It was a debate all of the 2015-16 NBA season—are the Warriors going for the regular-season wins record? Should they be?
They hit the mark, winning 73 games. They finished 73-9, eclipsing the previous historic standard set by the 1996 Chicago Bulls (72-10).
By all accounts, it was an incredible accomplishment. Winning 89 percent of your games in the NBA, with all the road-trips and back-to-backs and parity (even the bad teams typically have an All-Star), is quite a feat.
But we know what happened next: the Warriors limped through the Western Conference Playoffs, narrowly escaping the Oklahoma City Thunder, before blowing a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals. They crumbled beneath the weight of King James, who chased down their historic season and pinned it to the backboard.
The Warriors weren’t themselves in that series. Stephen Curry was hurt and mentally exhausted. Draymond Green lost his self-control. Key role players like Harrison Barnes and Festus Ezeli couldn’t provide the support they did during the regular season.
This year, the Warriors haven’t chased any records. They went 67-15 (which still tied for the seventh-best mark in NBA history), and probably could’ve challenged last year’s record if they really went for it. But they valued the title more highly this year.
Speaking to the media Wednesday ahead of that night’s NBA Finals Game 3, Green said going for the record last year was a “mistake.”
He was asked whether the team had “circled” a 16-0 playoff record, which they are two wins away from achieving.
“No, we made that mistake of circling 73 and worrying about the wrong thing before. It don’t matter,” Green said.
Stephen Curry seemed conflicted about their pursuit of 73.
“I don’t know,” Curry said Wednesday. “In the moment you obviously want to—that was a decision that we had talked about and we had discussed as a group and answered questions from the media pretty much from January on about that being a possibility, so I don’t know if there may be have been a little bit of a mental fatigue when it comes to just how much it took to get that 73 done and then having to restart and go to the playoffs. But honestly, I wouldn’t regret those decisions at all. We were one game away from winning a championship, so you can—I don’t think you can second guess that that much.”
Curry has a point—they came this close—but so do people on the other side. They didn’t win it all, after all, and logic suggests they would have if they had rested their stars and hadn’t gone for the record.
Hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to say now what the 2015-16 Warriors should have done, but all they have is what’s in front of them. And what’s in front of them is the potential of redemption.
Their quest to go up 3-0 and take a commanding series lead begins at 9 p.m. in Cleveland.
