Sunday Shootaround: What the Warriors gave us this season

If the Golden State Warriors didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have had much reason to invent them.

The Spurs would have served the role of the league’s most dominant team just fine, given that they have already established new franchise benchmarks of excellence even by their distinguished standards. The Spurs have the most wins in team history, while also cruising to an undefeated home mark with a markedly different style than the one used to win a championship just two years ago. In an alternate universe, their back-to-basics approach in defiance of analytically-driven trends would have defined the season.

MVP candidates in a world without Steph Curry? Sure, we would have those in abundance. You could have made a case for LeBron James, who continues to be dominant even without a serviceable jump shot. Kevin Durant recaptured his form, and health, while his teammate Russell Westbrook racked up triple doubles like a latter-day Oscar Robertson. In San Antonio, Kawhi Leonard has emerged as a post-Duncan franchise player to keep the Spurs in contention well into the next decade. Chris Paul has merely saved the Clippers with his ongoing brilliant play. Choose your narrative. This would have been a fascinating race.

We would have had plenty of ancillary storylines to chew on without the Warriors, from LeBron’s melodramatic second act with the Cavs to the Lakers’ implosion in Kobe Bryant’s final season, to the ongoing weirdness that surrounds the Knicks. We’ve experienced painful regression from mainstays like the Bulls, Rockets and Grizzlies and we’ve had our share of pleasant surprises as well, from Damian Lillard’s Blazers to Steve Clifford’s Hornets. And there was the 76ers, whose woeful ineptness on the court launched a thousand thinkpieces about their process.

All those plot points received their share of attention, but because the Warriors do exist they were all put aside and compartmentalized whenever the next game started. Even innocuous regular season games against overmatched opponents became must-see events and every night seemed to bring something new to marvel at, from Curry’s ridiculous shotmaking to Draymond Green’s next-level passing.

Everything that has happened this season has to been seen through the prism of Golden State’s seeming inevitability. They were not only the main story, at times, they were the only one that truly mattered.

Only the Spurs have offered a serious challenge to Golden State’s hegemony and by some measures such as point-differential, they might have even had the better season. But in three head-to-head matchups, the Warriors have proven to be the superior team. The true test will come in the postseason, which has only served to downplay the significance of the regular season even more.

In the here and now, the Warriors have dominated everything and everyone. There is no serious MVP debate. Curry will win his second consecutive award, elevating him into company with the game’s true elites. The only remaining question is whether the vote will be unanimous. In addition, the Warriors have a leading Sixth Man of the Year candidate in Andre Iguodala and a Green is a strong Defensive Player of the Year contender. You could even argue that Curry and Green should be considered for Most Improved Player, given the nebulous nature of that honor. They have been so overwhelming that they even provide two viable candidates for Coach of the Year in Steve Kerr and Luke Walton.

They won’t win all those awards, of course. Sixth Man has tended to go to microwavable scorers instead of game-changing defenders. As strong as Green has been, Leonard is the obvious favorite to repeat for DPOY honors. Kerr and Walton will likely split their share of the vote and there are a half-dozen other strong coaching candidates. But the fact remains that you can’t have a serious discussion about anything in the NBA this season, without bringing the Warriors into the conversation. (Okay fine, they don’t have a Rookie of the Year candidate.)

In the absence of competition, we’ve been forced to delve back into the past. Those comparisons to the great teams and players of legend are as irresistible as they are infuriating, and as Bill Russell once said, "It’s impossible to play against ghosts."

It’s those apparitions, specifically the specter of the ‘96 Bulls, that have so transfixed us this season. For all their individual success, it’s the pursuit of 73 wins that kept us bleary-eyed with fatigue from staying up late on the East Coast. What’s remarkable about this quest, beyond the fact that it even exists, is that Golden State’s losses have tended to come against the lesser lights of the league in very specific circumstances such as back-to-backs or when players sat games for rest or injuries. When they have been whole they are nearly impossible to beat.

As inexplicable as defeats at the hands of the Lakers and Timberwolves might appear, the Warriors are 11-1 against the league’s top five teams. That ability to play up to their opponent’s level and confront the challenges in front of them are what defines their ethos. It’s the love of competition and the very idea of even being challenged in any way that brings out their best.

"It doesn’t surprise me," said New Orleans coach Alvin Gentry, who was the lead assistant on Kerr’s staff last season. "The one thing that really got in their craw was the fact that people challenged their championship and said well, they didn’t go through San Antonio. They didn’t play the Clippers. I think they took that personally because they played everyone in the path of winning the championship. I think that fueled them. The way they came out was very interesting. They’ve run into a couple of roadblocks now, but I don’t think it’s anything that they should be real concerned about."

Easy for Gentry to say, who knows from real worries after his first season with the injury ravaged Pelicans. Temporary as they may be, those Golden State roadblocks had become troublesome in recent days. The Warriors had lost two of three -- at Oracle, no less, where they had won a record 54 straight games -- before beating the Spurs convincingly on Thursday night. And so, 73 wins is once again on the table.

