The Boston Celtics' Grant Williams, right, celebrates with teammates after defeating the Heat in Game 7 of the NBA Eastern Conference finals playoff series in Miami on May 29, 2022.Wilfredo Lee/The Associated Press
In order to make the NBA Finals, look at all the trouble the Boston Celtics had to put themselves through.
Their first round against Brooklyn – rock ’n’ roll’s most dysfunctional supergroup – was a media circus. Somehow, Boston won in a sweep and got dismissed at the same time.
Milwaukee pushed Boston hard in the second round, but then a shooting incident near the arena unwound that city and then the team.
Miami seemed to have the Celtics’ measure in the Eastern Conference final. Like all memorable basketball encounters, two weeks of play came down to the final 30 seconds on Sunday night.
Boston led by two. Miami’s Mr. Grumpy, Jimmy Butler, got the ball on a fast break. Instead of blowing by Boston’s Al Horford, who was on his heels with his back to the basket, Butler pulled up for an unmarked three.
Every baseball player imagines himself as Babe Ruth, bat dangling behind him, watching the ball go over the wall. Every NBA star thinks he’s going to be Kawhi Leonard.
Butler’s walk-off dream hit the front of the rim. Cut and scene.
Boston, the team-most-likely-to, has finally climbed the postseason cliff face. And now that it’s on top of the NBA mountain, it can see that there was a lift to the peak on the other side. The Golden State Warriors have already got off it.
Theoretically, the Western Conference is the hard one. You would not know that by watching Golden State games.
The Warriors slapped Denver and the current NBA MVP, Nikola Jokic, around. They toyed with Memphis before putting them away. And they annihilated the Dallas Mavericks, so much so that it has sparked an existential crisis at that club.
You will recall Golden State from such dynasties as the mid-to-late 2010s. You may also know them from such abysmal finishes as dead last in the league in 2020 and not a whole lot better in 2021.
Boston is the team that followed the MBA case-study route to success. It had got very bad for a while. It drafted wisely. It let that talent flounder until it had its bearings. The Celtics added some specialized staff through free agency. And then they prayed.
The Warriors are a new case study. If you were presenting it to potential investors you would start by waving a finger in the air and saying, “When you leave here today, I want you to think of one word – sabbatical.”
Let’s say you are a high-achiever in mid-career. You’re doing great, but you’re getting bored.
So you melt down completely against the Toronto Raptors in 2019. Who could’ve seen that one coming?
Your second-best player, Kevin Durant, is disastrously injured halfway (retorn Achilles) through the series. He’ll leave for browner pastures a few weeks later.
Your third-best player, Klay Thompson, is just as disastrously injured (torn ACL) in the last minutes of the last game of the series.
Your best player, Steph Curry, will soon suffer his own disastrous injury (broken hand) and take forever to find his way back to top form.
What had been a sports tech giant throwing off quarterly dividends was now, through no fault of its own, a startup again.
The usual route here is accelerated decline. Everybody fades or leaves or never quite figures out how to adjust. Most teams who find themselves in this position hang on to the old gang too long, extending the pain.
But the Warriors used this years-long dip as an extended recharging session. They added a few players, but no superstars.
A notable example is former No. 1 pick Andrew Wiggins. During his years in Minnesota, the Canadian never could manage to match his hype. When he was traded to Golden State, he was considered a renovation project.
However, freed of the expectation that he be the best player on the court all of the time, Wiggins manages to be the best player on the court some of the time.
Another good example is guard Jordan Poole, picked up at the end of the first round of the 2019 draft. A lot of NBA teams have at least one great player. But very few teams, maybe no teams, have background performers working at Poole’s level.
The Warriors monolith was built on these sorts of players. They are the ones who prove that scouts don’t get it wrong, so much as they get it safe. They talk up the player who is least likely to make them look stupid, and do so in a pack so that no particular person can be blamed when it doesn’t work out.
This is how the NBA’s most brilliant irritant, on court and off, the Warriors’ Draymond Green, got drafted 35th. It’s how a player as silky as Thompson was picked 11th. Most famously, it’s how the NBA’s Mr. Everything, Curry, was passed up by every team in the league early in his career after suffering a knee injury.
Now that LeBron James is so busy running the Lakers that he doesn’t have much time left for basketball, Curry is the last man able to win games by force of will. He is the key to the Warriors’ resurgence, just the way he was key to the original surgence. He is a human tide generator.
If the Warriors win this final – and they are prohibitive favourites – they are primed to do something that has never been done. Dynasties happen. But a dynasty operating over two distinct periods, separated by a period of total collapse, with essentially the same personnel? That’s a special trick.
Like every other league, the NBA is thin on original thinkers. Once someone tries something new and it works, everyone else rushes to do exactly what they did, exactly the way they did it.
This may be the Warriors’ real legacy – total originality.
Because while tanking caught on despite being synonymous with ‘loser,’ encouraging your superstars to co-ordinate their ligament tears is probably a bridge too far for most teams.