Barnstorming: 72 wins and the story of a season

On Sunday night, the Golden State Warriors beat the San Antonio Spurs 92-86, tying them with the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls for the most wins in a single season. That victory brought them to the doorstep of history. Tomorrow night, at home, they will try to beat an eroded Memphis Grizzlies team and finish the greatest regular season in NBA history.

As Paul Flannery pointed out at SBNation, the Warriors and their wins have been the dominant narrative of the NBA this season, subsuming all others to some degree. We have had rookie sensations, organizations crumbling while others reach lofty new heights, a great disruption in The Process, and the final lap for Kobe Bryant. Digital media is far too big a tent to say that those stories have been ignored, but they have certainly been crowded out by endlessly updated probabilities on 73 wins, former NBA players aggressively defending their eras and legacies against imagined assaults, and graphs on graphs of Stephen Curry’s unprecedented three-point barrage. This season, from start to finish, has belonged to the Warriors.

And yet, for all the limelight that has been devoted to them, the Warriors have also been a mirror. They have been protagonists, but with a slight shift in perspective we can also move them to the backdrop or make them a supporting character in other stories. They never disappear completely but what they have done reflects and connects to so many other narratives.

This chase for the best record of all-time began with an NBA record 24 consecutive wins to begin the season. The Warriors jumped ahead of Chicago’s 1995-96 pace early in that streak and have only dropped below it once, briefly, throughout the season. That pace-setting run started with a 16-point win at home over the New Orleans Pelicans on Opening Night, a rematch of their first round playoff series from last season. Four days later, the Warriors beat the Pelicans again, this time by 14 points in New Orleans. Those wins foreshadowed not just the beginning of a historic run but also the disastrous collapse of what was projected to be an up-and-comer in the Western Conference playoff picture.

The Pelicans were supposed to be building on their playoff experiences from last season with a new head coach and a new system. Instead, their illusory momentum broke on the walls of the Warriors. By the end of November, the Pelicans were 4-13, a hole they would never even really begin to dig themselves out of.

Of the Warriors nine losses this season, perhaps none was more head-scratching than their 17-point loss at the hands of the Los Angeles Lakers on March 6. This Lakers’s season has had precious few bright spots, between the repeated public shaming of D’Angelo Russell by Byron Scott, the tattered and embarrassing victory lap for Kobe Bryant, and the losses. So. Many. Losses. In this rare win, the Lakers got a good hard look at both their past and their future. Kobe was 4-of-14, missing all five of his three-pointers and tallying as many turnovers as assists (3). Meanwhile, Jordan Clarkson and D’Angelo Russell helped hound Klay Thompson and Stephen Curry into an unusually poor shooting effort. Clarkson, Russell and Julius Randle combined for 58 points, 21 rebounds, 7 assists and 6 steals, shooting 22-of-47 from the field.

There are a great many miles between the Lakers and respectable, competitive basketball. For one night, their peak overlapped with a Golden State valley and they were gifted with a look at what the next generation of purple and gold glory might look like.

Perhaps the second-most surprising loss for the Golden State Warriors was their overtime defeat at the hands of the Minnesota Timberwolves on April 5. This was in the stretch run for 73 wins, when Golden State was dialed in and pushing for history. It was not the context where you would expect the Warriors to play down to the competition, giving away a game that they could have had for themselves. The truth is, they didn’t. Minnesota took it from them.

The Timberwolves have struggled with consistency this season, trying to turn promising young talent into the kind of production that actually wins games. Karl-Anthony Towns is likely the Rookie of the Year this season, and he can compare trophies with Andrew Wiggins who won that honor last season. Around them are Zach LaVine, a finally healthy Ricky Rubio, and pieces like Shabazz Muhammad and Gorgui Dieng growing into their roles as complementary talents on the same sort of timelines as their hypothetical stars. The second half of this season for the Timberwolves has been about growth and momentum, building confidence for what comes next. No feather in their cap is longer or more luxurious than this win over Golden State. Like the Lakers, this was an act of scrying — Wiggins, Towns, LaVine, and Muhammad reached through the looking glass and made real a vision of the future where the Warriors and Wolves are rivals for the top of the Western Conference.

Assuming regular season patterns hold and the Warriors continue to throttle everyone in their conference on the way to the Finals, it seems likely that they will be facing a rematch with the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Warriors have already beaten the Cavaliers twice this season, a six-point win on Christmas Day and a 34-point drubbing in Cleveland in the middle of January. Neither win disqualifies the possibility that Cleveland could challenge Golden State in the Finals. Cleveland has sputtered and ground their gears all season trying to find something, anything that approximates the rhythm of consistently cohesive basketball. Setting aside the likelihood of them reaching it, this team has ceiling much higher than their present level of performance. Their losses to Golden State, and the season-long brilliance of the Warriors, only highlights how hard things have been for Cleveland. The story of the Cavaliers this year is one of subtweets and subtle frustration, but it’s also about how the Warriors used last year’s Finals as launching pad while Cleveland stayed in the observation deck to watch the show.

This season has also been a dramatic reshuffling for the Eastern Conference with the realization of upward mobility in a conference that has long been defined by a depressed middle class. Several of these teams staking claims on the future have had success against Golden State this season. Toronto, Atlanta, and Boston are currently seeded second through fourth in the Eastern Conference. They were a combined 1-5 against the Warriors this season. However, they their five losses came by a combined 27 points — about 5.4 points per game. That’s fairly impressive considering Golden State’s other 67 wins were by an average of 14.3 points per game. Boston, Toronto and Atlanta spent this season trying to validate their self-belief, prove that they were more than just the product of a middle-heavy conference. Going toe-to-toe with Golden State, even in losing efforts, has helped elevate each, giving them strength that they have brought to bear on other lesser teams. They are all better for the nature of their losses to the Warriors.

This season has been one of the Oklahoma City Thunder’s best. Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook are both near or at individual peaks and they have largely sorted out the dynamic about who gets the ball when (although this may have been more of a flaw constructed by fans and analysts than an actual challenge). New head coach Billy Donovan has helped fix some of the Scott Brooks stagnation, including finally staggering minutes for his two stars in way that provides more balance over a 48-minute game. The roster after Durant and Westbrook is limited, as usual, but the Thunder’s hopes for contention rest, as they always have, on the strength of having the two best individual players on the floor at any given moment. Unfortunately, the Warriors have demonstrated three times already this season that they can’t be outdone, even on this scale of individual brilliance. Stephen Curry has been blindingly good in their three matchups, each in different ways, breaking the Thunder’s hopes with sharp-shooting and savvy facilitation. The Thunder can’t seem to escape their own limitations and the Warriors have been the mirror reminding them exactly what those limitations are.

All due respect to the Memphis Grizzlies, but it is fitting that the schedule was set up for the San Antonio Spurs to provide the last and most significant challenge to the Warriors run at 73 wins. San Antonio has had a historic season themselves. Although they will finish a handful of games behind Golden State in the final regular season standings, they have a greater average margin of victory and have played a statistically more challenging schedule. By SRS, a composite of point differential and strength of schedule, the Spurs actually have the edge on Golden State, although both would be ranked among the ten-best regular season teams of all-time.

Both San Antonio and Golden State have an air of the inevitable and a meeting in the Western Conference Finals feels like destiny. After four regular season meetings, and three wins for Golden State, the Warriors firmly have the upper hand. But really, very little psychological ground has been gained and both teams still need four more wins to eliminate the other. For San Antonio, and the entire NBA, the story of this season ends when Golden State’s does.