Kevin Durant on His Fit with the Warriors
Durant outlines what made the Golden State Warriors so good.
When the Golden State Warriors won back-to-back NBA Championships in 2017 and 2018, they were criticized for having a superteam.
“Oh, of course the Warriors won -they have four legends on their team!” some insinuated.
Or, “How could they not win? How could any team stop Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, and Klay Thompson?”
And don’t get me wrong, that team was definitely a superteam.
But if you look throughout NBA history, just because a roster has a lot of superstars, it doesn’t mean the team will automatically win a title.
Some examples:
The 1985-86 Los Angeles Lakers
The 1996-97 Houston Rockets
The 2003-04 Los Angeles Lakers.
The 2010-11 Miami Heat (and also the 2013-14 Heat).
The 2023-24 Phoenix Suns.
The reason is that the players and the system also have to complement each other; they all have to harmonize.
You can’t just throw a bunch of good players together into a random system with a random playbook and expect it to work out.
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Now, back to the article…
The Golden State Warriors complemented one another, and this is why Kevin Durant believes they were able to win two titles in a row and make it to the Finals three times in a row.
On the Out the Mud podcast, Durant told Tony Allen and Zach Randolph that everything was just cohesive in Golden State and that’s how they were able to be dominant.
“…Having the opportunity to play with some of the best players that knew how to play that matched my skill set. So, everything in line, I feel like you seen that in the results that we had when we stepped on the court,” Durant said. “The Warriors, we didn’t play ball as like, we were just flat out bigger, better, bigger, stronger, faster than you. We played together. We actually played real team basketball for us to win. We made shots, you know what I’m saying? We could shoot the ball efficiently, so it worked out perfectly. And I think it was the perfect move for me to expand my game and widen my lens about what this thing is about.”
In the first season of this union (2016-17), the Warriors led the NBA with 67 wins. They also practically swept the playoffs (only lost 1 game in the postseason).
The following season, they did slightly worse. They were second in the West with 58 wins and took 7 games to defeat the Houston Rockets in the Western Conference Finals.
However, they swept LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals, so they were still pretty dominant.
And then injuries happened in the following NBA Finals (2019), which led to them losing.
Thus, superteams need structure and chemistry to win.
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