It’s something practically no one expected, but Stephen Curry has spent much of this postseason trying to explain how the first unanimous MVP in NBA history can look so pedestrian at times and how a team that won more games than anyone else has been blown out of not one, and not two, but three playoff games.
His conclusion? “The playoffs are hard,” he said off the Warriors’ 30-point hammering in Game 3 of the Finals. “It’s a tough grind to win a championship.”
For some 70-win teams, that appears to be true.
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There are only two in history. The first won its title without much issue. The second, Curry’s 73-win Warriors, stands at the brink of its own championship, entering Monday’s NBA Finals Game 5 in Oakland. Only, it came the hard way. Take Golden State’s last three losses, two against the Thunder and one against the Cavaliers, where they were run off the court by 28, 34 and 30 points. They even trailed in one of those blowouts, to the Thunder, by a staggering 41 points.
None of that matters right now, as the Warriors prepare to celebrate a second consecutive title, but they’ve spent the entire season looking toward legacy, toward history. There’s only one other team we can measure Golden State against, and we now have enough of a sample size to state the obvious:
They just don’t stack up to Michael Jordan’s 1996 Bulls.
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Yes, when it came to the regular-season, the Warriors made history by eclipsing the Bulls’ all-time win mark. But it’s been an entirely different story since mid-April.
Unlike the Warriors, the Bulls carried over their sheer dominance to the postseason, losing only three times, with one coming in overtime on the road. Their three losses, all outside Chicago, were by a total of 35 points. With their three blowout losses staining their case for historical greatness, the Warriors already have doubled the Bulls’ loss total, with six playoff defeats.
Jeff Van Gundy’s Knicks were the first team to beat the Bulls in the postseason and also were one of the 10 teams to defeat Chicago in the regular season, sending the Bulls to their most lopsided defeat (32 points) of the entire year. Van Gundy looked back at that 4-1 second-round playoff series for Sporting News and came up with one word to sum up the Bulls, using the appropriate punctuation mark: “Dominance!”
“I remember how hard it was to score on them when they were locked in,” he added. “They had tremendous length, with exceptional quickness and intelligence.”
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That lethal combination was also witnessed by the Magic in the Eastern Conference finals, when they were swept by the Bulls. That Orlando team had gone to the Finals the June before and boasted two of the games high-scoring superstars in Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway — and beaten the Bulls, shortly after Jordan’s return from baseball. In 1995-96, Hardaway was named to the All-NBA first team and O’Neal garnered third-team honors in what turned out to be his final season in Orlando.
But they also couldn’t solve the Bulls’ suffocating defense, being held to 67 points at home in a 19-point hammering in Game 3. At the time, it was the second-lowest scoring total in playoff history. Now, compare that kind of defense to the Warriors, who allowed the Thunder to score 72 points in two straight opening halves of their Game 3 and 4 blowout losses.
It’s apparent that the Warriors are perfecting the art of the tough grind, while the team they were compared to all season was the very model of playoff dominance.
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Lately, Steve Kerr has been scratching his head to explain his Warriors’ failure to compete in three games over a seven-game period. As he admitted after Game 3 of the Finals — the Warriors lost all four of their Game 3s during the postseason — they were “not ready to play” and “extremely soft.” Overall, they’ve bared little resemblance to the same team that broke a record many thought to be as unbreakable as Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game.
But 20 years ago, as a reserve guard for the Bulls, Kerr had little trouble explaining why his team rampaged through a playoff field that included two Eastern Conference powers that had been to the Finals in the previous two Junes. After the Bulls exacted revenge against Orlando, a year after the Magic had sent Jordan home from the playoffs a loser, Kerr pointed to No. 23.
“I think it not only says something about Michael as a player, but also as a person," Kerr said. "He started this quest 12 months ago, working out over the summer with this one singular goal in mind: Getting back to the Finals and doing what he could to make his team better than the Magic's. Mission accomplished."
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That was how it always was with Jordan. When he put his mind to something, no one was stopping him, not in a million years.
As much as the Warriors set out this season to prove their critics wrong about being lucky to win the championship last year, the 1995-96 Bulls were on a Jordan-fueled mission to re-establish themselves as the NBA’s top team.
The ’96 Bulls went on to polish off the SuperSonics in the NBA Finals, charging out to a 3-0 lead before taking their feet off the throats of Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp’s fun and talented team. Out in Seattle for the middle three games, they eased off their overmatched opponents, losing Game 4 by 21 and Game 5 by 11. The word circulating back then was that they were merely biding their time, looking to celebrate the fourth title of the Jordan Era back home in Chicago. Which they did in Game 6.
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They finished the season with an 87-13 record, making their case for Best Team Ever and starting their second three-peat. The Warriors already have 88 wins, thanks to the extended first round, but they also have 15 losses.
In the intervening years, the game has changed and the rules have changed, so it’s almost like a different sport now than it was 20 years ago. The 3-point shot, more of a gimmick and a change of pace in 1995-96, is now emphasized more than a mid-range jumper.
So it’s almost impossible to compare what the Warriors have been doing since late October to how the Bulls went about their business when the game was more physical. The Bulls were built for their league’s style of play and their rulebook, while the Warriors have developed a roster around the fastest pace in a faster-paced league and two amazing shooters.
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But if you’re going just by the one set of numbers that always trump the fancy analytics that are put forth today and touted as the gospel, then you know this: When it comes to overall dominance, the Bulls are the superior team. The Warriors will go down as the winningest team in NBA history, a record likely to hold for a few years, at least. They will go down as one of the all-time great teams, without a doubt.
They won’t go down as the greatest.
But it’s like Curry said. Winning in the playoffs is hard and it’s a tough grind. At least it is today for 70-win teams.
