It is Tuesday, the Golden State Warriors are still champions of the three-dimensional universe, and the only hot takes out there are:
1) How all the narratives suggesting danger, egomania, role confusion, injury and incapacity, hubris and general ruination were so hilariously wrong from Christmas onward.
2) How the Warriors can only get better as the rest of the National Basketball Association recedes in shame and degradation.
Which aren’t hot anything, really. A nation tried to make drama where there was none, tried to gin up some suspense where none could be found, and tried to make a morality play of sports in America, which is an act of desperation so hilarious that it need not be contemplated ever again.
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Rather, the Warriors got on famously, and spent the year kicking every ass presented to them.
In short, the Warriors became an excellent team, absorbed Kevin Durant into a flexible but enduring structure, and forcibly exorcised the only ghost they have ever confronted. The narratives all died in a fetid heap, and Occam’s Razor cut a path for Thursday’s parade route.
But how can this only get better, as so many people suggest? Well, it probably can’t.
You may now gather villagers, torches and cries of “Heresy!” and “Blasphemer!”
It is to Golden State’s credit that it seamlessly transitioned from brilliant to nova. But in doing so, it didn’t leave a lot of room below the ceiling. In short, if they have dramatic improvements still to be made, how will that improvement be measured?
By wins? They did 73 and regretted it later. By postseason record? There is only 16-0 left to do. By margin of victory? They finished fourth all-time, .65 points/game below the 1972 Lakers, and best all-time in the postseason. By any or all the other metrics? Does best Efficient Shooting Percentage really turn you on that much? By forcing LeBron James to leave Cleveland and try to build the Denver Nuggets to his personal specifications?
In other words, this might very well be as good as they can be, and if that is so, that is something to behold – because you just beheld it.
And if they can be better, there may not be available math to show it. It could be an eye-of-the-beholder thing, and you know how reliable that can be.
Indeed, there is every bit the chance that they could actually be worse and still win one or two or three more titles. The league is that far behind, and adaptation to a new way of conceptualizing the game and finding useful players to articulate it does not happen in one draft.
Is this a prediction? No, and if it were, it would be as useless as the suggestions that the Warriors can only get better without defining what “better than what we just saw” actually is.
What we just saw, you see, is ridiculously brilliant – the outer edge of the sport by any standard. But it was achievable in small part because the Warriors were playing against an external foe.
In 2015, the foe was Golden State’s history as hyperaggressive nonachievers. They had won one title in 53 years in Oakland and missed the playoffs entirely 34 times. Plus, professional individual and team excellence was new for them all (save of course, Jerry West, and even he lost the big one far more often than not), so the adrenalin of jamming a finger two knuckles deep into an entirely maladjusted franchise ran deep.
In 2016, the foe was their reputation as the New Basketball, which they probably embraced a bit too eagerly while forgetting the difficulty of the required slog.
And in 2017, the foe was the very real sting of vomiting up 2016.
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But today, and going forward, the foe is themselves and their own vision of their personal legacies and collective destiny. Theirs is the clash between the things that make their jobs great and the things that make them corrosive, and for every assumption that they can resist all the temptations of the wallet and degradations of the flesh, there is no certainty.
The brain drain already began when assistant general manager Travis Schlenk left to run his own shop in Atlanta, and there are persistent rumors that West is ready to tackle the organizational clown car fleet that is the Los Angeles Clippers. General manager Bob Myers will be wooed in time with cash and vice-presidencies and maybe even bits of equity, defensive mastermind Ron Adams may retire, vice-head coach Mike Brown may get another head coaching gig, the other coaches may get their own better opportunities, and worst of all, Kerr’s spinal fluid burden may never be eased.
And the salary cap may pick off the players here and there. The assumption is that the Warriors will invest in a bit more Andre Iguodala (a sound idea either by loyalty or by petrol still in the tank/juice still in the battery), while trying to figure out how to retain Shaun Livingston and Zaza Pachulia, and Durant has already said he wants to stay and will work out the math after Stephen Curry gets his max.
Thus the next big hammer comes in 2019 when Klay Thompson’s deal comes up, and Draymond Green a year later. By then, Curry, Durant and JaVale McGee will be 32, Thompson and Green 30, Ian Clark will be 29 and only Patrick McCaw will have more career ahead of him than behind him.
In other words, there are an awful lot of moving parts that need to be moved before the Warriors hang their shingle at Mission Bay, and not all moving parts move well or get replaced properly. And even if they did, the salary pile would exceed $300 million and the luxury tax bill would turn Joe Lacob into a crazed libertarian.
And injuries . . . well, there’s no need to belabor the obvious. Things and people break down, or they don’t, depending upon whether they do.
In short, predicting the future for this team is actually a level of insanity because, well, fertilizer happens. Some of it raises plants to full bloom and maturity, some of it raises plants to full bloom maturity until the raccoons and neighborhood kids get to it, and some of it just stinks up the yard.
We do know, though, that the Warriors are as well positioned for the future as any team can be, and since their present is so spectacular, the NBA’s other constituencies are now further behind this franchise’s exhaust pipe than ever.
In other words, the unknowns for this team, while plentiful, are as benign as unknowns can be. So embrace the unknown, you cowards. If you knew everything, nobody would take your bets or even drink with you because you'd be a monumentally crashing bore. Okay, more boring than you probably are now.
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