The Birth of a Juggernaut: A Deep Dive Into the 2017 Championship

English feature · same subject as above · Team: Golden State Warriors / Star: Kevin Durant

I The Night

June 12, 2017, Oracle Arena, Oakland. The horn went and the board read 129-120. Golden State closed out Cleveland 4-1 for the fifth championship in franchise history — and the first time since 1975 they'd done it on their own floor in the Bay Area.

It wasn't as comfortable as the score suggests. Cleveland came out swinging, Irving and James turning steals into layups and taking a four-point lead after one. LeBron's layup to open the fourth cut it to 98-95, the closest the Cavaliers got in the second half. Golden State answered with a 10-3 run, Durant scoring five of it.

Durant went 14 of 20 for 39 points, 7 rebounds and 5 assists. Curry had 34, 6 and 10. By the time the lead sat in double figures with a few minutes left, the building was already standing.

The number that defines this title: Golden State finished the postseason 16-1, the best playoff run the league has ever seen. The record had been 15-1, set by the 2001 Lakers and standing for sixteen years. They also won fifteen straight, another mark nobody had touched.

The Finals MVP was Kevin Durant, and it was unanimous. First championship, first Finals MVP, at 28, in his first season with the team.

Afterward LeBron came over and they held each other for a long moment. Durant said something later that got quoted everywhere: of everyone he'd ever looked at, LeBron was the only man who could look him eye to eye.

He also admitted he hadn't slept for two days. Anxious, jittery, just wanting to get out there. When it ended, the thing he kept saying was that they'd done it at home.

The confetti came down in a building that had waited forty-two years to see it. Oakland had watched this franchise win in Philadelphia and in Cleveland, and never in front of them.

The 1975 detail matters more than it sounds. That franchise had won in Philadelphia twice, in 1947 and 1956, back when the league barely resembled this one, and the 2015 banner had gone up in Cleveland. So the people in that building had never once watched it happen in front of them. The noise when the last seconds ran off was forty-two years of waiting coming out at once, and several players said afterward they could feel the floor moving under them.

II The Finals MVP

The 2017 Finals MVP was Kevin Durant, and all eleven votes went his way. Over five games: 35.2 points, 8.4 rebounds, 5.4 assists, on 55.6% from the floor, 47.4% from three and 92.7% at the line.

The steadiness is what stands out. He scored 30 or more in all five games — 38, 33, 31, 35, 39. Nobody had done that in a Finals since Shaquille O'Neal in 2000. His effective field goal percentage for the series was 63.9%.

Game 3 gave the series its picture. Cleveland was still ahead, under a minute left. Durant grabbed a defensive rebound, pushed it himself, and rose over LeBron for a three. 114-113. Cleveland never got back in front.

In Game 2 he went for 33, 13 rebounds and 6 assists, plus five blocks and three steals — a forward filling every column on a Finals box score. In Game 4, with the team losing, he shot 15 of 16 from the line and scored 35. In Game 5 he went 14 of 20 for 39.

That made him the third player ever to win Finals MVP in his first season with a new team, after Magic Johnson in 1980 and Moses Malone in 1983.

The real weight wasn't the numbers, though. It was that "he can win" was finally written down somewhere official. Nine years in Oklahoma City, one Finals appearance, an MVP, four scoring titles, and nothing to show for any of it until June.

He got the trophy from Adam Silver with his mother standing a few feet away, and the two of them stayed on that stage longer than the ceremony needed. Wanda Durant had been in the building for all of it, including the year everybody told her son he'd ruined the game.

Voters didn't hesitate. There was a case for LeBron, who averaged a triple-double, and there was a case for Curry, who was the engine. Neither got a single vote.

He nearly shot 50-40-90 for the series, which almost nobody manages over five games against a defense built entirely to stop him. The free throw number is the one that stunned people: 92.7% on real volume, including 15 of 16 in a game his team lost. For nine years the knock on him in big moments had been that he settled for jumpers and wore down late. In this series he got to the line more often and finished better than he had at any point in the regular season.

III The Summer Before

Everything points back to July 4, 2016. Durant announced in The Players' Tribune that he was signing with Golden State. Three days later he put his name on a two-year, $54.3 million deal with a player option after the first season.

Here's the problem with that. The Warriors had just won 73 games, the most any team had ever won. They'd won the title in 2015. And in the conference finals they'd come back from 3-1 down to eliminate Durant's Thunder. He wasn't rescuing a bad team. He was joining the one that had just beaten him.

