They had been there before.
They had been down 2-1 to a grinding team who had a defender opposing fans thought was their “Curry stopper.” The Golden State Warriors had been pounded inside before in these playoffs. They had heard the “jump shooting teams can’t win in the playoffs” before.
Golden State had heard all of that against Memphis — and they made a key adjustment and rattled off three straight wins.
That helped prepare them for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the NBA Finals — where the Warriors again made an adjustment and rattled off three convincing wins.
“Going into the playoffs and playing a Memphis, where that’s a tough team to beat. All that stuff primed us for this moment,” Draymond Green said drenched in Champaign after the Warriors had completed their comeback against the Cleveland Cavaliers and won an NBA title. “It primed us for our non-shooters to make shots. It primed us for somebody to think they can stop Steph Curry and then all of a sudden you see Steph Curry. It primed us for we’re too small, we’re a jump shooting team, it will never work. It primed us for all of that.
“So playing in the Western Conference on the daily, nightly basis, night to night, it gets you ready for everything. That’s why I think it’s the best conference in the NBA because you see all brands of basketball. So all of a sudden you run up against the Cavs and, I mean, LeBron James is great. There is no one like him. But you’re prepared for everything else because we’ve seen everything.”
Against Memphis in the second round, the adjustment was to ask big man Andrew Bogut to defend light-shooting guard Tony Allen. That allowed Bogut to hang back and protect the rim, helping out on Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph, and not pay a price.
Against Cleveland, there were a few adjustments but the key one was to sit Bogut and start Andre Iguodala — to go small. Bogut barely played the final few games, and more offensive bigs like David Lee got key minutes and run. The shorthanded Cavaliers could not adjust.
“Game 3 of The Finals we figured something out in the fourth quarter, and we decided to go small,” Lee said after the win. “On any other team, a guy like Andrew Bogut is angry and causes a fit. Instead, he’s the first one up cheering off the bench. So everybody has had their time to shine this year and that kind of sacrifice is how you win championships, and we were able to bring it home.”
The Warriors players to a man praised the chemistry on the team.
“That’s one thing you don’t see that often in the league,” Iguodala said in an interview on NBA TV. “You got stars and guys who want to be stars. Guys are ‘me, me, me, I want to get paid. I want to be a superstar. I want to have my own shoe.’ But we got just a great group of guys. Management did a great job, I don’t know if they knew personalities and how to match them, it’s crazy because we all really like each other.
“Teams say that all the time but you know guys don’t really like each other that much. You have three or four cliques — they hang out, they hang out, they hang out. But we had like 10 guys go to dinner, eight guys go to the movies. We had like seven guys go to the movies last night. We all can joke with each other, we throw punches each other and nobody takes it personal.”
In the end, the roster that shot too many jump shots was able to make the adjustments and win the NBA title. Coach Steve Kerr said he knew they could because of what they did on the other end of the court.
“Everyone wanted to talk about how many threes we took. We’re the number one defensive team in the league, and that’s what wins,” Kerr said. “You’ve got to be able to score points somehow, but you have to be good defensively. You have to be great defensively to win a title. For whatever reason, that seemed to be overlooked this year. But the combination of the offense and the defense, that matters, and I don’t think people pointed that out enough.”
They should now.
