On June 13th 2017, the Warriors became the most celebrated team in America after overthrowing the Cleveland Cavaliers 4-1 in the 2017 NBA Finals series. Moreover, two days later, they celebrated their championship victory in the streets of Oakland, California.
At the start of Finals Game 5, the series tally stood at 3-1 with the Warriors raging to get hold of the trophy. Their killer instinct was all the more lethal due to the lingering memories of 2016 NBA Finals loss. The victory march was led by the usual suspects Steph Curry and Kevin Durant, who eventually closed the door on the Cavaliers to secure Warriors’ second national title in three years.
The first quarter was unexpectedly not a one-sided affair with the Cavaliers hitting the ground running with an aggressively physical approach. Also, once again, they were led by none other than LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. The Warriors have a knack of notching up the heat in the third quarter, but here they dominated from the second quarter onwards and outscored the Cavaliers by 38-23. Eventually, in the latter half of the 4th quarter, the Warriors closed the game with Curry and Durant orchestrating the assault.
NBA The Golden State Warriors are basketball revolutionaries, devoid from any right way to play as established by grumpy traditionalists or, significantly, the current generation of analytics-nerds. The Warriors are not analytics, they do not represent the status quo; they topple logic!
Old-school NBA wisdom is based on a set of assumptions and what worked best in the past. For example, do not throw 3-pointers off the dribble or 60-foot alley-oops. Nevertheless, every time the Warriors added some new mojo to their game such as the evolutionary 3-pointer, they did not just crush the assumptions, they bury them.
However, the renaissance of the Warriors began in 2010 when a group of executives, led by a Silicon Valley investor bought the stumbling franchise. They set out to fix it by ignoring every conventional wisdom of building a basketball team. The result is a basketball panache no team has yet figured out how to tame!