The 2015 NBA Finals will long be remembered as a plot-twist-laden journey at the end of a paradoxical playoff season.
On one hand, this playoff season and NBA Finals series ended the way most expected — the team with the best record won, the team with LeBron James was there at the end to make it a fight. Yet, the road traveled to get to that expected endpoint was anything but linear.
More will be said on the playoffs as a whole in the coming days here at Crossover Chronicles, as we put the 2014-2015 NBA season into perspective. For now, though, let’s focus solely on the Finals, which ended Tuesday night in Cleveland with the Golden State Warriors partying like it’s 1975. The team nicknamed the Dubs registered the ultimate Dubya by winning Game 6 in Ohio. The Warriors captured their second NBA title in Oakland, their first in 40 years.
The series ended with the Warriors proving themselves to be the better team — better than an undermanned Cleveland side which might have won with a healthy Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, but still better under the circumstances presented. However, in order to understand how the 2015 Finals concluded, you need to appreciate how they started and developed.
This was a six-game series, and you could neatly divide the proceedings into two halves, the first three games and the second three games. As has been said multiple times, the 2015 Finals toyed with prevailing media opinion, flowing from the original pre-series expectation that Golden State was way too good to lose. When Cleveland’s defense flustered both Stephen Curry and Draymond Green in each of the first three games (Curry broke free in portions of Game 1 and in the fourth quarter of Game 3, but he was regularly held in check for the vast majority of those three contests), the tidal wave of opinion didn’t so much credit the Cavs as it pounded the Warriors’ two best players.
Curry was soft, and the chorus you heard in many precincts of #NBATwitter was that Draymond really wasn’t a max player after all. It couldn’t have been that Cleveland was doing amazing things on defense or that LeBron was the best player on the floor in the series. It couldn’t have been that the Warriors — playing in their first NBA Finals — were having trouble dealing with the pressure of the occasion as well as the pressure applied by the Cavs’ defense. No, it had to be a referendum on two players, and more specifically, an indication they were overrated.
Three games later, that tidal wave of media opinion has receded.
In the coming days, you’re going to read and hear plenty of words about Stephen Curry, the man who — in Games 5 and 6 — played like the league MVP he in fact was. He shrugged the “soft” label after Game 3 as forcefully as he shrugged off Matthew Dellavedova, who tried his best but was not able to keep pace over the course of a long series. (Don’t bury Delly, by the way; bury J.R. Smith — his shortcomings were more glaring than those of any other Cleveland player by a wide margin. If any Cavalier helped Golden State win this uneven and highly flawed series, it was J.R.) Curry is now a central face of the NBA; he will get his due from all corners, and deservedly so.
You’ll also read and hear a lot about Andre Iguodala, genuinely Golden State’s best player in this series and the central reason the Warriors are going to have a parade in Oakland when they return home. Iguodala has remade his career, finding the perfect team and overall situation for his considerable talents — talents that always needed to fit into a specific context where he didn’t have to do everything all the time. Iggy will get his due after many previous seasons being criticized by the likes of me for failing to own moments. Iggy owned this one more than any other Warrior.
Yet, in the fresh aftermath of Golden State’s return to the mountaintop in the Association, the player whose credentials, reputation and identity need to be discussed in greater detail is Draymond Green. Curry is the face of the franchise; Iggy was the best Golden State player in the Finals. Draymond, though, finished this NBA season the way he started it: by knitting everything together for the best team in the league.
Cleveland had cut the Golden State lead to seven points early in the fourth quarter of Game 6. For most of this series, and for just about all of the first three games, Green had been abused by Cleveland’s bigs, Timofey Mozgov and Tristan Thompson. You can cite the use of small ball by Steve Kerr as a liberating force for Green, but regardless of lineup combinations, the reality entering Game 4 was that Draymond had to play a lot better than he did in Games 1-3. After all the talk about Green not being a max player, he promptly showed why, actually, he is a max player and — more to the point — the second-best Warrior behind Curry.
With a lead of 16 down to seven, Green won the loose-ball battle he had been losing for most of the series. He batted an offensive rebound to the top of the key. Moments later, Curry hit a three to push Golden State’s lead back to 10.
Later in the fourth quarter, Iguodala made a three from the left corner to enable the Warriors to create even more distance. Yet, much as the ooohs and aaahs went to Curry after his triple — even though Draymond made the play possible — Iggy got the big hosannahs after his dagger. Yet, it was Draymond who made an artful feed to set up Iggy for one of his decisive splashdowns.
Yes, shooters deserve a ton of credit for making the big shots when they get them, but you don’t have a complete team without the guy who hustles to get the board or knifes through a defense and makes the pass to set up the open look.
That version of Draymond Green did not show up in Games 1-3 of the Finals. It did in Games 4-6.
You can do the math.
Want to do even more math?
In Games 4 through 6 — the three games the Dubs won by Dub-ble digits — Klay Thompson scored a combined total of 26 points, with 9, 12 and 5 in order. Thompson averaged only 3.3 rebounds in the final three games, his numbers reduced by constant foul trouble.
Draymond, on the other hand, posted these point-rebound-assist splits in Games 4-6:
17-7-6.
16-9-6.
16-11-10, the first Warrior triple-double in the playoffs since 1962, a stat that comes courtesy of Crossover Chronicles colleague John Cannon.
Iggy has the Finals MVP trophy, Curry the league MVP trophy and a Larry O’Brien to show to the world.
Draymond Green might not get the same level of glory or newsprint or bandwidth, but know that he was the second-best Warrior all season long and affirmed that status in the last three games of this series.
Draymond — let’s not deny it — is a loudmouth. How oddly appropriate that in an NBA Finals which threw curveballs at a lot of different points along the route, Draymond was quietly excellent in helping the Golden State Warriors to an NBA championship.