The Stephen Curry Finals
It was tough to keep up with all the different storylines over the past couple weeks, but Golden State's No. 30 ultimately (and deservedly) made himself the boldest headline of the championship series
The 2021-22 NBA season began with the Golden State Warriors imploring and ultimately convincing Andrew Wiggins to consent to taking the COVID-19 vaccine for the good of the team .... while Brooklyn's Kyrie Irving was resisting similar prodding from his team.
One of the most wide-open seasons in memory ended Thursday night with the Warriors seizing that up-for-grabs championship gold. They strutted into Boston, uncorked a decisive 52-19 run in the middle of Game 6 and ultimately forced NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum to hand them the Larry O’Brien Trophy for the fourth time in eight years, since Commissioner Adam Silver was barred from attending according to the league’s health and safety protocols.
Stephen Curry’s confidence that the Warriors would be the team to capitalize on that wide-open-ness and become the first team in league history to ever deal the storied Celtics three successive losses in the Finals was evident halfway through the third quarter. Curry hit a left-wing triple for a 72-50 lead. Then he pointed to a ring finger:
Six NBA Finals games across two weeks certainly generated lots of things to talk about — from the Wiggins/Irving dichotomy to the Warriors’ occasionally provocative histrionics to the lamentable fact that all six of the games were decided by 10 points or more. We shuddered at Jayson Tatum’s series-long shrinkage and the Celtics' fatal penchant for turnovers, debated the merits and perils of Draymond Green's double life as active player and podcaster and weathered further back and forth about Wiggins' redemptive arc as the most dangerous fourth option in basketball … set against the consternation in some corners about how much more the Warriors spend than everyone else in salary and luxury tax to have him on their roster.
Make no mistake, though. This series, for all its many sidebars and talking points, belonged to the aforementioned Wardell Stephen Curry.
Fully.
Finally.
No longer will he be subjected to the gnawing chatter about the lack of a Finals MVP award on his resume or his supposed shortcomings on the game's grandest stage. Apart from a Game 5 blip, when he missed each of the nine 3-pointers he attempted, Curry was better than ever when it mattered most — at age 34 — cementing himself among the 10 greatest players in league history by leading the Warriors to a fourth NBA title in six trips to the Finals over the past eight seasons.
“To me, this is his crowning achievement in what’s already been an amazing career,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said.
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The Warriors are now 22-2 in playoff series with Curry and Kerr leading this franchise. They are just the second team in league history, along with the Showtime Lakers in 1985, to win the Finals clincher on Boston's fabled parquet.
One supposes there will be some who continue to question Curry, or doubt him, or assert that his greatness is overstated, since pretty much everyone in the social media age has a microphone to shout him down. Example: I double-taked more than once reading this particular tweet Wednesday, on the eve of Golden State’s clinching 103-90 triumph, from a certain high-profile opinionist even after the Warriors — largely thanks to Curry's Finals-turning masterpiece on the road in Game 4 — had just seized a 3-2 series lead.
No matter. There has never been more justification to scoff at anyone who tries to diminish Curry's legacy. He is a certifiable member of the game's upper-crust elite now, having ascended to a new stratosphere with championship No. 4 on top of his previously unquestioned status as a true revolutionary whose boundless range as a long-distance shooter literally changed the way offenses run leaguewide.
“Without him, none of this happens,” Kerr said. “… Steph is ultimately why this run has happened, much like Timmy in San Antonio.”
Tim Duncan is my go-to comparison for Curry, too, when it comes to culture-setting. Maybe that’s because I spent so much time covering the Warriors in the formative years of their dynasty-building … or maybe I outright swiped it from Kerr. Either way? It’s especially apt. Curry doesn’t want to play anywhere else, like Duncan, and has now ushered a few different incarnations of the Warriors to titles. Like Duncan.
I remember talking to Curry by phone two years ago during the Walt Disney World bubble. The Warriors' remarkable run of five consecutive trips to the Finals, something we hadn't seen from any NBA team since the days of the dynastic Celtics of the 1960s, had crumbled in jarring fashion, with devastating injuries sustained by Kevin Durant (Achilles) and Klay Thompson (knee) in the 2019 Finals against Toronto, followed by Durant's free-agent defection to Brooklyn, followed by a 15-50 season that left the Warriors marooned some 2,800 miles away from the bubble.
“Obviously I was happy to see basketball back on TV, but that first week I had major FOMO," Curry told me.
