On Thursday, between Games 3 and 4 of the NBA Finals, LeBron James found himself answering a lot of questions about the greatness of the Golden State Warriors: How they came together, what makes it all work, how he and the rest of the league will go about trying to close the almost preposterous talent gap they've created.
Somewhere in the middle he was asked about Kevin Durant, whom he played against in the 2012 Finals when Durant was with the Oklahoma City Thunder, and whether LeBron saw anything in Durant during that series that could've predicted the superstar he has become.
"You knew he was built for greatness from the time that he was drafted," LeBron said, and then he got a little smile on his face as he added a slight jab at the end. "I mean, everybody knew that besides Portland, I guess."
The Portland Trail Blazers, of course, are the team that passed on Kevin Durant in the 2007 draft, when they instead took Greg Oden with the No. 1 overall pick, with Durant going No. 2 to the then-Seattle SuperSonics, who eventually became the Thunder. Looking back, it was one of the great draft blunders. But there have been worse. One of which, if you really want to get down to it, is most responsible for this Golden State Warriors juggernaut that just won its third championship in four years with a four-game sweep over LeBron and the Cavs.
With that in mind, here is a ranking of the 10 most important factors that have led to Golden State becoming a dynasty.
1. Drafting Stephen Curry
It was June 25, 2009, a date that will live in Warriors lore for the rest of time. The night that the Minnesota Timberwolves selected not one, but two points guards -- Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn -- with the two picks immediately preceding the No. 7 overall selection, where the Warriors were waiting with open arms to draft Stephen Curry. Nobody knew it, but the Warriors and really the entire NBA landscape, changed forever that day. None of this happens without Curry falling to the Warriors in 2009. An absolute stroke from the basketball gods.
2. Curry's ankle injuries
After the player himself, crazily enough, Curry's ankle injuries are more responsible than any other factor for this Warriors dynasty. By now it's been well chronicled, but in a nutshell, because of Curry's recurring ankle issues, the Warriors were able to sign him for four years, $44 million back in 2012. Had there been no question about his ankles and what his future might hold, he would've gotten far more than that.
But Curry wanted to ensure financial security for him and his family, so he took the below-market deal, and toward the back end of that contract the Warriors had an MVP player on a flat-out unfair bargain. That, combined with an unprecedented salary-cap spike in the summer of 2016, gave the Warriors the cap space they wouldn't have otherwise had to bring in Durant.
Simply put, had Curry been born with perfect ankles, we likely never would've seen this almost perfect team.
3. The new ownership group
Let's keep this simple: The Warriors were a laughingstock under previous owner Chris Cohan's regime. When the group led by Joe Lacob won the bid to buy the team for $450 million in 2010, everything changed. Curry was already in place, so you can't credit them with that. But everything after that, from bringing in one of the best GMs in the game in Bob Myers to just the commitment to winning with a first-class organization, paved the way for the Warriors to win a title within five years of that purchase, which Lacob said was the goal from the start.
4. Replacing Mark Jackson with Steve Kerr
Mark Jackson was a big part of this franchise going from a perennial doormat to a 50-win playoff team. Under his watch they upset the No. 3 Nuggets in the first round of the 2013 playoffs and took the Spurs to six games, and very well could have won that series had Curry not tweaked his ankle again. They infamously blew a 20-point lead in the fourth quarter of Game 1 vs. the Spurs, then came right back and laid a beating on San Antonio in Game 2. Curry was borderline inhuman in the Denver series and through the first game vs. San Antonio, when he put 44 on the Spurs. Those two series put Golden State on the map for real.
But ultimately, Jackson was not going to take this team to the next level, which is why I have this section above the drafting of Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, because even with those players, I believe the Warriors never would've won a title, let alone three, with Jackson at the helm. He refused to go away from his matchup-hunting isolation offense, and at times was even hesitant to completely turn things over to Curry. Warriors fans will be having Jermaine O'Neal post-up and Jarrett Jack isos with Curry standing in the corner nightmares for as long as they live. Throw in all the locker room drama, which went too deep to get into here, and Jackson had to go. By the end, he was holding back a team that was clearly ready to be elite.
Enter Kerr, who has won three titles in his only four seasons as an NBA head coach. He had the perfect communication skills and combination of humility and confidence in his system to enter into a situation that could've been dicey, given that the best player, Curry, had publicly supported Jackson staying on as coach. Kerr's ball/player movement system unlocked the part of the Warriors Jackson had been holding back. Think about this: Kerr took the Warriors to an NBA championship the year after Jackson piloted virtually that same roster to within three games of missing the playoffs entirely and a first-round exit versus the Clippers. One year, from the first round to the title. Pretty much the same team. You might never see an NBA coaching change make that kind of difference, that quickly, again.
5. Drafting Draymond Green and Klay Thompson
Because of the Durant signing, people sometimes forget that the core of this team is home-grown. It started with Curry in 2009, then continued with 2011 No. 11 overall pick Klay Thompson and 2012 No. 34 overall pick Draymond Green, who will go down as one of the biggest second-round steals in history. Along with Curry, this became the Warriors' version of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. This core won Golden State the NBA championship in 2015 and followed that with a record-breaking 73-win season in 2016. That is the team Durant wanted to join.
Again, I hesitate to rank the drafting of these two guys below bringing Kerr aboard in terms of the impact it had on this run, because, rather obviously, players matter more than coaches when it comes to winning championships in the NBA. And yet, even with Green, Thompson and Curry, the Warriors never would've won an NBA title without Kerr, or at least without somebody replacing Jackson. That was a huge, huge move for this franchise.
