The last time Stephen Curry went an NBA game without making a 3-point shot, Damian Jones was the team’s starting center. That was November 8, 2018, a cool 1,313 days ago.
Three days removed from perhaps his greatest performance ever, Curry put up a dud. He missed all nine threes, went 7-of-22 from the field and even badly missed a free throw.
It didn’t matter.
That shouldn’t be possible.
Even with Curry playing excellent defense and helping the offense in other ways, that should not have been possible.
Not in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, against a Boston Celtics team that seemed in so many ways like the perfect counter to the Warriors. They are younger, lengthier, more athletic, simply more well-rounded.
But what is beginning to separate these two teams is more than a lineup.
It goes beyond effort, wanting to win, great coaching, health, etc.
When you look at Boston’s roster, the starting five looks perhaps stronger than any team in the league. In Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Marcus Smart, Al Horford and Robert Williams III, there is a stellar two-way team and one of the more menacing defensive lineups the modern NBA has ever seen.
But the Warriors know how to get this done. Even the guys who haven’t done this seem to know how to get it done.
As Curry failed to find his shooting stroke in astounding fashion, Andrew Wiggins, a player once dismissed as a bust — at the very least one who would never live up to his potential — channeled Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan.
He floated around the hoop en route to 26 points (10 in the fourth), 13 rebounds, 2 assists, 2 steals and a block. Wiggins always has those moments, when he looks like the greatest players you’ve ever seen, but the Warriors continue to draw that from him more often. And now he’s doing it on the greatest stage there is.
Klay Thompson had an efficient 21 points and a couple steals. Gary Payton II tallied 15 points, 5 rebounds and 3 steals. Draymond Green snapped alive for a 8-8-6 slash.
All of those aforementioned players hounded Boston with a level of defensive intensity and ruthlessness the visitors didn’t quite seem prepared to respond to. That’s after a series defined by aggressive defense on either side.
There’s depth, and then there’s a depth of identity.
Call it a philosophical edge, an esoteric trump card. But as the Warriors have built up countless layers of scar tissue over the last near-decade, they have established a comfortability in experiencing and fighting failure at the moments which matter most.
The core obviously knows these moments best. It’s why Curry can throw up a nonpareil goose egg, Green can play like “shit,” as he called it, in Game 3, and Thompson can have two games worth of duds and yet this team is now on the brink of a fourth NBA title in eight years.
You see it in the on-court interactions.
Green talks. He might talk as well as anyone. Curry, when he wants to — like he did in Game 4 — makes sure everyone hears him. Thompson sure as hell talks. Poole? He chats plenty; ask Damian Lillard.
Even Andrew Wiggins flexed in Tatum’s face on Monday.
Green recalled after the game how the Warriors got a stamp of approval from notorious shit-talker Jimmy Butler when they acquired Wiggins, and Thompson expressed that one of his favorite things in the world is seeing that in-your-face behavior from Wiggins.
How much chatter have you seen from Boston outside of some faux-bravado from Grant Williams?
Marcus Smart’s clearly vocal, but he might direct more of that to referees than players. Ime Udoka might their best trash talker.
That’s not to say you need to trash talk well to win. But the Warriors are out-shit-talking the Celtics, and that’s indicative of their feel for these moments, the way they revel in the opportunity to fight back from the brink. When Boston threatened to run away in the third quarter, like in Game 1, they nipped it in the bud.
It permeates every inch of the organization and it’s why they reach to the depths of their bench for a few minutes when they need it.
There is a top-heaviness to Boston that is evident. On Monday, they had 7 players combine for 230 of their 240 minutes. The eighth man in their rotation is Payton Pritchard, who missed all three of his 3-pointers in his five minutes. That’s 235 minutes to eight players.
Golden State had 10 players combine for 236 minutes, and eight players combine for 227 minutes.
That’s all to say, the Warriors have the ability to find valuable minutes in ways that genuinely make you chuckle.
They’ve tapped Nemanja Bjelica — who somehow locked up Tatum in his few minutes guarding him in Game — Andre Iguodala, Gary Payton II and Otto Porter Jr.
Against Dallas, both Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody played some crucial minutes.
Did you really think you’d see Bjelica go coast-to-coast multiple times in the playoffs, let alone stump Tatum? That happened.
It sounds like a fever dream. You wake up and tell someone, “I dreamt Nemanja Bjelica locked up Jayson Tatum in the Finals,” and they tell you, “take an ibuprofen and go back to sleep.”
But that’s the reality of this franchise. They find lost value in consistent, ingenuitive ways. And that confidence that starts at the top — in large part to the fluid offensive system and all-hands-on-deck defense — spread through the rest of the roster like a well-built irrigation system.
Boston went scorched earth in the fourth quarter of Game 1. And what was Draymond Green’s response?
A brief perusal of the box score and a “look who hit their shots” retort that indicated he didn’t think the recipe that burned the Warriors in that game was all that viable.
Those three players combined for 65 points in the opener. The most they’ve combined for since then is 42 points.
They had 29 points combined in Game 5. White didn’t hit a single shot, scoring one point on one of his two free throws.
Any team that reaches the NBA Finals is talented. But there is an element of winning the NBA Finals that requires a stronger backbone. It takes the confidence of someone like Green, who predicted months ago the Warriors would win these Finals.
It’s less tangible than athleticism or scoring ability, but it is the engine of the teams who come out on top. Golden State, in a game their star player laid bricks, reaffirmed that is their backbone.
