March road trip, Kerr was supposed to speak with me at the team practice facility, but he couldn’t stay. There was a doctor’s appointment that even the team’s media relations department didn’t know about. Ten days after that, as I asked a source close to Kerr why he so often seems happy and carefree, the response shook me: “I don’t think happy is the right word for Steve.”
Why is that? “Well, he’s having a hard time now with his health.”
Three weeks later, Kerr’s back gave out again. Sitting on a 2–0 lead in the first-round series against Portland, he announced he was stepping aside. Assistant coach Mike Brown, who’d once coached a young LeBron James to his first career Finals appearance and had years of bench experience to his name, became acting head coach. The affable and gregarious Brown was hired in part as a hedge against Kerr’s health failing again, but this succession was going into motion at the most critical point in the season. They were still 14 wins shy of a title, and the competition would only get exponentially harder from there on.
But win the Warriors did, finishing off Portland in a four-game sweep before imposing the same fate on Utah. Even with Gordon Hayward and Rudy Gobert (albeit slightly hobbled from an injury suffered in the first round), the Jazz were overmatched from start to finish. The Warriors, now 8-0 in the playoffs, were halfway to a title, but San Antonio loomed in the conference finals. Even in dealing with their own injuries—Tony Parker was out for the playoffs with a ruptured quadriceps tendon, while MVP candidate Kawhi Leonard rolled his left ankle hard just a few days earlier and sat out the deciding Game 6 against Houston—the Spurs still had Gregg Popovich at the helm. Kerr’s mentor was regarded as the best head coach in the game, but he would be matching up against Brown, who’d been his assistant a year ago.
So the basketball gods finally gave the fans a series that was years in the offing, but fortunes turned hard in the Warriors’ favor when Leonard’s ankle finally gave out. In the third quarter of Game 1, as the Spurs’ lead swelled to as much as 25 points, Leonard landed on the foot of teammate David Lee, the ex-Warrior who was sitting on the Spurs bench just off the court. Leonard crumpled in obvious pain but stayed in the game. A couple of minutes later, Leonard landed awkwardly again, this time on the foot of Zaza Pachulia, who closed out aggressively as Leonard came down from a jumper. Reckless or not on Pachulia’s part, Leonard’s already compromised ankle could take no more. The Warriors stormed back to win Game 1 and took the next three games as Leonard, in street clothes, could only watch from the Spurs’ bench.
Twelve playoff games, 12 wins. Just four to go, and they would have a chance to finish off their run against (who else?) the Cleveland Cavaliers, who romped through the first three rounds with a 12-1 record.
A third meeting in three years. A rubber match to decide NBA supremacy. With both teams healthy and rested—all those sweeps meant a lot of downtime in between each series, including nine days off for the Warriors before the Finals—the question of who was the NBA’s best would definitively be decided.
With just four turnovers in Game 1, the Warriors were as disciplined as they were dangerous. Their 31 assists showed they could move the ball and score at will against a porous Cavs defense. A 113–91 thrashing and the Warriors were off and running. They were just three wins away from 16-0—the first undefeated postseason in NBA history.
But one hour and 45 minutes before the start of Game 2, news dropped that made dozens of gathered media members murmur and shift in their press seating. The back door to the interview room swung open and in strolled not Brown (who’d won 11 straight games) but Kerr. With hardly any advance notice, the Warriors head coach was headed back to the bench. Not even his players knew yet.
“Hi, everybody,” Kerr said with a grin. “Any questions?”
• • •
After the final buzzer sounds, Kevin Durant doesn’t know what to do first, but there’s LeBron James, so they embrace for a few seconds. James has just become the first player to ever average a triple-double in a Finals, but it’s a forgotten footnote for now. Durant was utterly dominant against the Cavaliers, averaging 35 points, eight rebounds, and five assists. In Games 1 and 2, he often drove the lane for uncontested slams. In Game 3 in Cleveland, it was Durant’s dramatic pull-up three over James with 45 seconds left that anchored an 11–0 Warriors run to end the game and secure an insurmountable 3–0 series lead. Even his 35 points in Game 4 helped turn that 21-point loss into something slightly more respectable.
