San Antonio Spurs' Offseason Gives Golden State Warriors New Fuel for Title
It's hard to be better than historically great, but the Golden State Warriors will draw motivation from a familiar source as they look to follow up one championship season with another.
According to Basketball-Reference.com, the 2014-15 Warriors posted the seventh-highest simple rating score in league history. That's a stat that takes into account margin of victory and strength of schedule, but all we need to know is that no team since Michael Jordan's title-winning Chicago Bulls has been more dominant.
ESPN.com's Baxter Holmes kept it simple:
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The San Antonio Spurs know a few things about dominance, too, having been the NBA's most consistently successful franchise for the past two decades. And they made an uncharacteristically splashy offseason move to assure they'd stay great for a while longer.
Extending a Dynasty
"Normally dormant and enjoying the frenzied madness from afar over a glass of wine, the Spurs stepped into the middle of it this summer," ESPN.com's Royce Young wrote. "They kept Danny Green with a sensible deal and then landed LaMarcus Aldridge, propping open their title window with a steel beam."
It's true. The Spurs, ridiculously good for years and still excellent last season, added a 29-year-old star in his prime. They've never done that before.
The Spurs draft and develop; that's how they built a core of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Kawhi Leonard. That's how they rehabilitated Boris Diaw and Danny Green. Now, they've reached outside their insular system and hauled in help.
A team that had long been terrifying is now even scarier.
Remember, the Spurs were in the thick of title contention last year. It took a superhuman first-round effort for the Los Angeles Clippers to defeat them in seven games. If a couple of bounces go the other way in that series, the Spurs might well have added a sixth title to their dynasty.
Health will be an issue for the aging Spurs, and it will be difficult for them to coast through the year after seeing how brutal the consequences of suboptimal playoff seeding (No. 6) could be last postseason. But San Antonio is simply better now, and it was already a contender to begin with.
As a result, the Spurs (along with the Cleveland Cavaliers) have better title odds than the Warriors in 2016, according to OddsShark.com.
And Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight.com crunched the numbers to reveal that, based on real plus-minus and projected playing time, the Spurs profile as the Dubs' statistical equals at the very least: "The Spurs were already among the class of the league before strengthening their roster this summer. While San Antonio may not shatter any records, its surgical dissection of the free-agent market has left it with arguably the best team in basketball."
Arguably.
Expect the Warriors to argue plenty.
Post-Championship Chips
Draymond Green is Golden State's mouthpiece. And he's always honest.
So his response to questions from the San Jose Mercury News' Tim Kawakami about San Antonio's reload carries a lot of weight:
"That's one of the teams in this league that I have the utmost respect for...I think they do a phenomenal job. So I can't mumble a bad word about those guys...I can almost guarantee you they're not stacking up for us. They're stacking up to win a championship. And that's fine. They deserve it. But we're not going out without a fight, I can tell you that much.
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The "nobody believed in us" cliche is a tired trope, but virtually every champion in every sport trots it out at some point in the celebratory haze.
Green, a second-round pick fueled by doubt, signed an $82 million contract over the summer and is now a champion. Even he would have struggled to convince himself he lacked believers going into next season.
But the Spurs' additions (don't forget David West, by the way) and a subtle pivot in motivation have Green ready to prove himself all over again.
He told B/R's Ric Bucher: "We've got to come out with that same chip on our shoulder that we had last year...and it has to be even bigger, knowing that everybody's gunning for us now."
The perceived disrespect that helps those chips grow won't be hard to find—not with the Spurs getting so much press, the Cavaliers questioning the legitimacy of the Warriors' title and the oddsmakers knocking the Dubs down a peg.
Fighting a Reflection
The irony in all this is that the Dubs are, in many ways, built in the Spurs' image.
The culture, the emphasis on character, the team-first approach, the willingness to sacrifice for the greater good (See: David Lee staying engaged after losing his job, and Andrew Bogut saying nothing after being benched in the Finals)—all that stuff comes from the Spurs.
Steve Kerr played for and studied under Gregg Popovich. In just one year as head coach, Kerr implemented offensive principles and philosophical tenets learned in San Antonio. And it'll be a good indication that those tenets have stuck if the Warriors keep mentions of disrespect and added motivation to a minimum.
The Spurs don't mention those things outwardly—even if they internally feed on them like everybody else.
They just keep pounding the rock in silence.
The Warriors were leaps and bounds better than everyone last year, and it'll be tough to duplicate the good injury luck they had, as well as the charmed, lightning-in-a-bottle vibe that pervaded the season. But there's reason to expect organic growth from a young core. Kerr will have time to implement the offensive intricacies (from the Spurs, of course) that he scrapped early last year, and now there's a little added fuel.
"It'll be a challenge," Green told Kawakami. "But I'm all for a challenge, so it'll be fun."
Maybe the Warriors didn't need an extra push, but they have one now.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @gt_hughes.
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