In a little over two weeks, or perhaps much sooner, the NBA Finals will be over. Either the Cleveland Cavaliers or the Golden State Warriors will have been crowned as champions. If it is the Warriors, it will be the final piece in the greatest season in NBA history — more regular season wins than anyone else and the ring to hold it together. If it is the Cavaliers, LeBron can finally exhale knowing he brought a championship to Cleveland.
Both scenarios would make a fitting ending to this NBA season, carefully wrapping up narrative threads of toil, celebration, winning, losing, frustration, failure, and vindication stretching back through the years. The epilogue will be a ticker-tape parade where someone (Timofey Mozgov? Mo Speights?) will embarrass themselves with meme-able dance moves. Then The Story of the 2015-16 NBA Season will be put up on the shelf with all the others, and a new story will begin.
The Warriors and Cavaliers would each seem to be well positioned for dynastic pursuits. Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving are each under contract for the next four seasons and it’s hard to imagine LeBron walking away from Cleveland again, even after another Finals loss. Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green are all on the right side of 30 and seem like Warriors for life. Whatever happens this season it seems possible, maybe even probable, that these two teams could be at the top of their respective conferences again next year.
The pieces around the stars will almost certainly change next year but projecting these teams, and the weight of their two Finals matchups, into the future is more about the aesthetic and strategic impact than the actual names and faces.
What the Warriors did last season was nothing short of revolutionary. It was not just worshipping at the altar of three-pointers or pace-and-space, it was about building a roster that could win big or small, that could play uptempo and maintain elite efficiency offensively and defensively. The system begins to weaken without Stephen Curry’s shooting but the same could be said for Klay Thompson’s, or Draymond Green’s defensive versatility and play-making, or Harrison Barnes’ ability to defend the post, or Andrew Bogut’s passing and rim protection, or Andre Iguodala, or Shaun Livingston.
This season the Warriors doubled down on their uniqueness, did it better, with more passion, with more vigor, and they won more games than anyone. In doing so, they have made a stunningly effective case for their competitive advantage, one that teams around the league will be attempting to copy. The Indiana Pacers dismantled their frontcourt to try and play small and fast. Ditto for the Washington Wizards. Don’t forget the New Orleans Pelicans, the Sacramento Kings, the Charlotte Hornets, the Chicago Bulls, and the Orlando Magic — all of whom made their offenses dramatically more Warriors-like.
The Cavaliers have exploded in these playoffs, in large part because of the success of smaller lineups with Kevin Love or Channing Frye at the center position. Lineups with either of those, and sometimes both, spread the floor to an incredible degree. They open up driving lanes for LeBron and Irving, they make a simple high pick-and-roll borderline unstoppable. The Cavaliers offense doesn’t adhere to all of Golden State’s principles, there is far less movement of players and the ball, not nearly as much off-ball complexity. But what has made it so powerful in these playoffs is their willingness to focus on space and shooting.
In the Finals this year we will get a chance to see the Warriors do their thing, and the Cavaliers try to top them with their own version of the same script. Remember the good old days when jump-shooting teams didn’t compete for championships?
Not everyone has Stephen Curry, and no one else in the league manipulates defense and creates open space quite the way he does. But every player affects a defense and space in some way. Savvy coaches are getting savvier about offensive design that is focused on space, how players affect it, instead of who scores best from where. The Cavaliers don’t do it exactly like the Warriors do, but they do it pretty damn well.
These players and teams in this year’s Finals may well be the ones controlling the league next year and the year after that. That’s possibly true when focusing on the specific names and faces, it’s undeniably true when thinking about them as templates. Any team that is competing for a title over the next decade is going to be borrowing something from Cleveland and Golden State. They will likely feature pick-and-roll ball-handlers who are deadly three-point shooters, big men who can space the floor, wings who can defend all positions. There will be unique vibrations, individualism can fill any crack after all, but these values will be part of the process.
This NBA Finals will be fascinating — a beautiful collection of small movements, of matchups, adjustments, and counter-adjustments. All of those micro narratives will coalesce into the macro, a story that we will likely read again and again.
For more NBA Finals coverage, check out our NBA Finals hub page.