The Golden State Warriors’ 2023 season ended last weekend with their conference semi-final series loss to the Los Angeles Lakers, the final Game 6 result being a 20-point blowout. Though the Warriors had been mostly favored in the series, the result shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who follows the NBA regularly. The current iteration of the Lakers is nothing like the team that started the season saddled with Russell Westbrook’s contract and penchant for ball-hogging and brick-throwing. The Lakers finally gave up on their failed experiment at the 2023 trade deadline, unloading Westbrook along with a first-round draft pick for serviceable role players that added greatly to their depth and transformed them into a team far better than their seventh-seed status suggested. The top-seed Denver Nuggets, who dispatched the KD Phoenix Suns with relative ease, will likely have all they can handle in the Lakers for the Western Conference Finals.
For the NBA, the far more consequential question is where the Warriors, after dominating the league for most of the last decade, will go from here. Much as owner Joe Lacob has been willing to shell out over $400 million annually between salaries and luxury taxes to keep chasing rings with Steph, Draymond, Klay and a rotating cast of support players, it’s hard to imagine spending that kind of money for a team that won only 43 games in the regular season and, as both coach Kerr and Draymond readily admitted, got only as far in the playoffs as they deserved. It would make sense to break up this team, except that such would either condemn Steph to play on borderline lottery teams for the rest of his career or induce him to force a trade to a contender. Not an easy set of choices for Lacob or his general manager Bob Myers to make, assuming Myers sticks around – a prospect currently in question.
One thing seems clear in retrospect. The 2022 champion Warriors weren’t the best team in the NBA that year, but as often happens in sports, they managed through a combination of luck and guile to steal a title that in normal circumstances would have gone to one of the more loaded teams that season like the Milwaukee Bucks or the Phoenix Suns. They were strongly reminiscent of the last San Francisco Giants championship team from 2014, which featured Madison Bumgarner, Buster Posey, and a lot of aging veterans and spare parts. Like the 2014 Giants, the 2022 Warriors rose to the occasion, beat the odds, and fed the hope that sometimes in life good things can happen when you least expect it. For that, they will always have a special place in my heart.