Yet the extended break forced upon him by the coronavirus pandemic and a 2019-20 nightmare of a season in which Curry and Thompson were only healthy enough to appear in a combined five games turned out to be a blessing. Curry had months to work on his body, to add strength, to gird himself for carrying this team like he never had to before in the wake of Durant's departure and with Thompson needing a long runway to make his way back from back-to-back seasons lost to debilitating injury. Thanks to Curry more than anyone in the Warriors' domain, they did not crumble after two non-playoff seasons and found a way to meld old (Thompson, Green and Kevon Looney) and new (Wiggins and Jordan Poole) once everyone was healthy enough to get back on the court.
Nor did they forgot how to seize NBA supremacy when it was so uncharacteristically there for the taking in a league with only one 60-win team (Phoenix).
Just be advised that Curry hasn’t grown any. He’s still just 6-foot-2 on a good day. “So different,” as Kerr put it, “from the traditional greats in this league.”
So it was hard not to see the pride oozing out of Curry postgame when he joined Detroit Pistons legend Isiah Thomas on the NBA TV set. Thomas overcame his even smaller stature to lead the Bad Boys Pistons to two titles. Yet he made sure to tell Curry, as they sat just a few seats apart, that winning twice as many rings in an eight-season span as he has equates to new, dynastic heights for Little Guys.
“I’ve gotten stronger over the years, but this ain’t easy,” Curry acknowledged.
The Warriors, mind you, do have a habit of making it look that way. The Celtics played the most suffocating defense that the Curry & Kerr Era Warriors have faced for years. They are more athletic, more physical, more imposing size-wise. The Celts won Game 1 and Game 3 and appeared to have neutralized the Warriors’ considerable Finals experience edge.
Then Kerr made an abrupt lineup change entering Game 4, just like he did during the 2015 Finals, starting Otto Porter Jr. over Kevon Looney. The coach also had the gumption to scale back a struggling Green’s role in crunch time to avoid falling into a 3-1 hole. Curry finished with 43 points (including seven 3s) and 10 rebounds in that Game 4. The series was never the same.
By Game 6, Boston looked broken by the seasoned group that managed to dial its defense up to the Celtics’ level throughout these Finals. (So glad, for the record, that I assembled this mea culpa to the Dubs after the Western Conference finals for not realizing sooner what they were poised to pull off.)
After 34 points, seven rebounds and seven assists in the decider, Curry wound up averaging 31.8 points per game in these Finals. Tatum wound up shooting 36.7% from the field for the series. As well as Wiggins played, rebounding like never before and taking on Thompson’s old role as Golden State’s foremost two-way force, no one was denying Curry his long-awaited Finals MVP coronation once you read the first two sentences out loud about how the two leading men fared.
Nor could Curry deny that the Finals MVP void he has at last filled meant tons to him in the end, more than he had ever let on before, judging by the tears that flowed so soon after Thursday’s buzzer.
One last parting thought: This might not be Curry’s last Finals MVP, either.
The NBA almost certainly won't be so ripe to be conquered next season — not with the Milwaukee Bucks, LA Clippers, Denver Nuggets and maybe even those enigmatic Nets all expected to return to full health. That said …
Golden State will likely get a lot more from Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody next season, plus the first meaningful contributions from former No. 2 overall pick James Wiseman. There’s also every chance that Thompson, 32, regains more of his usual offensive potency as his legs continue to steady after the dreaded combination of ACL and Achilles tears that sidelined him for nearly 950 days.
The Warriors, in other words, might actually be closer than ever to owner Joe Lacob’s long-ago “light years ahead” boast.
"We built this for 10 or 11 years," Curry said.
Who would dare say it’s over now?
Lots of amazing stories from this version of the Warriors, but my favorite might be that of Gary Payton Jr., who Kerr put in at the end of last night’s game when The Warriors needed stops. Pretty crazy to think that Payton, 15th and last man to make the team, career drifter, barely more than six feet tall, is in the go-to lockdown lineup alongside three hall of famers.
Ever since about March, I have been dreading the possibility the Celtics would win #18 and pull ahead of the Lakers. I haven't been able to truly relax until this morning. As a Laker fan, I will always love and appreciate this Warriors team for what they just did. The thought of Bill Simmons unhappy brings a smile to my face. Long live Steph, Klay, Kerr, Draymond, Wiggins, Poole, Looney, Payton and the rest.