But Durant’s lethality was fully unleashed in the Game 5 clincher back at Oracle Arena. With all the pressure in the world on his shoulders, he was sensational, dropping 39 points on 20 shot attempts and keeping the Cavs at bay through a manic, back-and-forth fourth quarter that wasn’t decided until the final minute.
With about 45 seconds left, Curry danced along the left wing above the arc as Kyrie Irving tried to move with him step for step. A year earlier, it was Irving who nailed the three that damned Golden State to a summer of second-guessing. This time, Curry, who finished with 34 points on the night, would seek his revenge. He hopped around, to his left, around to the right, left, right, left again, looking for that sliver of an opening. Curry finally juked one last time, saw his angle, and, with six seconds on the shot clock, let the ball fly from 25 feet out.
Swish.
Curry flew down the court, leaped in the air, and bounced hips mid-flight with Draymond Green. Andre Iguodala, who played 38 inspiring minutes and scored his most points (20) in nearly three months, looked right at Durant, who raised all seven feet and four inches of his arms high above in jubilation. After a decade in the NBA, after a long year of criticism and ridicule, Durant had on the most spectacular of stages.
And so he hugged James, then found his mother, Wanda, to embrace her, too. Then he found Curry, the undisputed star of this team, the man who pledged to put everything aside, all ego and pretense, to acclimate Durant and help him fulfill his mission of finally winning a title.
It hadn’t been easy for Durant, whose personality was unlike any other in the Warriors locker room. His sense of humor could be tough to parse, and there were times when a surprising sensitivity would surface. When one lighthearted postgame discussion about expensive suits led a reporter to harmlessly joke that “we poor sportswriters can’t afford all that,” Durant quickly retorted, “Man, you don’t even know what poor is.” He would also often push back on media members who asked weak press conference questions. (Fair enough, though.) Durant didn’t quite embody the happy-go-lucky ethos that had been codified with Kerr’s arrival, but he grew more comfortable as the season went on. Even sitting out five-plus weeks with the late-season knee injury was something he ultimately viewed as a positive. “I think that was good,” Durant said after his first game back, “just to get away, kind of have a mental vacation from it all.”
By the time the Warriors reached the Finals, Durant was a singular force, not only in his own play but in how he opened the floor up for Curry, Thompson, and others. It had taken all season but Durant was now fully integrated into Kerr’s motion offense, thanks in large part to his adaptability and work ethic. “You can talk about whatever you want to talk about, but nobody comes in and cares about the game or loves the game as much as I do or works as hard as do I at the basketball game,” Durant said afterward, his glittering Finals MVP trophy standing near him. “I knew at some point in my life that it will come around for me. So I just tried to stay with those principles and keep grinding.”
As I inched my way toward the locker room, the Moët making my eyes water with each closing step, Durant emerged and gave Rich Kleiman, his business partner, a mammoth bear hug, the sheer happiness evident on his face. The tears of ecstasy in the locker room behind him, the sopping puddles of bubbly pooling on the floor, the high fives and the smiles—it was largely because of Durant, but it was also due to Kerr and Curry—who was three weeks away from signing a $201 million contract, the richest in NBA history—and Myers, whose dress shirt was drenched and practically see-through as he drank from a comically large champagne bottle, and Sammy Gelfand, the analytics whiz who made the rounds inside the locker room, shaking hands with anyone he could find, and still dozens more people down the line.
At the top of that hierarchy sat Joe Lacob, who watched from courtside as the Warriors became the first Oakland sports franchise in 43 years to win a championship on home soil. After he and Peter Guber lifted the Larry O’Brien trophy for the second time in their lives, Lacob was asked by ESPN’s Doris Burke whom he wished to thank for making this title a reality.
“There is no doubt,” he calmly began, “that who we have to acknowledge the most are these guys right here!” With Lacob now wildly gesticulating over his shoulder, the crowd went nuts, the scathing boos of five years ago little more than myth in this moment. “Fantastic team! Every single one of them! We love ’em! They’re great players, Steph and Draymond and everybody else. And Kevin, thanks for coming!”
From down the dais, Durant replied, “Yes, sir!” He then kissed the championship trophy, already cradled in his enormous arms, for the first time in his life.