Warriors

 

NBA Playoffs 2022: Golden State Warriors do not give up their dynastic position

Painful, frustrating, demoralizing. Those words come closer to how Draymond Green would describe the two seasons between the Golden State Warriors' last appearance in the 2019 NBA Finals and the current season, being one game away from returning to the championship series after Sunday's 109-100 victory against the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference finals.

However, there is a memory from the last two seasons that is still present.

"Really, none of these people removed us from this space," Green told ESPN journalist Ohm Youngmisuk regarding the team that did not qualify for the playoffs in the previous two seasons. "Toronto beat us, but no one really came in and said, 'All right, the Golden State Warriors era is over.'"

For all the attitude and bluster, it's easy to forget that Green has always been one of the sharpest observers of the NBA landscape.

The Los Angeles Lakers team won the NBA title in 2020, while the Warriors stumbled to add the worst record in the league with Green, Klay Thompson and Stephen Curry absent for the entire season or significant lapses due to injuries. The Milwaukee Bucks won the title last season, while the Warriors were trying to train their next generation of players while giving their current core a chance to reach the highest levels of the championship.

This season, the new teams and superstars, like the last three teams that the Warriors have faced in these playoffs, began to occupy their respective places in the future of the NBA. However, no team or organization has come close to replacing the Warriors and displacing them from their dynastic place.

In the first round, Golden State finished off two-time MVP Nikola Jokic and the Denver Nuggets. In the second round, they beat Ja Morant and the Memphis Grizzlies, the team frequently compared to them (even directly, as Dillon Brooks shamelessly did) during the early phases of their dynasty.

In these conference finals, the Warriors gave Mavericks superstar Luka Doncic the same kind of attention and treatment they used to give LeBron James: concede his greatness and recognize that he would probably score more than 40 points, no matter what defensive scheme they put in front of him.

"Luka is amazing," Green said of the Mavericks All-Star, who scored 40 points Sunday despite finishing minus-19 in 40 minutes. "This is your moment. Your moment is the future. He is a great player and he will be a great one for a long time."

The Warriors won, just as they did in three of four Finals matchups against James, limiting all their rivals. In Sunday's duel, they limited Doncic's teammates to 36% shooting from the field and an atrocious 25% from the 3-point line.

It is the third time in these playoffs in which Doncic adds at least 40 points in a loss, tied with James (2009), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1977) and Jerry West (1965) with the best production in a postseason, according to ESPN Stats & Information data.

Over the next few weeks, a lot will be written and said about the way the Warriors regrouped and reinvented themselves to get back to these phases of the tournament.

However, it is probably better to ask: Have they abandoned them at some point?

"We're not leaving the space because we've gotten too old to be here anymore," Green told Youngmisuk. "We are not leaving this space because we have all gone separately. We left the space because Klay Thompson was absent and then he was out of action again, and Andre [Iguodala] was not here either."

"Afterwards, Steph Curry was absent. We didn't leave this space because we were no longer able to stay in this space."

Obviously, there is an important figure from the Warriors dynasty that Green omitted in his analysis. We are talking about the man awarded twice consecutively as the Most Valuable Player of the Finals in 2017 and 2018, the same one who left the team as a free agent in 2019 to join the Brooklyn Nets: Kevin Durant.

Perhaps it was a simple omission on Green's part, or a subtle reminder that the Warriors won a championship in 2014-15 and reached the record of 73 victories in 2015-16 before Durant's arrival.

That style of play from the early years of the Warriors dynasty has come back through its paces in this series.

These Warriors stood out using their length, talent and intelligence to play a suffocating defense, while boasting the most democratic and aesthetic offense in the NBA.

All this, along with the absolute destruction of their rivals in the third period.

On Sunday night, Golden State was able to turn a hard-fought 48-47 halftime lead into a comfortable 78-68 superiority before the fourth period.

According to ESPN Stats & Info, the Warriors outscored the Mavericks by 10.3 points per game in the third period of this series. This pace would lead them to boast their best differential in all the series played under coach Steve Kerr: better than the 9.7 points with which they prevailed over the Houston Rockets in the third periods of the Conference Finals in 2018.

That seven-game series was much closer than this or any of their subsequent Conference Finals matches. Sunday's win was Golden State's ninth in a row in the conference finals, a string dating back to that Game 7 win against Houston in 2018.

"For us to come back to these instances and win a playoff series, much less where we are now, it's not about the motivation," said Curry, who finished with 31 points, 11 assists and 5 rebounds. "It's more about the excitement of being able to do it in a different way."

"The motivation is that we have returned to these instances, with the opportunity to seek an appearance in Finals after a two-year break with our core and a new cast."

Those nine wins in a row in the Conference Finals share a common thread, despite the two seasons that have passed between them. The Warriors tend to get stronger as the series progresses, while making the most of the weaknesses they discover in their rivals.

In this series, Golden State has identified the shortcomings of the Mavericks when it comes to protecting the rim. Several sources linked to the team have indicated to ESPN that Dallas will emphasize this aspect in its offseason moves.

According to the Second Spectrum data, the Warriors have 72.6% of their layups and dumps during this series, which puts them on track to add the second best production in a series among NBA teams since the collection of such data began in the 2013-14 season.

This Sunday, they converted on 68.8% of their layups and dumps. Doncic was the defender who came closest on 11 of those plays and was a creep, giving up 10 layups or dunks, including Andrew Wiggins' Tomahawk dunk with 6:38 left on the clock.

The 11 layup attempts tie the second-worst single-game record in Doncic's career (the worst in his playoff career) and the 10 baskets is the worst record for him in the same game.

That represents an expression of Doncic's individual defensive problems and the Warriors' emphasis on forcing him to expend energy on that side of the court.

"I'm still learning," Doncic said. "I think after the season is over, regardless of where we are, I'm going to look back and learn a lot of things. These are my first Conference Finals in the NBA."

In contrast, the Warriors have been in these instances many times. And the way they're playing now, it's like they never left.

The Golden State Warriors, far superior to the Mavs, are heading to their sixth Final in eight seasons

DALLAS - The Golden State Warriors beat the Dallas Mavericks 109-100 and seem closer than ever to returning to the Finals, where they were five years in a row before the pandemic hit.

The Warriors seem to play loose and without pressure at home or as visitors; in this case in a packed arena of the American Airlines Center in Dallas, which received 20,813 fans, who mostly in the end seemed already resigned to waking up from the dream of NBA Finals, with only the goal of avoiding the sweep on Tuesday.

No team in the history of the NBA postseason has risen to win a series in which they were down 3-0.

"One game at a time," Dallas guard Jalen Brunson said. "Flat and simple, one game at a time, is all we have. We have to lift our game in the third period, grab our rebounds and when the going gets tough we have to stick together, like we've done all year."

GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS

1.- There are times when the Warriors seem unstoppable and even when they go through their most complicated moments they have seemed superior to the Mavericks in most of the transcendent aspects of the game; statistical and intangible.

Stephen Curry led the Warriors on Sunday with 31 points and 11 assists. Klay Thompson scored 19 points, but his defense was almost impenetrable along the entire floor.

Golden State again took off in the third period, as it has been the whole series. In Game 3, they won 30-21 that quarter to turn a one-point lead into 10 over Dallas going into the final period.