6. Losing Game 7 to the Cavs in 2016
This is tough, because had the Warriors won that game, they would've finished the greatest season in NBA history after the 73-win regular season and had back-to-back titles, so a dynasty would've been in the works anyway. But Durant went on record saying that he wouldn't have come to the Warriors had they won that series, and ultimately, the Warriors are obviously a better team with Durant on board. Maybe the greatest team ever. I don't think they get to that level without KD, and they don't get KD without that loss. Like with Curry's injuries, even gut-wrenching losses ultimately work in the Warriors' favor.
7. Acquiring Kevin Durant
Listen, Durant is the second-best basketball player in the world, and he joined a 73-win team. We can talk about LeBron and Chris Bosh going to Miami or Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett joining Paul Pierce in Boston, but those moves pale in comparison to the magnitude of Durant joining Curry and company. The NBA hasn't seen two forces like that on the same team since Kobe and Shaq, and they didn't join one another at the height of their powers.
The only reason this isn't ranked higher is because all the things I've already talked about had to happen first before the Warriors could even become a team Durant would be interested in joining. He has said multiple times that he came to Golden State because of the players, because of the chemistry, because of the culture they have built from the top down, so establishing those things was paramount in building this dynasty.
Durant won his second straight Finals MVP on Friday, and man did he deserve it. This guy is a beast. He averaged over 28 points a game in the series while playing admirable defense on LeBron James. He was brilliant in Game 3 with 43 points when Curry and Thompson couldn't buy a bucket for most of the game. He had a triple-double in the clincher. Curry could have easily won MVP, but in the minutes after Durant was awarded the trophy, the two shared a moment. Durant went over to Curry and put his arms around him and you could tell they were, in their own way, telling one another the appreciation they have for one another's games.
We all love to talk about whose team this is, who the best player is, who should be initiating the offense, but inside that Warriors locker room -- and this is something everyone from Kerr down has said -- they don't care about that stuff. They only care about winning. To have two of the three best players in the league approach the game that way was once unthinkable in the NBA. Now it's the model for winning, to compromise individual numbers and accolades in the name of reaching a collective goal. Every team in the league is now trying to do the same thing.
8. Signing Andre Iguodala
I was talking with former Pistons great Rip Hamilton in the office before I left for the Finals, and he was telling me that when he was in the league, the Warriors were the place to go if you were coming up on your free agency year, because you would put up good numbers in their run-and-gun system that was designed for entertainment rather than winning. In other words, the Warriors were not a team serious players with serious designs on winning wanted to play for. Even Curry has said he initially did not want to be drafted by Golden State.
Iguodala coming to the Warriors changed that perception.
Golden State had to pull off a minor miracle to get Iguodala in the summer of 2013, clearing the necessary cap space by convincing the Jazz to take on the contracts of Richard Jefferson, Andris Biedrins (who had massively bloated $9 million left on his deal) and Brandon Rush. The reports were that the Warriors were gunning to use the money on Dwight Howard, who was the biggest name on the market at the time. Not ending up with Howard could be its own section in here, because that would've been devastating to what the Warriors were building at that point, but everything came up roses when Howard went to Houston, the money cleared, and Iguodala slid in.
Two years later, Iguodala won Finals MVP, and in many ways, what the Warriors do doesn't work, or certainly not as well, without him. He's one of the keys to their vaunted death lineup, which basically won them the 2015 title, starting when Kerr decided to put Iguodala in the starting lineup against Memphis in the second round when the Grizzlies were up 2-1 in that series. Iguodala will never be mentioned in the same breath as Curry, Durant, or even Green or Thompson, but he is at the core of not only what this Warriors team has become, but also how they went about doing it.
9. Trading Monta Ellis for Andrew Bogut
Curry would've become a star eventually regardless of circumstance; his talent is just too great. But people who followed the team before they became NBA royalty know that the Warriors deciding to trade Monta Ellis, a very popular player at the time, was the first real key to starting the Curry ascension. It made the team his, plain and simple. Also, the acquisition of Bogut was really the start of the Warriors emphasizing defense as part of their chart forward, and their defense over these last four years has probably been the most underrated part of this whole run.
Credit Mark Jackson for that, too. I know I said he had to go for this team to become what it has become, and that's true. But there are stages to dynasties, and in their infancy, the Warriors needed Mark Jackson to instill their foundational defensive principles and their flat-out competitive spirit. Ironically, Bogut and Jackson never really got along, but together they played a huge part in changing the defensive culture.
10. Good fortune
I'm putting this last because the Warriors have, for the most part, made their own luck. But there is no denying how many things have gone their way on this run. I've listed most of them, but just to summarize: They got Curry, the best shooter in history, in the draft only after one team selected two point guards instead of him. Then Curry had tissue-paper ankles that were almost miraculously cured by surgery, but not before the Warriors could get him on a steal of a deal that allowed them to ultimately sign Durant. Oh, and the only way they were able to sign Durant was because his free agency happened to coincide with an unprecedented spike in the salary cap.
They have avoided major injuries to any of their star players throughout this run, which is no small feat. On the flip side, their opponents have not enjoyed the same injury fortune. They played the Cavs in the 2015 Finals without Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving for all but one game. Kawhi Leonard got hurt in 2017 when the Spurs had the Warriors down by 25 in Game 1 of the conference finals. This year, Chris Paul couldn't play Games 6 and 7 of the conference finals when the Rockets had the Warriors down 3-2.
It is ludicrous to think the Warriors weren't capable of wining that Houston series even had Paul remained healthy, just as they were more than good enough to beat the Cavs in 2015 with a healthy team, and the Spurs with Leonard. And don't even talk to me about the Grizzlies and how they lost Mike Conley for that second-round series in 2015. Memphis was not winning that series.
In the end, you play the hand your dealt. The Warriors were dealt a pretty sweet hand throughout to this run, no doubt, but they deserve all the credit for making the most of their cards.
