Warriors are third-rate dynasty
When LeBron James, the most unstoppable basketball force on the planet, is reduced to being a philosopher King, you know the Golden State Warriors are true basketball dynasty.
“It’s one of the best teams that’s ever been assembled,” he told reporters at the NBA Finals this week, about the time King James realized he wasn’t going to stop the Warriors from winning another championship.
The drama is gone from this best-of-seven series. But America will watch Game 4, just as we watched Prince Harry get hitched to Meghan Markle, because we’re suckers for royalty. The Warriors are set to become only the sixth team in league history to win a championship three times within four years. That’s fantastic and dynastic.
But where do the Warriors, led by Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson, rank among NBA dynasties? Would they be tough enough to beat Michael Jordan and the Bulls, who ruled the 1990s? Better than the Showtime Lakers of the ’80s? Or a match for the Celtics of the ’60s, who were as stinkin’ good as Red Auerbach’s victory cigar?
“They’ve got four Hall of Famers on their team in Klay, Dray, Steph and KD,’’ said James, in what sounded like a concession speech, issued even before the Cavs lost at home in Game 3. How can James be expected to win a battle royal against four Warriors with one hand tied behind his back by J.R. Smith? It’s not a fair fight.
Heck, it hasn’t been fair for anybody in the NBA since the Warriors signed Durant to join the band in 2016. I mean, did the Avengers need to recruit Superman from the Justice League to rule the galaxy?
Steph and KD are the NBA’s fun couple of the moment. But they didn’t invent the super team. Curry knows his basketball history. So he knows this to be true: More so than any other major sports league in the United States, the history of the NBA has been written by its dynasties, starting with George Mikan, who began the trend of a dominant team in every decade (save the 1970s) for the past 70 years.
Mikan was before my time. But I’ve lived through most of NBA history and been in the building for everything from Magic vs. Bird to the Jordan sticking jumpers at the buzzer and Shaquille O’Neal making the Staples Center rock to the chant of “Three-peat!”
This is one man’s ranking of the greatest pro basketball dynasties.
No. 1: The Showtime Lakers. In 1987, a year before Curry took his first breath, Nuggets coach Doug Moe was telling me, “We got no shot to beat the Lakers.” They won four championships in seven years during the 1980s, despite the best efforts of some guy named Larry Bird. The Showtime Lakers would beat the current Warriors in six games, because Andre Iguodala couldn’t stop either Magic Johnson or Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, let alone both of them.
No. 2: Jordan rules. The Jordan vs. James debate is legit. The Warriors vs. Bulls debate is not. The argument, however, quickly devolves into an old school vs. new school spat. Why? Here’s guessing Jordan and Dennis Rodman would find the Warriors laughably soft, while Steph and Klay could smugly dare Chicago to match them in a three-point shooting contest. I can guarantee one thing in a seven-game series: Rodman and Green would get tangled under the boards, and it would take suspensions to keep ’em separated.
No. 3: The Garden party. Every generation insists with 100 percent certainty the music of its youth is the best, whether we’re talking the Rolling Stones or Kendrick Lamar. So I won’t bore you by listing how many members of the 1963 Celtics are enshrined in the Hall of Fame (although counting would require two hands). But please consider one statistic: James, who has competed in the championship series eight times in a row, has recorded 483 rebounds in the Finals, fifth-best in history. The leader? Bill Russell, whose 1,718 rebounds are nearly twice as many as Wilt Chamberlain, who stands in second place.
When Golden State won 67 regular-season games and the championship a year ago, there was great temptation to instantly declare them the best NBA team of all time, or at least during the age of Twitter, when reflection and context often get lost in a rush to judgment. A better measure of a team’s greatness is sustained success.
The Warriors have earned the right to be called a basketball dynasty. But are Steph and KD and Draymond and Klay the dynasty to beat all NBA dynasties? Not even close. The Warriors are not in the top three. At least not yet.
Now kindly get off my lawn.