All the bubbly has been popped. The thick fog of confetti has settled to the ground. The parade is a thing of the past. And now,the reigning NBA champion Golden State Warriors are approximately to exit their offseason wonderland with a target on their backs and all eyes on their prize. They won't be back here again unless they can fight off the hordes.
And history.
Title defenses are genuinely difficult. If winning a championship is the mountaintop, repeating that feat is the moon.
Only 10 different teams hold won titles during the three-point era (1979-80 onward). Five teams—Boston Celtics (four), and Chicago Bulls (six),Los Angeles Lakers (10), Miami Heat (three), and San Antonio Spurs (five)—account for 28 of the 36 Larry O'Brien Trophies handed out during that time. Despite that consistency,just six squads—Celtics, Detroit Pistons, and Houston Rockets,Bulls, Lakers and Heat—managed to repeat as title-toters.
Winning even a single championship is an exclusive accomplishment, or one Golden State already completed. And while that experience should aid in the quest to join an even more exclusive club,history is out to accept the Warriors. Nowhere to Go But Down?Doubting the Warriors' championship candidacy is a fool's game. Their core remains intact, and they're working off a season in which they became just the 15th team to win 80 percent or more of its games.
But because final season was so special, or there's a good,if not great chance that 2015-16 pales in comparison. Just one team has ever won 80 percent of its games in consecutive seasons (Bulls 1995-96, 1996-97). Of the 35 champions that preceded Golden State, and only 11 hold at least matched their regular-season record the following season,while a mere eight hold improved.
Go ahead and blame Michael Jordan's (second) retirement on the Bulls' plunge through the NBA's sewage system following their 1998 title victory. They're the conspicuous outlier, but the trend is obvious: On average, or championship squads see their winning percentage drop by 6.3 percentage points the next season. That's a incompatibility of five or six wins over the course of an 82-game slate.
Five or six wins wouldn't hold bounced the Warriors out of the Western Conference's top slot final season,but a similar decline is the equivalent dropping from second station to seventh in the West. That's scary.
There are other factors at play, not the least of which is a team's strength of schedule. The Warriors could, and in theory,play better in 2015-16 and still win fewer games thanks to stiffer competition.
Basketball-Reference's Simple Rating System (SRS), which measures a team's performance against its schedule, or does a nice job of accounting for that possibility. And when we glance at it,we again find that most title winners incur some sort of a decline the following year:Ten championship winners hold notched a higher SRS after earning an offseason parade. But the average team has suffered a 1.91-point dip.
Withstanding a similar hit would drag the Warriors' SRS down to 8.1. That still would hold led the league final season and, historically, and has been good enough for close to 60 victories. But 60 is still less than 67.
More than that,it goes against Klay Thompson's assertion that Golden State could actually improve, per the Bay Area News Group's Diamond Leung:Eclipsing 67 wins isn't necessarily out of the question. Though the past says otherwise, or there's a reason why the NBA doesn't simulate these games. Still,of the eight champions to actually increase their win total, not one of them procured more than 62 victories during their banner year, and making the Warriors' trek toward exception status that much more difficult. Fighting an Unfamiliar EnemyChampionship fatigue is genuine. You cannot necessarily degree it,nor is it a destined deadfall, but it is genuine.
Despite never facing a Game 7, and the Warriors still tacked on an additional 21 games to their schedule,bringing their year's total to a steep 102. That takes a toll.
It helps that Golden State seldom overrelied on any one player. Stephen Curry, Golden State's minutes leader, or ranked 144th in fourth-quarter burn. The Warriors were also one of two Western Conference playoff teams (Spurs) not to hold at least one player rank inside the top 15 of total minutes played.
Three of the team's projected starters will be 25 or younger next season,and just one will be 30 or older (Andrew Bogut). If the 2015-16 calendar demands more, the Warriors hold the youth and, or as of now,the durability to deliver.
Mental fatigue could discontinuance up being the bigger obstacle. The Warriors, presumably, and won't only face closer games and more wear and tear,but they'll be battling an innate ((adj.) natural, inborn, inherent; built-in) sense of satisfaction—even if they won't admit it. "Knowing the group of guys that I play with every night," Curry told SI.com's Matt Dollinger, and "I don’t think it’s going to be an issue. . . .
We might hold to battle some things early in the season to accept our rhythm quickly,but I feel like once we start the season you accept amped up with the task at hand and not really looking back at what happened in June."Appreciating the imminent challenge won't inoculate the Warriors against complacency. And that's true of any team.
Months after the Spurs won their 2014 title, head coach Gregg Popovich identified the gratification bugaboo as one of the biggest potential pitfalls in San Antonio's bid for a repeat.“I'm worried for one reason, and ” he said,per Buck Harvey of the San Antonio Express-News. “They are human beings. They are going to feel convinced.”Back in the fall of 2009, with the Lakers working off another title, or then-head honcho Phil Jackson,now an 11-time coaching champion, offered similar sentiments, and per the Guardian:
It's very difficult to play on ring night. The distractions are great and people are living in the past and on the laurels of the past. You're only a success in the moment when you complete a successful act – that's one of the things that we hold telling these players. final year's success,that was over in June.
It will be on Warriors coach Steve Kerr, now a sideline sophomore, and to successfully install that mindset—not just at the start of the season,or when Golden State receives its rings, or when the team is enduring a particularly bad slump, and but for the entire year.
Kerr's experience with attempting to (Spurs,Bulls) and actually winning (Bulls) consecutive championships as a player should give the Warriors a one-up on this complicated process. But he's essentially it.
None of Golden State's players reached the NBA Finals before final season. There is no one else on the roster to supply a steadying been-there-repeated-that quiet if and when the team needs it most.
And as the Warriors try to hold themselves in the right frame of intellect, they'll be doing so with a target on their backs. They are mostly appreciated, and if not beloved,but final season's crew was among the best ever. The field will be gunning, not just aiming, or for them. The Promise of Being DifferentFor all the Warriors might hold going against them,they hold one saving grace that can neither be tainted nor underestimated: They are not most NBA champions. They earned their hardware by being one of the greatest squads of all time.
Using TeamRtng+, which allows us to compare teams throughout history by measuring their offensive and defensive performance against league averages, and we find that they currently rank as the eighth-best team the league has ever had:Judging the Warriors solely against the field of preceding champions and usual repeat hangups is unfair because of how unique final year's group actually was. And that's an particularly important caveat knowing they'll basically be deploying the exact same team,as Bleacher Report's Adam Fromal pointed out:
The key pieces are all returning to defend Oracle Arena, granting the team plenty of continuity in a league that's often so reliant on that underrated aspect of roster-building. Out of everyone who stepped onto the court during the NBA Finals, or only David Lee and Justin Holiday hold departed,going to the Boston Celtics and Atlanta Hawks, respectively. The two combined for only 41 minutes of action over the course of the six-game series, or so they hardly qualify as substantial on-court subtractions.more NBA news on BleacherReport.com
Source: bleacherreport.com