Warriors clinched the championship with a signature run

It’s fitting that the final game of the 2017 NBA season was ultimately decided by what always seems to decide Golden State Warriors games. No team in the NBA goes on demoralizing runs quite like the Warriors, and they busted out one for the ages to change the course of Game 5.

With 10:14 to go in the second quarter, Deron Williams pushed the ball up the floor after a missed shot. He found LeBron James streaking down the right wing, and LeBron threw down a monster dunk (while getting hit in the head by Kevin Durant), forcing Steve Kerr to call a timeout to talk to his troops. That dunk pushed the Cavaliers’ lead to eight points, at 41-33. A few days after the Cavs had poured in 49 first-quarter points, they were lighting up the Warriors defense yet again.

(Anyone running their mouth about LeBron somehow not doing enough in this series needs to have their head examined, by the way. The man averaged a damn triple-double in the Finals — 33.6 points, 12 rebounds, and 10 assists a night — while shooting 56 percent from the field and 39 percent from three. He slapped up 41, 13, and 8 in the final game. He could not physically have done anything more.)

Just over seven minutes later (7:06, to be exact), Stephen Curry knocked down a technical foul free throw after a scuffle between David West and Tristan Thompson. In between the dunk and the free throw, the Warriors rampaged up and down the floor with a 28-4 run, erasing the entirety of the eight-point deficit and building a 16-point lead that ultimately proved insurmountable.

The lead-changing shot, fittingly, came from Kevin Durant. He pouted in 11 of the 24 points during the game-deciding run — nine of them on a trio of 3-pointers, each a different style (step-back, pull-up, spot-up) than the last. (Just for kicks, KD threw in three rebounds, an assist, and a steal during the run as well. He’s pretty good.) Durant is a game-changing scorer of the highest order, and his ability to score with ease from anywhere on the floor changed this game for good. That’s why the Warriors got him, and damn if it didn’t pay off.

But it wasn’t all KD. The 28-4 run started, of all things, with a mid-range jumper from David West. West scored all of 21 points in the series, but four of them (his only four points in the clincher) came during this crucial stretch, as did two of his 10 rebounds. West was the Warriors’ oldest player for most of this season (until they signed Matt Barnes) and there were times where it looked like he may not be able to survive in a playoff rotation, given the speed of the game these days. But Steve Kerr turned to him for the backup center minutes over JaVale McGee in Game 5, and damn if that decision didn’t pay off, too.

West’s basket came off a pass from Andre Iguodala, who was of course on the floor for the entirety of the 28-4 push. Iguodala has been the ultimate glue guy since landing in Oakland, and his contributions in this series were immense. (He ended the Finals a series-high plus-60, in a five-game set that had a total point differential of 34 points.) In addition to creating West’s run-starting basket, he added another dime, a rebound, and a high-flying driving dunk that conjured images of the Iguodala of old, setting the stage for Durant’s back-to-back 3s that put Golden State into the lead for good.

Curry entered the game midway through the run, but didn’t take long to make his presence felt. He followed Durant’s second three of the game with a trey of his own, pushing the Warriors’ lead to five. He made a driving and-one floater over the outstretched arm of Tristan Thompson, and he got knocked on his ass and brought the Oracle crowd off theirs in the process.

He assisted on a Draymond Green three, grabbed two huge boards and created Durant’s open look that pushed the lead to 15, and then 17 seconds later calmly sank the technical free-throw to complete the 28-4 romp.

Draymond nailed that aforementioned triple, he snagged three boards, and he assisted on West’s second basket of the game. And of course, he did what he always does: snuffed out fires on the defensive end through a combination of instinct and nearly unparalleled movement skills.

And it’s on that end where they really won the game. Sure, the Warriors scoring 28 points in seven minutes was special. But they wouldn’t have found a way to get not only back in the game, but far enough out in front to hold the lead for good had they not figured out a way to at least momentarily shut down a Cleveland attack that had bedeviled them for five-plus quarters in a row. The Cavaliers shot just 2-of-11 during the game-deciding stretch after starting the game 16-of-26. LeBron, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love all went scoreless during the seven-minute kill-shot of a run, shooting 0-of-6 from the field combined.

Next: LeBron James, analytics and revisualizing greatness

The most explosive offensive team we’ve seen in a long time buckled down, got a few stops, and let those stops fuel their unstoppable offensive attack. The result was exactly what you’d expect from one of the greatest collections of talent the league has ever known.