Back Up the Mountain: A Deep Dive Into the 2022 Championship

English feature · same subject as above · Team: Golden State Warriors / Star: Stephen Curry

I The Night

June 16, 2022, TD Garden. The horn sounded and Boston's building went quiet at 103-90. The Warriors closed it out on the road, 4-2, for the seventh championship in franchise history and their fourth in eight years. The moment it ended, Stephen Curry sat down on the floor, put his face in his hands and couldn't stop crying.

It started as Boston's game. The Celtics came out on a 14-2 run and the Garden got as loud as it gets. But the answer looked like a team that had seen every version of this before: after that 14-2 punch, Golden State outscored Boston by 27 over the rest of the first half and went in up 54-39.

They stretched it to 22 in the third. Boston didn't fold — Brown and Horford dragged it back to eight in the fourth — and then came the sequence everybody remembers. With 3:17 left, Curry hit a finger roll and then a three, the lead went back to 15, and that was the end of it.

Curry finished with 34 points, 7 rebounds and 7 assists, 6 of 11 from deep. Andrew Wiggins had 18, 6, 5, plus four steals and three blocks. Draymond Green went 12-12-8. Jordan Poole added 15. On the other side Jaylen Brown scored 34, Al Horford had 19 and 14, and Jayson Tatum finished with 13 points and five turnovers.

Read the trophy against the backdrop. It moved Golden State past the Bulls' six and into third place alone on the all-time championship list. It also stopped Boston from taking an 18th, which would have broken the tie with the Lakers and put the Celtics alone on top. Both franchises had their history rewritten in one night.

For Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green and Andre Iguodala, this was ring number four. The first three came in 2015, 2017 and 2018, back when this group made five straight Finals and winning felt like a schedule. This one came a completely different way. "They're all unique, they're all special," Steve Kerr said. "This one might have been the most unlikely."

Kerr knows what he's talking about. This was his ninth championship overall, counting the five he won as a player, and he'd spent the previous two seasons watching the whole thing get written off. The confetti hadn't finished falling before the narrative flipped from "the dynasty is dead" to "the dynasty found one more."

There was a stretch in that first half nobody in Boston will forget. Down 14-2 early, Golden State ran off 21 straight points — a 21-0 run on the road, in a closeout game, in the Finals. By the time it ended the Garden had gone from deafening to stunned, and the Celtics spent the rest of the night chasing a game that had already been taken away from them.

II The Finals MVP

The 2022 Finals MVP was Stephen Curry, and it was unanimous. It was the first Bill Russell Trophy of his career — the one hole in a resume that already had four Finals appearances, three rings and two MVPs. In 2015 it went to Andre Iguodala. In 2017 and 2018 it went to Kevin Durant. For years that was the knock: great, but never the best player in the series that mattered.

Over six games he averaged 31.2 points, 6.0 rebounds and 5.0 assists. Game by game: 34, 29, 31, 43 — the 43 in Game 4 might be the best game he's ever played — and then 34 again to close it. In Game 1 he scored 21 in the first quarter and hit six threes, the most by anyone in a single quarter in Finals history.

The one bad night was Game 5: 0 of 9 from three, 7 of 22 overall. The Warriors won anyway, 104-94. That's the part that tells you what this team had become. In the early dynasty years, a Curry night like that meant a loss. By 2022 it didn't.

With the award, Curry joined the shortest list in the sport: four titles, two MVPs, a Finals MVP. Kareem, Duncan, LeBron, Magic, Jordan. He's also the only player in history with more than 3,000 career threes, a record he took off Ray Allen's 2,973 back in December 2021.

The 2021-22 season was a sweep of everything else too. He broke the all-time three-point record. He won All-Star Game MVP in Cleveland with 50 points. He made All-NBA Second Team. And he became the first winner of the Western Conference finals MVP — the Magic Johnson Trophy, handed out for the first time that year — taking all nine votes while averaging 23.8 points, 6.6 rebounds and 7.4 assists against Dallas.

