SAN FRANCISCO — The Warriors are back in the NBA Finals because they didn’t read the obituaries written for their dynasty.
Back in 2019, the Warriors’ run of greatness was pronounced dead. What else could it be?
Kevin Durant had made an unceremonious exit to Brooklyn (how’s that going?), Andre Iguodala was traded to the Grizzlies for salary cap relief and Klay Thompson was set to miss the 2019-20 season with a torn ACL.
Of the Warriors’ five best players going into the 2019 playoffs — the core of their second and third championship runs — only Steph Curry and Draymond Green remained on the team a season later.
And they were surrounded by a roster that looked nothing like a championship contender. The 2019-20 Warriors had 22 players over the course of 65 games. Twelve of them no longer have roles in the NBA or are out of the league altogether.
Then Curry broke his hand in that season’s fourth game.
Season over.
The Warriors won only 15 games — the worst record in the league — after going to their fifth NBA Finals in five years under head coach Steve Kerr.
They were so bad that the NBA didn’t even invite them to the pandemic bubble season in Orlando, Fla.
Dynasty over, right?
It wasn’t rock bottom for the franchise — the Warriors had seen decades of lean years — but no one outside of the Warriors’ facility expected that only two years later, they’d be back in the Finals again.
So how did Golden State return to the pinnacle?
Ask Green, and he’ll tell you that it was simply Curry, Thompson and him getting back together. Indeed, in the six years they have played together under Kerr, they have gone to the Finals six times.
Sometimes it is, indeed, that simple.
But do not discount the value — yes, the value — of that 15-win season in the Warriors’ return to excellence.
“It was a blessing in disguise,” Jordan Poole, a rookie on that team, said Wednesday.
Green was the Warrior who felt the brunt of the losing season. He had never been on a losing team before 2019-2020.
“He was one of the only guys who was even healthy enough to play,” Warriors center Kevon Looney, who played 20 games for that team because of injury, said of Green. “He’s a winner. The definition of a winner. I know for him to be losing like that was tough. … He was frustrated.”
Green, indeed, had never been on a losing team in his basketball life before that season. His identity as a player was tied to winning. So yes, the struggle of losing three of every four was real.
“We were 15-50 and I felt all of those losses. All of them losses bothered me,” Green said.
But the forward and Kerr’s commitment to the team’s way of doing business — the principles that took the Warriors to five NBA Finals in five years — persisted.
“We were able to sustain that culture … by staying true to our process,” Kerr said.
“It was just keeping the main thing the main thing — which is winning,” Green said. “When we were getting crushed two years ago … the mindset every day was ‘how can we win? … It was always doing things from a place of ‘this is how you win.' ”
“We never really gave into the losing ways we see around this league often,” Green continued. “We didn’t just fall into the habits that you can build when you’re losing the way we were.”
The losing season also allowed younger players to find their footing in the league.
That’s why Poole viewed the season from hell as a blessing, one that is paying huge dividends this season, as he has become an impact player for the Western Conference champions.
“It was huge,” Poole told me. “Just being able to pick and choose my spots, [to] feel the flow of the game, see what was different between college and NBA.”
Juan Toscano-Anderson found a spot in the NBA with that down-and-out Dubs team. So did Damion Lee. And because the roster was young and in a constant state of flux because of injuries, the Warriors’ coaching staff also had to up their player-development game on the fly.
But more than anything else, the Warriors were able to release some pressure.
The burden of expectation is immense and it followed the Warriors every minute of every day for four years after their first title, reaching new levels seemingly every season.
Then Curry broke his hand and suddenly, no one expected a thing from the Warriors anymore.
“We got to breathe a little bit,” Warriors general manager Bob Myers told me. “It happened pretty fast — [by] game four, we knew we were not going to be in the playoffs. It gave us a chance to start evaluating our process. … I think we delved more into analytics and started to focus more on player development. It gave us chance to look at the best way to organize the front office.”
It’s hard to argue the fruits of that labor aren’t being seen today.
Even while the most explicit asset the Warriors received for their season at the bottom — No. 2 overall pick in the 2021 NBA draft James Wiseman — has provided no value to the team this season.
It took a while, but Poole has developed into a future All-Star.
The Warriors made a big trade to acquire Andrew Wiggins that season. He is now fulfilling the expectations that have followed him since being taken as the No. 1 overall pick in 2014.
The Warriors also acquired what turned out to be the No. 7 overall pick in the 2021 NBA draft in that trade. They used that pick to select Jonathan Kuminga.
And with the foundation of success not broken by all that losing, the Warriors were able to find their identity once again late last season.
“I don’t think any of us thought we were winning a championship last year, but every game mattered down the stretch because we wanted to reassert ourselves as a very dominant, capable, championship-type team,” Curry said. “We finished the season, beat some really good teams, and got that confidence back.”
There’s no doubt that it’s back.
And that’s in large part because that confidence never bottomed out, even when the team did.
