Warriors’ beautiful, bold basketball is reminiscent of 1985-86 Celtics
This team is worthy of admiration from even most discerning basketball fans. That means you, Boston old-timers.
COMMENTARY
From time to time, I’ll get sideswiped with a social-media accusation of too often writing about a national sports story from the Boston perspective. It happens more than I expect actually, and on the surface it bewilders me. My gig is to write for a predominantly Boston audience from the online perch a Boston-centric website and thus will be looking for the Boston angle in just about anything that captivates sports fans? I thought it seemed obvious. My address is Boston.com. It’s where we come from and where we’re coming from.
To some degree, I do understand where the leave-Boston-out-of-this-you-chowdahead yowling comes from, or at least its genesis. I hate saying this because I sound like a smug donkey, but a good-sized fraction of it is envy. Boston teams have won — let me pause obnoxiously to count ‘em up — four Super Bowls, three World Series, and single NBA and NHL titles since 2001. It’s a wonder Cleveland hasn’t attacked us during the night. Then again, they’d probably lose that showdown in heartbreaking fashion too.
I bring up all of this not just because gloating is fun and I’m a donkey and it will never fail to be fun to tally a decade-and-a-half’s worth of championships. I bring it up because we just witnessed an all-timer of an NBA Playoff series: The defending-champion, 73-win Warriors’ rallied from a 3-1 deficit to overcome a Thunder team that features two of the best half-dozen players in the league in Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. And it was reminiscent of the best basketball most of us have ever seen around here.
http://cinesport.boston.com/boston-globe-sports/finn-what-boston-thinks-warriors/
The Warriors did this by making so many seemingly impossible shots under intense pressure that, after a while, every flicked 27-footer by Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson stopped seeming impossible and started seeming destined to go in, no matter the degree of difficulty or tension. The defending champion’s performance while carrying the weight of the 73-9 season — the annoying yeah-but-they-didn’t-finish-the-job comps to the disappointment of the 2007 Patriots’ 18-1 ending were already percolating after Game 4 — could not have been more admirable or clutch. Curry and Thompson, especially during his 41-point masterpiece in Game 6, were the epitome of grace under pressure.
That’s where our city comes into this. If you’re of my generation, the standard-bearer for beautiful, bold basketball is the 1985-86 Celtics. If you’re of an older generation, the standard is … well, it’s still the ’86 crew of Bird and McHale, Ainge and DJ, Chief and Walton, but you also speak with reverential first-hand knowledge of the Bill Russell era. That New Big Three era wasn’t a bad introduction to Celtics lore for the young ones, either.
What the Warriors did was reminiscent of the best Celtics teams I’ve had the good fortune of witnessing, including ’86. There seems to be a rush around here to diminish Curry and Co.’s accomplishments the last two years, to suggest it’s a softer league than it used to be, that more precise long-range shooting is somehow a bad thing, that nothing we’re seeing now could compete with what happened back in my day, grumble-grumble.
Well, that’s nonsense from those clinging to and perhaps exaggerating the past. As someone who admires the ’86 Celtics as much I admire anything I’ve ever seen in sports save for perhaps watching Butch Hobson dive headfirst into a bat rack when I was 8 years old, these Warriors are on par with anyone as tough champions, and they are worthy of all of the admiration they get. I realize they need to beat LeBron James and the bolstered Cavs in the Finals rematch, that their work is not done yet.
But their work was breathtaking Monday night, and I mean breathtaking in the good sense. The Thunder did not choke; they were down four points, on the road, in Game 7, with 1 minute 40 seconds left, and Warriors fans were terrified of Kevin Durant at that moment. You know what happened? The Warriors went out and won it with extraordinary shot-making in pressure-packed circumstances. What Thompson and Curry did … well, to put it in our local parlance: It’s the kind of thing that made Larry a legend.
There’s another way to put it into Celtics perspective too, and beyond the text my ol’ dad sent me after Thompson’s performance in Game 6: What an unbelievable game. Showed how far the Celtics have to go. That’s true, I countered, and the Warriors are something to aspire to, but hey, the Celtics did go 1-1 against them in a pair of thrillers this year. Maybe it’s not that far. And if the C’s get Durant …
I know: That’s somewhere between a daydream and pipe dream. The agonizing ending for Durant and the Thunder has already spurred a million day-after columns and speculative tweets on what the superstar free-agent’s future holds. While I believe the Celtics really do intrigue him to some degree, financially it makes sense for him to return to the Thunder for one more year. And he does have unfinished business there now – sometimes a hideous ending ends up being the motivation for a team to finally get over the top.
I hope Durant comes here; I bet he will for a meeting with Danny Ainge and Brad Stevens and the Celtics’ impressive brain trust. But then, I suspect, he’ll return to Oklahoma City for one more shot with Westbrook and this core before the speculation begins anew next offseason. Hey, for all of our spoils, Boston fans are fully capable of – and guilty of – coveting other cities’ stars. Sometimes, like what we just saw from the Warriors, we ought to covet and admire their achievements, too.
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