The backlash was unlike anything the league had dealt with. Softest move in sports history. If you can't beat them. You ruined the game. It came from fans, from retired players, from active ones, and it ran the entire season. His jersey got burned in Oklahoma City. He got turned into a cupcake meme.

On February 11 he went back to Oklahoma City as a visitor for the first time. He got booed for forty-eight straight minutes, on every touch, and scored 34 in a Warriors win, then walked off with his head down.

Hanging over all of it was a second thing. In the 2016 Finals, Golden State had blown a 3-1 lead to Cleveland, with Draymond suspended for Game 5 and Bogut's knee gone. Everyone on that roster spent the whole year carrying the biggest collapse in the sport's history.

So the 2017 title solved two problems at once. For Durant it answered every version of "you can't win." For the Warriors it wiped out 3-1.

He never got his reputation back, not really. What he got instead was the only thing that ends an argument in this sport, which is a trophy you can't argue with.

And the irony nobody missed: the team that couldn't close out 3-1 became the team that went 12-0 to start the next postseason.

There's a story from that week that gets told constantly. Draymond Green, still raw from losing the Finals he'd been suspended for, called Durant the moment he heard. The pitch wasn't money or market size. It was that Golden State had already been the best team in basketball and still hadn't been good enough, and Durant was the piece that would fix it. Nobody else in the league could make that argument honestly, and everyone knew it.

IV The Road

The regular season was 67-15, best in the league. Durant played 62 games and averaged 25.1 points, 8.3 rebounds, 4.8 assists and 1.6 blocks on 53.7% shooting — the most efficient year of his career to that point. In March a Grade 2 MCL sprain and a tibial bone bruise in his left knee cost him the final nineteen games.

The playoffs were a different team entirely. Portland got swept, by an average of 18. Utah got swept, by 15. San Antonio got swept, by 16. Twelve games, twelve wins, an average margin of 16.3.

They became the first team in league history to sweep three straight best-of-seven series and walk into the Finals at 12-0. Only two of those twelve games finished inside ten points.

Game 1 against the Spurs was the one real test. San Antonio led by 25, still up 20 at the half. With 7:53 left in the third, Kawhi Leonard landed on Zaza Pachulia's foot and rolled his ankle, and that was the end of his season. He had 26 points by then and the Spurs led by 23. Golden State came back and won 113-111, with 40 from Curry and 37 from Durant.

Popovich was furious about the closeout afterward, and that series carries an asterisk in a lot of people's minds to this day. Nobody can prove what would have happened, which is exactly why the argument never dies.

There's one more piece of context that gets skipped. Steve Kerr couldn't coach. Complications from his back surgery — severe headaches and nausea — had sidelined him since Game 2 of the first round. Mike Brown ran the team through the 12-0. Kerr came back for Game 2 of the Finals and the building gave him a standing ovation.

So this is a title won largely without its head coach on the bench. That doesn't make it less real. It tells you how completely the players owned the system by then.

Fifteen straight wins is its own kind of absurd. It means that from the opening tip of the playoffs to the fourth quarter of Finals Game 3, a stretch of more than six weeks, this team did not lose a single game. Then Cleveland won Game 4 by 21 points and the streak was gone. The only blemish on the best postseason anyone has ever put together came in a game where the other side made 24 threes and still went home down 3-1.

V The Roster Puzzle

Stephen Curry gave up the most and had the most underrated year of anyone. In the Finals he averaged 26.8 points, 8.0 rebounds and 9.4 assists, and he assisted on 20 of Durant's 60 made baskets — a third of his teammate's offense, off his own gravity.

The bigger number: across the 2017 playoffs, Golden State outscored opponents by 245 points with Curry on the floor. That's the highest postseason mark since the league started tracking it in 1996-97; Kobe's 2001 had been the record at plus-213. Draymond Green was at plus-227. Both of them passed Kobe in the same run.

Green won Defensive Player of the Year that season. He was the emotional engine and the guy calling every switch, and his ability to guard all five positions is what made the switching scheme possible. The terrifying part of that team: the defensive quarterback and the offensive engine were two different people, and both were on the floor almost all the time.

Klay Thompson was the quiet third option. He took the other team's best perimeter player in the conference finals and scored entirely without the ball. He shot poorly in the Finals and Cleveland still couldn't relax on him for a second.

Then the rest of it: Zaza Pachulia starting at center and setting the screens, JaVale McGee getting a start in the conference finals and scoring 16, Ian Clark, Matt Barnes, David West, Shaun Livingston, Patrick McCaw. Two usable players at nearly every spot on the roster.

That depth is why the regular season didn't matter. They could lose Durant for nineteen games, lose their coach for two months, and still be the best team alive by April.

