Nine days is too long a break for the Golden State Warriors, but it will serve a valuable purpose when trying to reassess what matters about this season.
And that is this: Getting through the last 30 games without either significant injury (either players or coaches) or catastrophic loss of form.
The discussion about what records they can or cannot achieve this year has been a mild amusement to those outside the circle, but the crescendo has now reached the potential letdown stage: “What if they go in the toilet and only finish 71-11?” “What if they lose a home game?” “What if San Antonio wins the always important scoring margin title?” “What about Game 7?”
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Well, all that is true for the “basketball is an amusement” crowd, but let’s be honest here – this is just killing time until the postseason starts in April.
The Warriors have re-defined the regular season, at least for now, but they have done it with the unconscious connivance of the league. This is an unusual time for the NBA in that it is either watching the very nature of the game changing, or the Warriors are an outlier like the Edmonton Oilers of the ‘80s.
But discussing the epochal nature of a team that has won only one title is at its very essence silly, and the real goal here in determining whether the Warriors will truly be a seminal team in the history of the sport is entirely dependent upon them winning another title. This title.
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Reason? Winning 70 games and going home empty makes them the 2001 Seattle Mariners – winners of 116 games in the regular season and one in the postseason. Nobody talks about that Seattle team any more, because . . . well, why would you?
No, the Warriors will not be defined by their regular season numbers, and while we get sucked in by the pursuit of those numbers, we’re just killing time the way they are.
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And the same can be said of San Antonio as well. The only substantive difference between the two teams this year is the extra four road losses the Spurs have amassed, and since we know that Gregg Popovich views the relationship between his roster and the regular season differently than most other coaches, this is a distinction without import.
We also know that the Warriors’ 120-90 win over the Spurs last month has no meaningful relationship to future events. If they are the two teams destined to play in the Western Conference Finals (and imagine the national letdown if that doesn’t occur), we are still largely in the dark about how they will interact over an extended series, all the way down to whether their combined 52-0 home record will be more powerful than their combined 41-12 road record.
Which brings us to the battle to have the best record in the conference. As most people have ceded the notion that the Western Conference Final is in fact the Finals by another name, the battle for hosting that seventh game takes on an outsized importance, if only because there have only been 11 seventh games in conference finals in the last 25 years – 11 of 50. Of those 11, the home team has gone 9-2, making the seventh game important, and the team that avoided the seventh game ended up beating the team that played it six times, making the seventh game slightly less than a coin flip.
Bored yet? You should be, because the true nature of this season will not be defined by any numbers at all, but by the tectonic plates from Northern California and Southern Texas grinding against each other that define the NBA this season. Both Popovich and Steve Kerr have been careful to say the kindest things about each other (since they like each other, that makes sense), so psychological games won’t play into this much, certainly no more than numbers will.
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But here’s what will:
- Losing a star player. Either Stephen Curry or Kawhi Leonard are series-changers if absent, and by the virtues of their shared styles, each team would benefit from and take advantage of the other team’s other shortages.
- Kerr’s health. If in-game coaching and between-games strategizing mean a lot in such finals, Popovich’s presence is a significant advantage for San Antonio over Luke Walton and his 43 games of experience. The Warriors’ staff is deeper than that, of course, but Kerr is a bonus for Golden State, and if he cannot go because of the touchy nature of his back surgery, all other equations change.
- The players doing what players do. In other words, the games. The four, five, six or seven games that are still not even guaranteed.
And we’ll know none of these things matter before late May. All the lead-up to that series is what Michael Corleone called a pezzanovante – from the Italian, to seem like a big deal but to be controlled by larger forces.
Or, to reduce it to its actual essence, we’re still in the preseason. We’re just putting a lot of tinsel on it because seven months is a long time to wait for the seven games that really matter.