2015 Golden State Warriors: The Dawn of Small Ball

Andre Iguodala · Golden State Warriors · the first zero-start Finals MVP in NBA history · bilingual deep analysis

Verified facts: G6 (Jun 16, 2015, Quicken Loans Arena) Warriors 105-97 Cavaliers, series 4-2; franchise's 4th title, first in 40 years (longest gap between titles in NBA history); Iguodala won Finals MVP with zero regular-season starts.

The Night

On June 16, 2015, inside Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena, J.R. Smith drilled a three with just over a minute left to pull the Cavaliers within 101-97. For a moment the home crowd could taste it, and the visiting bench seemed to stop breathing.

But Stephen Curry and Andre Iguodala stepped to the free-throw line and buried every attempt, sealing a 105-97 win and a 4-2 series victory, the fourth championship in franchise history.

The last time Golden State had won it all was 1975. Forty seasons separated the two banners, the longest gap between titles in NBA history. From Philadelphia to Oakland, from Rick Barry to Stephen Curry, a franchise had waited nearly two generations.

The title also made them the fifth franchise with at least four championships, joining the Spurs, Bulls, Lakers and Celtics, the only clubs that wear the word dynasty without apology.

Smith had 15 fourth-quarter points and briefly gave Cleveland real hope, but Curry's 25 points and eight assists and Iguodala's 25 answered every surge with a calm that felt almost cruel.

Draymond Green finished with a triple-double, 16 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists, the first of his career and the most important. Across the floor LeBron James posted 32, 18 and 9, carrying a roster that kept thinning.

When the horn sounded, the broadcast cut to Oakland, where fireworks and car horns had already started without waiting for permission. A city that had waited 40 years no longer had to explain why it believed.

For Cleveland the loss stretched a wait that had already run five decades. The city had not celebrated a major sports title since the 1964 Browns, and that clock would not stop for another year.

Golden State's crown rested on a plain truth: the best team beats the best player. James was heroic, but the Warriors were simply deeper, faster and harder to solve.

Inside the visiting locker room the relief was physical. Kerr, a five-time champion as a player, finally had a ring as a coach, and the men who had grown up watching him lifted him off the floor.

The MVP Coronation

When the Finals MVP was announced, the name was Andre Iguodala, a 31-year-old who had come off the bench in all 77 of his regular-season games and averaged just 7.8 points.

He became the first player in NBA history to win the award without a single regular-season start, and the first to do it while beginning the Finals as a reserve. Of 11 voters, seven chose him, four chose James, and Curry received none.

Across six games Iguodala averaged 16.3 points, 5.8 rebounds and 4.0 assists on efficient shooting. He scored a season-high 25 in the clincher, each basket a quiet reply to anyone who called him a side piece.

His real value showed on defense. After Kerr inserted him into the starting five in Game 4 to guard LeBron James, the results flipped overnight: James had averaged 41 through three games, then managed only 20 in Game 4 and none in the fourth.

The vote has been debated for years, with many insisting the losing James was the series' best player. But Iguodala did not take the award from Curry, who got zero votes; he took the one that a winner's logic said belonged to the swing piece.

The case was simple. Iguodala's presence changed how the whole machine moved. He was not the top scorer; he was the gear that let the rest of the machine turn.

By the starter's lens he was a patch; by the result's lens he was Kerr's most important piece. A piece who had sat on the bench all year was pushed to the center of the board in June.

Iguodala's road to the award was strange by any measure. He had started 758 games across his career before accepting a bench role, a demotion he took without complaint because the team kept winning.

The vote split showed a league still uneasy rewarding a defender over a scorer. Yet the eye test across Games 4 through 6 was clear: whenever James touched the ball, Iguodala was there.

Years later the argument has not fully faded, but the trophy sits in Oakland with his name on it. For a player often called a connector, the 2015 Finals were the night the league called him essential.

The Birth of Small Ball

The series reached 2-1 against Golden State, and the team looked like it might be dragged under. They lost Game 1 in overtime, escaped Game 2 in overtime, then dropped Game 3 at home 91-96 to fall behind.