It's also why "superteam" undersells it. A superteam is four stars and nothing behind them. This was four stars and a bench that had already won a championship together two years earlier.

Andre Iguodala is the piece that made the whole thing fit. He was the 2015 Finals MVP, and by 2017 he'd accepted a bench role, taking the toughest wing assignment every night and shooting the shots nobody else wanted. Every version of the small-ball lineup that made this team unguardable had him standing in the corner. He'd lost a step by then, and the scheme still didn't function without him.

VI The Gamble

The bet was placed in the summer of 2016. To fit Durant's max salary, Golden State let Harrison Barnes walk — the starting small forward from their 2015 title team — along with Bogut, Speights, Ezeli and Barbosa.

They traded the depth of a 73-win roster for one man. The front office's read was that at the Finals level, having a scorer who cannot be schemed off the floor is worth more than having a strong second unit.

What made the signing possible at all was a one-time window. The salary cap jumped in 2016 on the new national TV money, and Curry was still on the below-market extension he'd signed in 2012 when his ankles were a genuine concern. Take either of those away and there's no room. A year earlier or a year later, the math doesn't exist.

Durant signed a one-plus-one with a player option, which meant the Warriors only ever locked him in for a single season. From the first day this was a timed bet — win now, because nothing was guaranteed beyond June.

Bob Myers said afterward that it had been championship or bust for that group, and that's not a figure of speech. Losing the Finals after 73 wins had set the bar somewhere unreachable by any normal standard.

Kerr's absence is part of the same story. Going 12-0 without your head coach tells you the system had stopped belonging to the coach. The players were running it themselves by then.

And every piece of the bet came with a deadline attached. Barnes, Bogut, Ezeli, Speights — all gone, all for a two-year window that everyone understood might close after twelve months.

VII The Tuition

Cleveland was not bad that year. LeBron James averaged 33.6 points, 12.0 rebounds and 10.0 assists in the Finals, becoming the first player in NBA history to average a triple-double in the championship series. In Game 5 he had 41, 13 and 8, scoring 14 in the fourth quarter by himself.

Kyrie Irving averaged 29.4. In Game 4 he went for 40 and Cleveland won 137-116 to avoid the sweep, hitting 24 threes — a Finals record at the time. LeBron had 31, 11 and 10 that night.

Game 3 was the one that got away. A JR Smith three put them up 113-107 with a little over three minutes left, and then Cleveland didn't score again. LeBron had a look to tie it, missed, got his own rebound, and turned it over.

In Game 5 the Cavaliers actually played well. They shot 53%, scored 62 in the paint, forced 13 turnovers and turned them into 25 points. Smith went 9 of 11 with seven threes for 25. Tristan Thompson had 15 and 8.

There was just one problem, and it was the same one every night. The guy on the other side scored 30 in all five games, and every time Cleveland got it back to single digits, Golden State closed the door within two or three possessions.

Tyronn Lue said he broke down halfway through his postgame talk and a lot of his players were crying in the locker room. A team that gave everything it had lost to a team that had barely been tested, which is the cruelest version of this sport.

It's worth saying the Cavs were defending champions. They'd won this thing eleven months earlier by coming back from 3-1, and they were the only team in the league anyone thought could live with Golden State.

VIII The City and the Map

Oakland had waited 42 years. The last time the Warriors won a title on their own floor was 1975. They'd won two in Philadelphia, in 1947 and 1956, and they'd won in Cleveland in 2015. On this June night the city finally watched it happen in front of them.

Sixteen and one is the number that will outlive everything else about this team. Not just the best record — a statement about how complete a team can be across four best-of-seven rounds. It's still standing.

This is also where the nickname came from. Four All-Stars on one roster — Curry, Durant, Thompson, Green — plus a Defensive Player of the Year in the middle of them. The rest of the league understood that summer that the bar had moved permanently.

For Durant as an individual, the night rewrote his file. Before it he was one of the best players never to win anything. After it he had a scoring title collection, an MVP, a ring and a Finals MVP, all in the same career.

And this trophy planted everything that followed. It proved the move worked, which is what made 2018 possible. It also fixed how everyone would judge the next two years — not can they win, but how many times.

He said he hadn't slept for two days, that he'd been nervous and shaky and just wanted to put it all out there. Then the plainest line of the night: they'd done it, they were champions, and they got to celebrate at home.

The parade came a few days later through downtown Oakland. For a franchise that had spent most of its existence as a punchline, three titles and the best playoff record ever was a strange new problem to have.

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Video Recap

Official Finals MVP highlights: