Sports Illustrated NBA Warriors Commemorative 2022

Adapted from SI.com June 17, 2022 THEY’D DANCED this celebratory dance before, the steps familiar, the rhythm ever-changing: first, with an innocent joyfulness, later with a chest-thumping exuberance. And this time, with tears and defiance and a renewed appreciation for the journey. The Warriors of Golden State reclaimed their preeminence, dispatching the Celtics in a six-game NBA Finals, earning their fourth championship in eight years and cementing them among the greatest dynasties of all time. It bore all the familiar features—all the Stephen Curry threes (and shimmies), all the Klay Thompson shooting flourishes, all the Draymond Green bravado and defensive brilliance that carried this team to glory in 2015 and ’17 and ’18. And yet it was ultimately like none of them, and perhaps a little sweeter. Not more significant,…

FOLLOWING GAME 3 of the Warriors’ first-round series against the Nuggets, Draymond Green offered a simple truth as he addressed the media in Denver. “Everybody not made for the playoffs,” he said after Golden State took a 3–0 series lead with a 118–113 victory. “You look around and some guys who you think are guys, are not guys in the playoffs. “That’s just what it is.” Green’s comment wasn’t meant as a jab at two-time MVP Nikola Jokić—whom Green lauded after a 37-point, 18-rebound performance—and he wasn’t singling out any Nugget in particular. Perhaps Green’s words were a self-affirming statement: He was a playoff guy. He certainly played like one. After missing the last two postseasons, Green and the Warriors looked like they were back where they belonged. The stats…

EARLY IN THE playoffs, Memphis point guard Ja Morant explained the philosophy he has when the ball is in his hands. “I pretty much read the defense,” he said. “They take me away. I know my teammate’s open. They take my teammates away, then I go score. Cat and mouse. It’s not as hard as people think.” It takes a special kind of 22-year-old to insist that picking apart an NBA defense is easy, but in Games 1 and 2 against the Warriors, the Grizzlies’ third-year star often made it look that way. Golden State seemed content to make the speedy Morant beat them as a jump shooter, sagging into the lane to limit his drives. The strategy was reminiscent of how the Warriors handled Russell Westbrook when he was…

Adapted from SI.com May 27, 2022 WITH A LITTLE more than three minutes to go in Game 5 of the Western Conference finals, Klay Thompson took a pullup jumper in the lane that was rejected by Dallas guard Spencer Dinwiddie. No worries. Thompson finagled the rebound and rose up for another two from the elbow. Still, no dice. He air-balled it. But Kevon Looney scooped up the rebound—one of his 18 in that game—as Thompson moved to the right corner. The ball found its way back to Klay, and this time he sank a three, his eighth of the game. That extinguished the Mavs’ faintest glimmer of hope at a comeback. The Warriors, up 15 at that point, won 120–110 to return to the NBA Finals. That sequence from Thompson,…

GAME 1 STEPHEN CURRY scored 34 points, and the Celtics won. Jayson Tatum shot 3-for-17, and the Celtics won. Boston was outscored 38–24 in the third quarter, and the Celtics won. “Being resilient has been the word for us this year,” second-year guard Payton Pritchard said after his Celtics rallied to take Game 1 of the NBA Finals, 120–108. “And I think it showed tonight.” Boston entered this game with the NBA’s stingiest defense, but in the first quarter the Warriors exploited it—particularly Curry, who knocked down six three-pointers, a Finals record for a quarter. Overall the team was 7-for-13 from deep. Yet Boston, backed by a diverse offense with five players scoring at least five points, finished the period trailing by only four. The Celtics squeezed out a lead…

Adapted from SI.com June 1, 2022 IN THE WAKING nightmares of former Houston assistant Jeff Bzdelik, Stephen Curry isn’t raining threes from the arc, or the logo, or the Bay Bridge. He isn’t even shooting. At least, not initially. He doesn’t even have the ball. No, the haunting images from 2018 are all of Curry running, darting and weaving between Warriors teammates and Rockets defenders, scrambling the schemes Bzdelik and his colleagues worked so hard to devise in the days, weeks and months leading to Game 7 of that year’s Western Conference finals. Finally, at the end of all that running and darting and weaving, the ball does indeed find its way to Curry, right there in front of the Rockets’ bench, where the greatest shooter in NBA history calmly…