At the podium he could barely talk. Voice gone, eyes red. "We found a way to just get it done," he said. "It's part of a championship pedigree, our experience. We built this for 10-11 years." Then he looked down at the trophy and gave everybody the line that got replayed all summer: "Finally got that bad boy."

That's the thing about the award, though. He'd already won two MVPs, and the voters had spent three championship runs finding someone else. Watching him cry on the floor told you what it actually meant to him — more than he'd ever let on while everybody was asking about it.

He was 34 by then, in his sixth Finals in eight seasons, and the conversation had followed him through every one of them. Too small to be the best player on a champion. Too dependent on the stars around him. The award didn't settle all of it, but it ended the loudest version — and it came in the series where nobody could argue about who the best player on the floor had been.

III The Long Way Back

You have to go back to June 2019 to get the weight of this one. Game 5 of the Finals, Durant tears his Achilles. Game 6, Klay Thompson tears his ACL, and Toronto finishes the job on Golden State's floor. That summer Durant left for Brooklyn as a free agent, and while rehabbing the knee, Klay tore his Achilles and missed the entire following season.

What came next was the darkest stretch this franchise has had in decades. They went 15-50 in 2019-20, dead last in the league. The next year was better and still ended in the play-in tournament for the second straight spring. Klay missed two full seasons. Curry played a combined 68 games across both years and broke his hand in the middle of it.

Everyone wrote the obituary. The dynasty is over. Curry will never win again. Break it up and start over. That ran from the summer of 2019 all the way into the fall of 2021, and inside the building the answer never changed: give these guys one more shot.

Klay came back on January 9, 2022, 941 days after his last NBA game. He didn't come back as a mascot. He spent the season rediscovering the version of himself that can get a shot off from anywhere on the floor, and he delivered in big playoff nights when the offense bogged down.

The season itself announced the return early: 18 wins in the first 20 games. They finished 53-29, third in the West. A team that was the worst in basketball two years earlier was a title favorite again. That gap — from the bottom to the top in two years — is harder than any repeat.

And there was a specific kind of doubt hanging over it. This wasn't a young team on the way up. It was a team whose best players were 32, 32 and 34, coming off catastrophic injuries, being told they were finished. Every game of that regular season was an argument against the people who had already moved on.

And the doubt had specifics. This was the oldest roster in the league. Klay had missed two full years with two of the worst injuries in basketball. Curry was in his mid-thirties. Every other contender in the West had gotten younger and more athletic while Golden State stood still. The reasonable read was that the window had shut in 2019 and nobody had bothered to tell them.

IV The Road

First round: Denver, and Nikola Jokić, the reigning MVP. Curry had hurt his foot late in the regular season and came off the bench in four of the five games — a thing almost no superstar of his stature would quietly accept. He accepted it. Denver went out in five.

Second round: Memphis, the No. 2 seed, and Ja Morant, that year's Most Improved Player. It was the ugliest series of the run, full of bodies on the floor and wild swings, and the Warriors took it in six. Poole and Curry carried the guard minutes, and Golden State's defense did the rest.

Conference finals: Dallas, in five, capped by a 120-110 closeout in which Curry collected the first Magic Johnson Trophy ever handed out. It put Golden State in the Finals for the sixth time in eight seasons and the first in three years.

They finished 16-6 in the playoffs, which isn't the record of a juggernaut. Phoenix won 64 games that year, Memphis 56. But nobody in the bracket knew how to win a series the way this group did, and by May that counted for more than seedings.

That's the underrated asset: they knew how. Five straight Finals leaves behind muscle memory, not trophies. Down eight, nobody panicked. Up twenty, nobody relaxed. When a run came, they knew which possession to defend first. Young teams have to learn that in the moment. This one had learned it years earlier and never forgot.

