The Golden State Warriors and the chase for 73 wins

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.