The Golden State Warriors and the chase for 73 wins

Every NBA fan, if it is not their team in question, is afraid of the two words “NBA dynasty”. It means the team they love, that they follow whole-heartedly and undergo its every up and down has to play second fiddle to a more dominant, a more annihilating force of Basketball hegemony. The die-hard NBA fans will tell you becoming a dynasty in the current NBA setup is next to impossible.

With cap restrictions and half the teams entering the league with max-level cap rooms, it is only a matter of time before some franchise throws an insubordinate amount of money at the player who might be key to your team.

The stars are generally immune to such greed but for the bench guys, the energy guys, the role players, it takes about one season of stellar performance to become coveted free agents.

With such turmoil, hardly any team fields the same 12 players for two consecutive seasons. There will always be that one guy who outperforms, who in spite of being on a Restricted Free-Agent contract gets millions of dollars thrown to him, an amount which the team having his bird rights is in no position to match or doesn’t want to, depending on the scenario.

Just ask Tristian Thompson and the poker game the Cavaliers and Thompson played for much of last year’s free agency. And just like that, your team is short of a key energy guy, a key contributor, a key scorer. The cycle repeats.

There are a few things common across every NBA dynasty, though. A good coach, excellent role players, the right balance of youth players and veterans, good management and players buying in on the team philosophy. And most importantly, a truly transcendent superstar.

A superstar who defies standards, who defies expectations, a player who’s every move, every action influences the game in ways the SportsVU cameras do not catch. The Bill Russell Celtics had all of these things, which is why they are the benchmark when it comes to NBA dynasties. The Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls had it too. And as it turns out so do the Steph Curry Warriors.

The Warriors look to break the regular season record of 72-10.

Meteoric rises in professional sports are so few and far in between, you can actually count all such instances on your fingers. Sport doesn’t work that way. Generally, it is a slow, steady and painful climb to the top involving missed opportunities and bucket-loads of heartbreaks. But sometimes a team or a franchise depicts such inexplicable improvement that you cannot help but marvel the beauty of their accomplishments.

The case with Golden State has been somewhat similar. In what was touted as LeBron James’s league, soon to be Kevin Durant’s once LeBron decides to yield the torch, the Golden State Warriors in the past two years have wrenched the power so decisively and with such force that they have literally thrown conventional wisdom out of the window. At the helm of it all has been Stephen Curry.

Stephen Curry: Changing the way we play basketball

Stephen Curry is dominating the game of basketball and changing its perception in ways that have not been seen since the time of Michael Jordan. No longer do kids aspire to be 6’8 and all muscles. Now all every kid wants to do is hit threes, tap his chest and point to the sky.

It is testimony to the change Curry has brought into the league that the Three-Point Contest at the All-Star weekend, once almost a neglected event is among the most watched and eagerly awaited events of the festivity. The festivity which also features the dunk contest, long been considered the absolute test of basketball prowess.

Stephen Curry is bending defences and game plans in ways that are giving coaches collective nightmares. No longer is establishing a defensive position just outside the three-point line considered fail-safe. For years the 3 pointer, considered a difficult shot in its own stead, was considered inefficient.

With the advent of Curry and his mind-numbing efficiency, the shift in strategy and focus could not be more prominent. His game-winner against the Oklahoma City Thunder from 38 feet was such a dagger that over those six freeze-frame seconds,

Andre Roberson who has worked really hard in becoming an excellent defender and prides himself in his ability, could do nothing but watch the ball soar rainbow-like, right up to the rafters and splash through the net.

His position? A yard outside the three point line. Roberson may have blamed the basketball gods. Commentators and coaches blamed him. It didn’t matter. The game was over, the Warriors had won and Stephen Curry had once again done things that were once considered unfathomable.

Stephen Curry and his game have changed the boundaries of what is acceptable so drastically, that on a collegiate level where averaging 4 made three-pointers a game was considered so difficult that just 11 years ago, not a single player was capable of doing it, 30 players this season have done it.

Punishing a mismatch when an opposition big man switches on Curry after a screen no longer incites a need to trick him and draw a foul. Instead, Curry just rises up and shoots over the outstretched arm of the hapless big guy.

Finishing a fast break at the rim is no longer the efficient way to do it. Instead, Curry pulls up on a dime and drains a fast break three, all during the time when the opposition defender is backpedalling hoping to contest the shot at the rim. Double-teaming him is no longer an out since every one of the Warrior players is capable of manufacturing looks at the rim or more easily make a wide open three point shot. And yet Curry is just a bigger piece of the pie when it comes to the Warriors.

A team effort

Curry hitting the 38-foot game winner against the Thunder

The sheer number of ways the Warriors can hurt teams cannot be articulated. In spite of having players that can very well take every possession and turn it into an isolation play and be fiercely competitive while doing it, the way the Warriors move the ball is something right out of Basketball textbooks.

The versatility the Warriors have as a team is not something that can be disregarded because that is the very thing that is making them churn out perhaps the most dominant season in recorded sports history. The play-making ability of each Warriors player, from the starting five right up to the fringes of the bench, is such that switching to a Plan B or a Plan C right up to Plan Z gives the same results night in and night out.

Maybe Stephen Curry is not feeling it, is injured or just needs rest. The Warriors deploy Shaun Livingston on the smaller opposition point guard and watch him punish the height difference with possession after possession of turnaround jumpers. Maybe the shot blocking of the opposition big man is creating problems for their paint game.

They put Mo Speights in and watch him draw out the big man with one midrange jumper after the next. And when everything fails there is always the Stephen Curry bailout plan. Though the numbers have been rare, we have seen Steph Curry evaporate double digit leads with multiple three-pointers and skip his way to the Warriors bench, while the opposition coaches scramble for ways to stem the Tsunami and wrench the momentum back.

We can go on and on about the things Warriors do right on the court, but they have been dissected and analysed so much that it would all sound repetitive. The Warriors are in a position to break the record for most number of wins by a team held by Jordan’s Bulls at 72-10.

Nobody would have thought that the Warriors would be so punishingly dominant that a number such as 73 wins would actually come under the realms of possibility. But they are and that number is agonizingly close to becoming a reality.

The NBA has long been dominated by toughness. Toughness on court and off of it. For a game which comes under the categorisation of “No-Contact” although definitions and opinions vary, it is surprising how brutal basketball actually is. That is the reason kids from less privileged backgrounds, from impoverished families under the influence of gang violence, drugs and abuse saw basketball as their only out to leave all those things behind.

It was never dominated by the rich kids, kids with a private court, a shooting coach to help them work on their form and their shot. Steph Curry had all that. He was born into all of it. And the more he succeeds, the more he inspires kids like him. But the other hard reality is that a 30 foot three pointer is a good shot – For Steph Curry. Not for anyone else. It is just a gap that can be shortened by heaving relentlessly at a basketball hoop. Everybody can shoot, not everybody can dunk.

The Warriors seem poised to win another championship. If and when they do, they will set up a chain of events which will culminate into a point of no return. The unprecedented success that Steph Curry has garnered playing the game the way he does has already resulted in widespread changes throughout the sport.

Every sport undergoes a defining era where known norms are altered and metamorphosed to accommodate new ones. Steph Curry and the Warriors are that change. The path to a championship goes through them. The path to basketball domination goes through them. And if the past two years are any indication, every facet of Basketball success will go through them because the Warriors are here to stay.