OAKLAND -- This would seem to answer the burning question of whether the Golden State Warriors can take a bunch of punches.
This would seem to solve the matter of their toughness, and their ability to fight from a prone position.
And finally, this would seem to redefine their trip to the NBA Finals against a healthier and heartier Cleveland Cavaliers not as the imperious champion without a bruise or scrape or torn cloth, but as the hardest heart in the house.
[INSTANT REPLAY: Warriors outlast Thunder, punch ticket to Finals]
The Warriors took all that the Oklahoma City Thunder could hurl at them – and the Thunder did hurl everything within their reach – and, better than kick it back with impunity, they took it time and again and sent it back when it looked as though they could take no more. They are the 10th team in NBA history (and 50th in 620 series if you include baseball and hockey) to fall behind three games to one, keep their wits, fly their middle fingers at the burdens of history and advance to the next round.
Now that ought to clear your sinuses with an air gun.
But of course the numbers are never the full story, but merely the rough outline. Emphasis on “rough.”
Indeed, Game 7, a 96-88 rock fight, was even more emblematic of the series than the incandescent Game 6. Oklahoma City tried to impose its indomitable will early by involving more than just Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook in the early going, but couldn’t turn the early going into the late getting. The Warriors, who had been hammered into a supine form in Games 3 and 4, rose from similar starts in Games 5, 6 and finally Game 7 to show that it isn’t all just front-running and jacking up interstate threes and vamping after every shot.
If 2013 was the sign that they had arrived as a factor . . . if 2014 showed that they knew both how close and how far away they still were . . . if 2015 demonstrated how well they can hand-ride a season . . . if all those things are true, then 2016 has shown that they know what to do after absorbing a fist in the face.
Namely, that they can take a few beatings and maintain their truth, which is that they can make you submit by scoring faster and defending more stoutly and being as obstinate in search of rebounds and attacking in waves that never end.
Waves? Okay, that’s a little diluted. Say instead a series of tsunamis that sometimes build offshore but eventually hit land hard enough to change coast line.
In the last two games, Golden State hit 32 of 61 threes, 30 of 55 from the barely carbon-based Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, to Oklahoma City’s 10-for-50. That’s 66 points of difference in two games that the Warriors won by an aggregate of 15, the inescapable cruelty of the new math.
But wait, for there is more. From Game 3, when they allowed the Thunder to pig-slap them with 133 points, their defense took that total down to 118, then 101, then 88. Even though 133 is an outlier, that’s 45 points in dropoff, which means that 88 becomes an outlier too.
And, in keeping with the hackneyed marketing slogan “Strength In Numbers” (next year, “The New Business Model”), Game 7 was won in the final four minutes of the third quarter when four of the five starters who do much of the heavy lifting were out of the game.
Yes, the once-hailed but more recently much-maligned bench that head coach Steve Kerr could never assemble into a consistent rotation because of Oklahoma City’s sheer Oklahoma City-ness, grabbed the game by its larynx and choked it obsidian blue with a 12-0 run that gave Golden State a 71-58 lead that defined the remainder of the game.
“I think when Shaun (Livingston) had that fast break dunk, which brought the house down (with 2:35 left),” Kerr said,”and I thought our two Brazilians (Anderson Varejao and Leandro Barbosa) were fantastic. Anderson had an incredible 1:51 run, a couple of assists and a big bucket and the energy and taking a charge from Westbrook, and Barbosa, who I’ve gone away from the last few games, comes in, stays ready and makes a big shot for us, and Harrison (Barnes, the lost starter) hit that corner three from Varejao, which was just a huge shot. With everything on the line, our guys all came through.”
In sum, Players Six through Nine took the work of the five starters and spun a double-digit lead, which was barely sufficient to fight off three separate and distinctly desperate Oklahoma City counterattacks.
And in keeping with the one narrative people could trust when all others seemed to swell and shrink before they could be properly absorbed, Curry finished the fight and the night with an open 27-footer with 26.8 seconds left. As the house Livingstone had tried to bring down 13 minutes earlier collapsed in an orgiastic heap, Curry screamed to them and the heavens beyond that, yes, the Warriors can take a punch because unbeknownst to the nation, they have a diamond jaw to go with their satin shooting and dandified ways. That, in short, they can take a kicking and keep on sticking.
The Warriors went in five days from a team that has won a championship to a champion – the kind that doesn’t have points deducted for too much style and not enough grit, or too much wrist and not enough heart.
“We weren’t just down 3-1, remember,” Kerr said, “but we’d been blown out two straight games. So obviously everything began with Game 5 and kind of rediscovering ourselves and our style. Then Game 6 (the Thompson game) was kind of magical . . . it’s a pretty remarkable comeback, and it shows, I think a lot about our guys and their will and their grit.”
The job remains incomplete, of course, and Cleveland has played three fewer games and will have three more days rest. That will be mentioned. But so must the fact that the last Finals team to have more rest and win the championship was Miami in 2006, and the last team to win the Finals after playing fewer preliminary games was Los Angeles in 2010.
So it isn’t rest that will win this championship, but the better of two teams that know how to take a lot of punches and throw one more and one last one in response. Now the Warriors can say they are everyone’s equal in that department.