Is that quest important enough to justify playing all 82 games like they were meaningful, or does the goal itself lead down a dangerous path? It’s a philosophical question that gets into the heart of where the NBA stands at the moment, between the poles of logical reason and the pursuit of irrational, even meaningless achievements that make the sport so compelling on a daily basis.

"I think it’s good for them," Gentry said. "I know everyone talked about well, you should be resting the guys. No. If you’ve got a goal like that ahead of you, if you do obtain that goal it might never be broken in this league. It gave them something to play for and it’s a great challenge."

At the same time, we all know the season is too damn long and that good health is as much a determining factor in the playoffs as talent and ambition. To treat each game with this much significance is to invite disaster. And yet, who are we to deny competitors the right to become immortal?

This has been the question that has gnawed at Kerr as far back as late January when his team crushed San Antonio in its highly-anticipated first matchup. Because of the often lopsided nature of their games, none of their main players top the 35-minute mark per game, but Curry, Green and Klay Thompson will all log slightly more minutes than last season. Kerr has rested players, specifically Andrew Bogut, Shaun Livingston and Iguodala, but for the most part he has resisted the scheduled time off that Spurs coach Gregg Popovich has made a staple of his approach. The rational side says rest is paramount, but competition does not always produce rational reactions and the Warriors have made the impossible seem routine.

Kerr told reporters that he made a pact with his players that he would not deny them the chance at history, provided they were physically ready to play. Really, what else could he do? Even Pop has said that he would play his starters in the rematch on Sunday when the Spurs chase their own bit of history: a perfect home regular season. Even Pop, the big-picture master who pioneered the art of regular season maintenance has given in to the impulse of the moment at hand.

It’s good that the Warriors exist and that we didn’t need to invent them. They may have rendered all other regular season matters trivial and inconsequential, but they have also transformed the ephemeral pursuit of legend into an honest and noble goal. They made every game matter and for that alone, they will be remembered and rightfully celebrated.

The interesting thing about writing a weekly column is that it offers a snapshot of a moment in time. Sometimes the pieces hold up, other times they age poorly. Too many times, a guy I talked to on Wednesday got hurt on Saturday and forced a drastic last-minute rewrite, but that’s life in a league where narratives change by the day. These were a few that held up and stand out as my favorites to write. The Quotes this week are from these stories.

The Kobe Game and KG’s weird farewell: The apex of the Kobe Retirement Tour came in late December and early January as he made his final visits to the East Coast cities that helped birth, cultivate and cement his legend. I was fortunate to watch him relive his past glories in a place that had also witnessed his greatest defeat. Kobe gets history, which is more than we can say for Sam Mitchell who made the unconscionable decision to play Kevin Garnett in Brooklyn, thus depriving Boston a chance to give KG a proper sendoff. Was this the end for Garnett? Who knows, and KG wasn’t spilling any secrets. Each were true to themselves and the Garden appreciated both in their way.

Dirk Nowitzki’s low-key endurance run: If Kobe was subsisting on the adulation of his enemies and KG was serving as a legend in residence, Nowitzki was still operating as the main man on a team with playoff ambitions. Dirk’s historic status has long been clinched, but it’s this latter-day run that reveals so much about him. He spends hours getting ready and just as long recovering, but damn if he’s still got it. Dirk’s game was always built to last, but it’s the small, subtle things he’s done that have prolonged his place among the game’s better players that resonate now.

Double overtime with the Warriors: Regular season games come and go, and even the memorables ones fade quickly into the background. What made this one stand out was that it delivered on the build-up, which covered several days, and lasted all the way through multiple overtimes. It was still early in the season, so the Warriors weren’t quite jaded yet. They were enjoying the scene, even reveling in it, and they had everyone’s attention. It’s fitting that their winning streak ended rather anticlimactically the next day in Milwaukee on the last night of a long road trip. This game served as their line in the sand.

Leadership 101 with Damian Lillard: Even the most optimistic Blazermaniac didn’t see this coming, but Dame doesn’t do hopes and dreams. The dude is all about the real and that has manifested itself during a complete roster overhaul that jettisoned four starters and brought in 10 new players. His play has been outstanding, but it’s his emergence as the team’s vocal authority and resident conscience that has elevated the Blazers into the playoff hunt. A lot of people worried about he’d handle this season. There is no one in the league I worry about less than Damian Lillard.

Grappling with greatness: Paul George has long been one of the league’s most fascinating players. Skilled and confident, he has surpassed expectations to such a degree that we have to invent new markers for him to reach every season. From role-playing curiosity to All-Star starter in just a few short years, we have yet to establish a ceiling on what he can be now and in the future. For a brief moment, PG was one of the top 10 players in the world. As January rolled around he was struggling to maintain his form. Always candid and forthright, sometimes to a fault, George reflected on his status and the burdens of being a franchise player.