Phoenix, the best team in the league that regular season, got knocked out in the second round. Memphis, the two seed, lost to Golden State. The top of the West was loaded, and the team that walked out of it was the one everybody had spent two years calling finished.

Each round asked a different question. Denver asked whether Curry could find a rhythm coming off the bench. Memphis asked whether Golden State could handle the most athletic young team in the conference. Dallas asked whether the defense could hold up against an offense built entirely around one genius with the ball. They answered all three, and by the time Boston arrived there was no question left that the Warriors hadn't already been asked.

V The Roster Puzzle

What made this title different from the first three was the names around the stars. Andrew Wiggins arrived from Minnesota in 2020 carrying a label he hadn't earned: lottery pick, never put it together. By 2022 he was an All-Star starter, and in the Finals he was the man assigned to Tatum. In Game 6: 18 points, 6 rebounds, 5 assists, four steals, three blocks.

Jordan Poole was the other thread. A late-first-round pick in 2019, thrown into the starting lineup during the lost years, booed at times, doubted constantly — and then in 2022 he was the sharpest scorer off the bench. Fifteen in the clincher. His shooting burst in Game 2 is the reason that series turned when it did.

Kevon Looney did the work that never shows up: screening, boxing out, chasing his own misses. Gary Payton II brought perimeter pressure. Otto Porter Jr. brought size and shooting. Nemanja Bjelica brought passing from the high post. Andre Iguodala, half retired, was still the guy who made the right play in a big possession and settled everybody in the huddle.

Draymond Green held it all together. Twelve points, 12 rebounds and 8 assists in Game 6 looks like a normal line until you watch the film: every switch called, every blitz timed, every teammate pointed to the right spot. One man conducting an entire defense is almost extinct in today's NBA, and it's why Golden State's defense held up when the offense didn't.

Then there were the kids who barely played — Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody, James Wiseman. They were the other half of the "two timelines" plan: compete now, stockpile young talent at the same time. It got mocked all year. In June it turned out not to have cost them anything.

Every one of those pieces shared a profile. A former No. 1 pick written off, a young guard nobody believed in, a role player on a minimum deal, a veteran past his prime. Golden State didn't outspend the field on stars in 2022. It found players who needed the right situation and gave them one with structure.

Kerr called it strength in numbers, and in 2022 the phrase finally meant something again. Golden State got real playoff minutes from eleven or twelve different players. Only one of them averaged 20 points across the postseason. What they had instead was a bench that never blew a lead and a rotation Kerr could reshape series by series, depending on who was hurt and who had the hot hand.

VI The Gamble

The bet had a name: don't break it up. Through two broken seasons, the Warriors held three enormous contracts — Curry, Thompson, Green — and the consensus was to trade at least one while the value was still there. Bob Myers' answer was blunt. The organization owed these three another shot, and they should get to walk away on their own terms.

Joe Lacob's version was simpler: pay. Golden State's luxury tax bills in those years were among the most eye-watering in the league, and what it bought was a roster everybody called too old, too expensive and too capped out. Nobody said any of that in June.

Steve Kerr stuck with an unfashionable idea. He didn't abandon the motion offense to chase pace, and he didn't hand the entire offense to Curry while Klay was out. When Klay returned, Kerr spent half a season re-fitting the rotation around him. Under the pressure of regular-season standings, that kind of patience is expensive.

The Wiggins trade looks like theft now. In 2020 Golden State moved D'Angelo Russell for a former No. 1 pick and a protected first, and everybody read it as a salary dump. Two years later that same forward was guarding the other team's best player in the Finals and hitting shots that mattered.

So this title is a strange answer sheet. No teardown, no tanking, no blockbuster. Just a core everyone thought had expired, a handful of undervalued role players, and the patience to wait for the injured guys to come back. It shouldn't work as often as it sounds like it should.

Myers said it best after the trophy: they kept the big three together because they wanted to go out on their own terms. That's not a strategy you'll find in any analytics model. It's a bet on people, and in 2022 it paid.

