The Warriors’ pandemic-era decline and the uncertainty that once surrounded their biggest stars are enough to make this title a genuine feelgood story
The exterior drum of Chase Center, the Golden State Warriors’ shimmering new home on the western shore of San Francisco Bay, was apparently designed to resemble a reassembled apple peel. Last night Golden State completed an achievement to give that strange visual metaphor some semblance of sense. The Warriors’ sorry losers of 2019-21 have been reborn as champions. The discards have been repurposed, the wreckage of seasons past transformed into beautiful victory. The has-beens are now have-rings; the apple peel is reassembled. The Warriors are back.
But if the end of the story seems familiar, there’s also something different about this Warriors championship. “I didn’t learn anything about myself, I knew I was resilient,” said Draymond Green, on the victory podium at Boston’s TD Garden, when asked to reflect on how his understanding of himself and his teammates had changed over the course of these finals. And much, indeed, was recognizable about the way the Warriors closed the finals out last night: the lightning scoring sprees, electric offensive transitions, the lethal shooting from distance and collective intelligence off the ball, that trampolining energy and familiar, tentacular elusiveness. But if the Warriors already knew who they were, this series will be remembered for changing the way the rest of us see them. Just like the champion Golden State teams of 2015, 2017 and 2018, these Warriors were accurate, efficient, ruthless and relentless. But they were also curiously likable. This marks a real departure for a team that had, in recent years, come to seem like the embodiment of everything bad about the modern NBA. Though it may be a strange thing to say about a franchise that has now won exactly half of the rings on offer over the past eight seasons, the depth of the Warriors’ pandemic-era decline and the uncertainty that once surrounded their biggest stars’ prospects of revival are enough to make this championship a genuine feelgood story – not quite a victory for the underdog, but a glowing tribute to what tech billions, the greatest shooter in basketball history, and simple persistence can achieve together.