That is when Steve Kerr made his daring move. For Game 4 he benched center Andrew Bogut, slid Iguodala into the starting unit and shifted Green to center, unleashing a tiny, fast lineup.

This was the embryo of the later famous Death Lineup. It used pace and spacing to blunt Cleveland's size and muscle. Kerr had told the media he would not change the starters, then admitted afterward he had lied.

In its first night the small group won 103-82 on the road by 21. Iguodala had 22, Curry 22, Green 17, and all three woke up at the right spots. Cleveland grabbed 16 offensive boards and still could not buy the scoreboard back.

Golden State then won three straight to take the crown. A patchwork lineup became the turning point of the series and the template for dominating the league over the next four years.

The lead was only three entering the fourth, but the small group's rotation and help defense left Cleveland unable to keep pace in the final eight minutes. Speed beat height in a Finals for the first time many could remember.

What made the group scary was not any one man but five who could all shoot, pass and switch. It was less a set play than a philosophy that left the opponent nowhere to hide.

The gamble worked because Cleveland had no answer for five shooters on the floor together. Mozgov, their best big, was pulled to the perimeter, where his worth shrank to almost nothing.

Kerr's choice to abandon size reflected a wider shift in how the game was played. Teams had gone small before, but rarely with this much conviction on the Finals stage.

What looked like panic was actually a bet on identity. The Warriors believed their style, not their height, was the future, and one June they proved it before the largest crowd.

The Road to the Finals

In the regular season the Warriors were the brightest light in the league. Under Kerr they went 67-15, a franchise record and the tenth 67-win season in NBA history, their first ever 60-win year.

They were 39-2 at home, the second-best home mark in league history, and ranked first in defensive efficiency and second in offensive efficiency, the only team that year in the top two at both ends.

In the playoffs they swept Anthony Davis and the Pelicans 4-0, the franchise's first postseason sweep since the 1975 Finals, then beat the Grizzlies 4-2 after falling behind 1-2.

In the Western Conference Finals they defeated Houston 4-1. That Rockets team had just come back from 3-1 down against the Clippers, yet still could not match Golden State's depth and ball movement.

Across the full season the Warriors won 83 games, third-most in NBA history for a single campaign. From October to June they left the league almost no doubt about who was best.

The trickiest coaching test came against Memphis, where Kerr deliberately left Tony Allen open in Game 4 and had Bogut protect the rim, forcing the Grizzlies' best wing defender to shoot the jumper he feared most.

When Golden State reached the Finals in June, 40 years had passed since their last appearance. Waiting at the door was a Cleveland team, newly built around three stars, that hungered for its own redemption.

The 67 wins hid how young this group was. Curry, Thompson, Green and Barnes were all homegrown, a core built through the draft rather than bought on the open market.

Kerr's system told the guards to push the pace and the forwards to space the floor, a formula that turned a good team into the league's most efficient machine.

By the time they reached Cleveland, the Warriors had answered every style thrown at them, from Memphis muscle to Houston's isolation-heavy attack, without losing their poise.

The Roster Pieces

Curry was the heartbeat. He won his first regular-season MVP, the first Warrior so honored since Wilt Chamberlain, and buried 286 threes to break his own record.

The Splash Brothers, Curry and Klay Thompson, combined for 525 made threes, another record. Thompson scored 37 in a single quarter and 52 overall in January, writing the word sniper into a one-quarter myth.

Draymond Green was the underrated axle. He grew from a forward into an all-purpose hub who could pass and protect the rim, and his Game 6 Finals triple-double made him the second-youngest to do it.

Around Iguodala, Shaun Livingston, Leandro Barbosa, David Lee and Harrison Barnes formed a rotation deep enough to feel like a luxury. Barnes hit key threes in the conference finals and the Finals to break several ties.

Bogut was the regular-season starting center and the defensive anchor, yet gladly gave way to the small group. That willingness to step aside for a win is the soft power most outsiders never counted.