There was a cost attached to all of it. Golden State carried the biggest payroll and tax bill in the league that season, and it paid that bill for a team that had missed the playoffs in each of the two previous years. Owners don't write checks that size on sentiment. Lacob did, and he was standing on the floor afterward calling this one the most meaningful of the four.

VII The Tuition

Boston's season deserves its own chapter. They were 16-19 after 41 games and sitting tenth in the East. Then they won 35 of their last 47, finished 51-31, and took the second seed — all in Ime Udoka's first year as head coach, hired after Brad Stevens moved up to run the front office.

Their playoff path was the hardest in the league. A sweep of Brooklyn and its two superstars. A seven-game win over Milwaukee after trailing 3-2. Another seven-game win over the top-seeded Heat after trailing 2-1. Boston reached the Finals for the first time since 2010.

Game 1 was a hammer. The Celtics won the fourth quarter 40-16, the most lopsided quarter in Finals history. Al Horford, in his Finals debut after 141 playoff games without ever getting there, scored 26 and went 4 for 4 from three. Tatum shot 3 for 17 for 12 points — and handed out 13 assists, the most ever by a player in his Finals debut.

Tatum's shot never came back. Golden State switched and blitzed him all series, and he never found a comfortable place to operate: 13 points and five turnovers in the closeout. Brown was better — 27 in Game 3, 34 in Game 6 — but nobody was carrying a team past this version of the Warriors by himself.

Losing three straight after leading 2-1 is a hard ending to sit with, and Boston sat with it. Still: a team that was tenth in its conference in January, with a rookie head coach and a 24-year-old best player, got within two wins of Banner 18. That's not a failure. That's an invoice, and it comes due the following spring.

Horford's night in Game 1 is worth keeping. A 35-year-old who had played 141 playoff games without reaching a Finals finally got there and looked like he belonged. Whatever else came out of that series, that image held.

They got here with defense, too. Boston finished the regular season with the best defensive rating in the league, and Marcus Smart won Defensive Player of the Year — the first guard to take the award in more than two decades. That's the group that put Golden State in a 2-1 hole. It's also the group that couldn't score enough in June for any of it to matter.

VIII The City and the Map

For the Bay Area this one tasted different from the other three. 2015 was a surprise, 2017 and 2018 were domination, and 2022 was getting something back — a team that had been called old, finished and ready for the wrecking ball, standing on top again after everyone had written the last word.

It also moved the franchise on the all-time board. Seven titles, past Chicago's six, third alone behind Boston and the Lakers. Six Finals in eight years, four championships in eight years — a density that the modern cap and tax system is supposed to make impossible.

More than the counting, it changed the argument about how to win. Golden State showed a road that was neither superteam nor full teardown: keep the core you drafted, add role players with precision, wait for health. It sounds boring, and it's the thing fewer franchises are willing to do than anything else.

Curry's own story closed that night. Too small, too fragile, too often the second-best guy on his own championship team. At 34, in his sixth Finals, he took the one award that had escaped him and cried on the floor of a hostile arena while doing it. It was the best image of the season.

Kerr called it the most unlikely of the four. He's right. A dynasty wins because it's strong enough. A team that climbs out of the bottom wins because it refused to give up on itself when giving up was the reasonable move. Those are not the same kind of hard.

Eight years, six Finals, four rings, and one that nobody saw coming. If this really was the last one for that core, they picked a strange and perfect way to go out: on the road, in Boston, with Curry holding the trophy he'd been told he'd never get.

Six Finals in eight seasons is the number that will age best. Injuries ate two entire years out of the middle of it, and they still came back and won the last one. Other dynasties moved cities or swapped cores or took long gaps between titles. What this group did — the same three players at the center of it for a decade — doesn't line up with much of anything else in the league's history.

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Video Recap

Official Finals MVP highlights: