Like everyone else in the universe with a basketball jones, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the Stephen Curry shooting-star exhibition this season. Despite this space-aged phenomenon we’ve all been blessed with (step-back 27-footer with a hand in the face anyone?) and recently had taken away from us for a bit, I am sincerely looking forward to watching Wardell S. Curry’s team play without him until he comes back (knock on polished hardwood).
This feels like something with precedent. How often over the years have we witnessed a stellar team forced by injury to go into battle without their biggest gun? With all due respect to the unbiased homer, Bill Simmons, and his Ewing Theory of a high-quality team congealing magically for a playoff push as soon as their heavy artillery gets shelved, more often than not they just look like a shell of themselves and simply fade away, bowing-out valiantly but gracelessly without ever really putting up too much of a fight. Occasionally though, there are enough champions and high caliber players left on the squad to make it interesting.
This takes me back to the summer after my freshman (and most pimple-filled) year of high school, and to the Chicago Bulls the season after Michael Jordan retired (the first time). That 1993-1994 NBA season marked the last time, to my mind, in which a collection of legitimate champions were forced into war without their wunderkind. Those Bulls were coming off of three straight champagne summers, and despite the fact that the best basketball player to ever lace up his own overpriced-sneakers had walked away to play minor-league baseball before the season tipped-off, they still had the heart, the desire, the intelligence, and all of the intangibles necessary (besides the league’s leading scorer) to put up one hell of a fight in defending their championship crown.
Those Bulls came up short. Yet were it not for an all-time iffy call by professional referee Hugh Collins at the end of game five, when he deemed that MVP candidate Scottie Pippen’s right had ever so slightly grazed some outer-shell electrons belonging to the atomic structure of the shooting hand of the Knick named Hubert Davis, then they would have found themselves in the Eastern Conference Finals without M.J. Bad call!!! Bad call… possibly the result of bad karma accrued by that same Scottie Pippen when, two games earlier in the series, with the Bulls down two games to none, a petulant Pippen sat himself down on the bench with 1.8 seconds left on the game clock because the obtuse triangle know as Phil Jackson drew up the last play to end in a made shot for Toni Kukoc. With that last bit of selfishness aside, I feel that this week’s Warriors, and probably for the next couple of weeks going forward, can find in those Bulls an excellent template for how a championship team can spin their setback into a big win without the services of an employee who happens to lay claim to being the best basketball player alive.
Those battling Bulls still came to the table with three all-stars to their credit in Pippen, Horace Grant, and even B.J. Armstrong, who was selected by the fans to start that year’s mid-season exhibition game. The current Warriors, as in immediate and right now, with Steph on the bench cheering on his mates while casually rocking the cool t-shirt underneath the blazer look, are still able to put on the floor two all-stars and soon to be All-NBA team members in Dray Green and Klay “Big Smoky” Thompson, plus the MVP of last year’s Finals in Dre Iguodala. The play killer defense, possess a deeply reliable bench, and still have the confidence and expectation of winning every time the step out onto the court.
Whichever team survives this first-round train-wreck between Portland and Los Angeles (probably Portland, I mean… come on) is going to find out, along with all of us Joneses, just how good the rest of this championship Golden State team really is. That series won’t be like the Knicks-Bulls ’94 second-round series, in which those Bulls came in as the underdog, lower-seeded team. The wounded Warriors are certainly the favorites versus either of those teams, and Curry could quite possibly play later in that series. However, if his MRI and two-week reassessment come back negative and he has to miss more time in the Western Conference Finals against either the Spurs or Thunder, then certainly many of us will be viewing this team with the highest number of wins ever during an NBA regular season as full-fledged underdogs. But just how many of us would actually be ready to count them out without Stephen pronounced with an “F”? I’m not ready to do that. On the contrary, despite the misfortune of being banned from watching Ayesha’s husband launch a double-digit number of three-point bombs each game and Riley’s father’s dance-a-jig celebrations when so many those shots go in, I will still be very excited to see how his team does without him. After all, they already played half of this season without one leader and all-time great three-point shooter in Coach Kerr, and we know how that turned out.
Granted, their coach is no longer a player, nor when he did play was he ever as close to the player Curry is (except for once during a game of NBA Live ’96 when he, controlled by my best friend’s fingers and thumbs, went off for 80 points in an epic pixilated performance). But if these Warriors can pull it together once more in the absence of one of their leaders, this time the league MVP, then watch out Spurs or Thunder (probably Spurs), and watch out Bulls (of 1994), because these wounded Warriors could be looking to best you again. Either way, I feel we are set up to see a championship caliber team make a championship level push without their number one option to lead the way. Steph Curry is great at basketball, but let us not forget that everyone else involved in the Bay Area blitzkrieg of 2015-16 is still very, very good. I’m excited to see them step up to the task, but if Steph comes back in time for the big series and the Warriors’ status reverts from underdogs back to the OverGods which they have shown themselves to be these past two seasons, well then I am excited for that, too.