The bench brought real experience too: Livingston's steadiness, Barbosa's chaos, Lee's playmaking gave Kerr a fresh piece every quarter. Depth was the true color of those 67 wins.

This was no accident of five talents but a precisely calculated puzzle. Everyone knew where to stand and knew that when the system turned, he was only one ring of it.

The Season's Wager

In the summer of 2014 the Warriors made a move that furrowed brows: they fired Mark Jackson, who had just taken the team to the playoffs, and hired the unproven Steve Kerr on a five-year, $25 million deal.

Kerr had won five titles as a player, learned the triangle in Chicago and team-first philosophy in San Antonio, then run the Suns and called games for TNT. He folded all of it into one system.

He became the first rookie head coach to win a title since Pat Riley in 1982, and the seventh ever to do it in his first season. At one point he reached 63 wins, the most by any first-year coach.

Curry completed his leap from elite shooter to league face. He became the sixth man to win his first MVP and first title in the same year and the first since Shaquille O'Neal in 2000, joining Cousy and Magic as point guards who did both.

The title carried private weight for him: his father Dell played 16 NBA seasons without a ring, and now the son won it for him. Curry said afterward his dad was living the moment through him and his teammates.

Kerr's back injury forced him out two days into training camp, Luke Walton ran the team to a 39-4 mark, and by the time Kerr returned the identity was set. The wager paid off in year one.

More than a single crown, this was the flipping of a switch. No one knew yet that over the next four years they would collect three more trophies.

The Opponent's Tuition

Cleveland's tragedy was written before the Finals began. Kevin Love dislocated his shoulder fighting for position against Kelly Olynyk in the first round and was done for the year; one of the Big Three was gone before the stage arrived.

With 2:22 left in overtime of Game 1, Kyrie Irving fractured his left kneecap and joined Love on the shelf. He stood up to finish one last possession, but his first Finals would also be his only healthy one.

So the whole series James stood alone, surrounded by patches like Matthew Dellavedova. In Game 1 he and Irving combined for 67, yet Golden State opened overtime on a 10-0 run and Cleveland scored just two points, losing 108-100.

James produced epic numbers: 35.8 points, 13.3 rebounds and 8.8 assists per game, the first player ever to lead both teams in all three major categories, and passed 5,000 career playoff points to reach sixth all time.

But he was too alone. No Cavalier other than James averaged more than 14 points. Dellavedova thrilled in Game 2, even landing in the hospital, yet faded fast, going 3 of 14 in Game 4.

The two games Cleveland won rested on James's will and the opponent's lapses: Game 2 came in overtime, Game 3 on his 40-point, 12-rebound, 8-assist line. When the small ball turned, one man could not fill every gap.

Afterward James said they had too much talent in suits, talent that never got to dress. The line became the most bitter footnote of 2015 and the seed of the 2016 revenge.

The City and the Legacy

On title night Oakland's streets lit up in blue and gold. This was not a Silicon Valley tech win but an old industrial city's 40-year-late party, claimed at last as its own.

The Warriors also became the first team since the 1991 Bulls to win it all with a roster that had zero Finals experience. They completed the oldest kind of coronation in the youngest possible way.

What mattered more was that they redrew the map. Before 2015, owning the paint was still the reigning creed; after the Death Lineup, spacing and pace became the new throne, and the whole league began copying small ball.

This was the start of a Warriors dynasty. In 2016, 2017 and 2018 they won three of four titles, writing 73 wins, a unanimous MVP and a 3-1 conference-finals comeback into history, and it all began on this June night.

For Iguodala it was a reward for the journey: his first 758 career games were all starts, yet this season he accepted the bench until the Finals pushed him back up, and an MVP proved that a role never equals a value.

For Curry it was a late but certain coronation. With threes he told the league the future was not in the paint but beyond that arc. Forty years of waiting bought a new era.

Oakland may one day lose this team, but in the summer of 2015 the whole city believed its age had only just begun to open.

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