I have been saying for a week that being down 3-1 in a seven-game series, while not a position to be desired, is not fatal to a very good basketball team. If that team is the defending NBA champion, there’s even less cause for panic.
To support that position, I merely had to recount my own experience covering the 1995 Phoenix Suns, who had the defending champion Rockets in a 3-1 stranglehold heading home to play Game 5. The Rockets won that game in overtime, thumped the Suns by 13 at home in Game 6, and then completed the task by overcoming a double-digit halftime deficit to win Game 7 by one point.
On the road.
Monday night in Oakland, NBA history has a difficult decision to make. Does it come down on the side of the team trying to become only the tenth team out of 234 to complete a comeback from a 3-1 hole? Or does it favor the team trying to win a Game 7 on the road, something that has happened only 24 times in 125 chances?
In 1995, The Rockets needed to check both of these boxes. In 2016, both the Warriors and Thunder have to deal with only one.
As a Warrior fan, I’m concerned by the fact that so many people are acting as though the Warriors’ spot in the NBA Finals has already been earned.
It has not.
Game 7 at home, while a strong advantage, is nothing close to a guarantee of success. As I mentioned, I personally witnessed the Rockets become a member of the “We won Game 7 on the road” club, but it wasn’t the first time I’d seen it with my own eyes.
This game marks the first Game 7 at home for the Golden State Warriors since May 16, 1976. The Warriors faced the upstart Phoenix Suns, a 42-win team that was given no chance against the defending NBA champs.
I was there. I don’t know how my dad pulled it off — “Warriors Fever” also existed in the Bay Area then — but we were in the last row of the upper bowl behind the north basket.
It took me a long time to get over it. Actually, exactly 39 years.
The Warriors dominated the NBA that year. Coming off their unexpected championship in 1975, they made only one significant roster change, adding rookie guard Gus Williams and trading Butch Beard. Here’s a short list of their achievements:
* Led the league with 59 wins, an 11-game improvement over their championship season, and a franchise record which stood until last year.
* Led the league in points per game
* 4th in the league in points allowed, leading the league in scoring margin by a mile
* Won 10 of their games by 20 or more points, five of those by 30 and one by 40
* Only two of those 20-plus-point wins came in the second half of the season, and one of those was in game 42
* Had 3 All-Stars (Rick Barry, Jamaal Wilkes, and Phil Smith)
* 36-5 home record
* Lost two games in a row only once
So you can imagine the confidence in Warriors fans’ hearts as they filed into what is now called Oracle Arena. The Warriors had won Game 5 there, and dropped Game 6 on the road in Phoenix. No way they lose two in a row, right? At home? Are you serious?
With the advantage of hindsight, a few things are clearer today than they were then. The Suns won “only” 42 games, but two of them were against the Warriors, one of them in Oakland. One of their four losses to Golden State came in overtime, also in Oakland. The Suns had a very interesting collection of players. Alvan Adams, the NBA Rookie of the Year, and fellow rookie Ricky Sobers, who was pressed into the starting lineup because of an injury to Dick Van Arsdale, joined forces with vets Paul Westphal and Garfield Heard, a midseason acquisition. The Suns started out 18-27, so they were a much better team at playoff time than their record indicated.
The Warriors led by six at the half in Game 7, but the Suns erased that lead and led by two going into the fourth quarter. The Warriors’ offense, so powerful during the regular season, devolved into one-on-one attempts that were increasingly unsuccessful. The Suns pulled away in the fourth quarter, leading at one point by 12 and settling for a 94-86 win. The Warriors had scored 20 points below their season average.
There was drama, too. Rick Barry went 30 minutes without scoring, from the second quarter well into the fourth. He said after the game “you can’t score if you don’t have the ball,” but he didn’t seem to be trying to hard to get it.
Suffice to say that the team’s chemistry, which had been a key component in the Warriors’ championship the year before, had been altered significantly by the Beard trade. Phil Smith, a very adept scorer, had stepped into the point guard role, but he wasn’t the playmaker or distributor Beard was. During the regular season, they were more than good enough, but when the pressure ramped up in the playoffs, their chemistry problems boiled over.
I just remember thinking, “This can’t be happening! Where is the team I’ve watched for two years?”
I have to say that I had the same feeling watching Games 3 and 4 of this Western Conference Finals.
The free-flowing Warrior offense I had seen for almost two years was nonexistent, replaced by a helter-skelter collection of rushed shots and passes into the stands or — worse — the hands of the Thunder, leading to dunks and 3-pointers.
The Thunder face an uphill battle in this Game 7. They face a defending champion at home, one that very recently was written off in the series. The Warriors know they’re fortunate to have another bite at this apple, and they will not be complacent.
However, the Thunder also have a couple of things going for them. One is that they are again the hunter, not the hunted. They played poorly as favorites in Games 5 and 6, but now they return to the underdog role that served them so well in Games 1, 3 and 4. The other is that they have a very simple thing to fix: They need to play together and trust each other. They played that way for the entirety of the San Antonio series and the first four games of this one, so they know they can do it.
The third thing they have going is that they won two on the road against the Spurs and one against the Warriors, two teams which lost only three home games in 82 tries this season.
This duel could go either way, and any commentary that says it’s over is shortsighted. Warrior fans of a certain vintage know this only too well.
