Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty ImagesSince the Golden State Warriors hired Steve Kerr as head coach in 2014 and kicked off the run of six NBA Finals in eight seasons, they've openly aspired to the kind of sustainable success the San Antonio Spurs have enjoyed for the past quarter-century. Kerr played for Gregg Popovich near the end of his career, winning two titles as a role player supporting David Robinson and Tim Duncan. As a coach, he's had his own Duncan in Stephen Curry. The similarities were too obvious, bordering on cliche.
But in winning their fourth title in eight seasons since the run began, Kerr, Curry and the Warriors have their proof of concept.
With Thursday's series-clinching win over the Celtics, the trio of Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green picked up their 21st Finals win together. They've eclipsed the mark of 19 previously set by Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili for most wins in the Finals by an All-NBA trio in the past 50 years.
Even being here now, this far into the run, puts the Warriors in rare company. Winning this championship may be the start of something unprecedented.
The Warriors' 2022 title run, which comes after two seasons of missing the playoffs entirely due to injuries, has officially kicked off the third distinct era within this dynasty that started with their first Finals appearance and title in the 2014-15 season.
The constants have been Kerr and the star trio of Curry, Thompson and Green, but the Warriors teams that have made it this far have looked different around them. In eight years they've gone from a group of upstarts that won well ahead of schedule, to a superteam so dominant it had three years of think pieces about whether they were ruining the NBA, to the elder statesmen they once challenged, winning in different ways with different supporting casts on different age timelines, to a degree that's only been seen before in San Antonio.
That first Warriors title team, the one that lucked into unlocking Green as a starting power forward when David Lee suffered an injury in training camp, was built around Curry and Thompson as superstar shooters in their 20s surrounded by role players who were significantly older. Starting center Andrew Bogut was 30, forwards Lee and Andre Iguodala were 31. The first Spurs title team, too, won with a young generational superstar surrounded by much older veteran talent. At 22 in his second season, Duncan was the only player in the top eight in minutes played who was younger than 30, with the aging Robinson as his co-star.
The Warriors were even better the next year, winning an NBA-record 73 regular-season games but falling short in the Finals, and that 3-1 collapse led directly to their transition into the middle period, the one most people will remember as the definitive team of its era for many reasons.
Kevin Durant's arrival in Golden State in the summer of 2016 made the Warriors completely unbeatable for two seasons, and may have done so for even longer if he hadn't suffered a torn Achilles in the 2019 Finals against the Raptors and ultimately left for Brooklyn that summer. The bedrock of those three seasons of the Warriors was the same, with Kerr and the Curry-Thompson-Green triumvirate, but the presence of maybe the deadliest scorer of the modern era in the slot previously occupied by the solid but workmanlike Harrison Barnes completely changed the character of the team. It was all "the Warriors," but they weren't the same at all.
Neither were the mid-2000s Spurs with Duncan in his prime flanked by fellow All-Stars Parker and Ginobili. They won two titles in 2005 and 2007, the same number as the 1999-2003 Spurs, but the feel was different even though Duncan and Popovich were the constants of both eras. Those mid-2000s Spurs teams didn't blow opponents off the court for two years straight like the Durant-era Warriors did, but they were the defining team of a period of the league's history relatively bereft of star power.
This is also when the Spurs started to burnish their reputation for finding absolutely perfect role players to put around their stars—defensive specialist Bruce Bowen, sharpshooter Brent Barry, veteran scoring guard Michael Finley—leading to talk of "winning culture" and "the Spurs way," which many successful teams have tried to emulate but nobody has been able to successfully while winning at a high level for this long, until the Warriors.
The Warriors have developed a similar rep for finding ideal supporting players for their stars, starting with Shaun Livingston, who came on board for the first title run in 2014-15, and then JaVale McGee during the Durant years. Now, any role player who signs with Golden State for the minimum or mid-level exception—Otto Porter Jr., Nemanja Bjelica—is widely assumed to be a steal and a perfect glue guy, because the Warriors have hit on so many of these types of players before.
This version of the Warriors has officially entered their 2013-14 Spurs period. Curry, Thompson and Green are still here. But for the first time, with Jordan Poole and Jonathan Kuminga, there's a belief that the young talent the Warriors have drafted and developed could one day keep the run going even after those three are finished playing. Those later Duncan-Parker-Ginobili San Antonio teams were bolstered by Kawhi Leonard, a non-lottery pick who became a two-way dynamo and MVP candidate, and Danny Green, a reclamation project who found his perfect role as a 3-and-D wing and might have won Finals MVP in 2013 if San Antonio had won that series against the Heat.
The Spurs were poised to continue contending past Duncan's retirement in 2016 until Leonard's quad injury and subsequent departure from San Antonio sent them into the rebuild they find themselves in currently. The next generation of the Warriors aren't ready for that yet, but they don't need to be, not with Curry, Thompson and Green still this good.
By the time the Big Three ages out, though, things could be different.
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