Thunder and Warriors: 2 teams at the peak of their powers
During Stephen Curry’s MVP ceremony, the Warriors showed a two-minute video, with the point guard’s teammates explaining his most breathtaking plays of the season.
With 0.6 of a second left in overtime Feb. 27, Curry drained a 37-foot jumper that beat Oklahoma City, a shot that overshadowed the first true crisis of the season — a halftime locker-room standoff between Draymond Green and head coach Steve Kerr — and turned the Thunder’s 30-rebound advantage into a side note.
Eleven weeks later, the Warriors very well might need similar sorcery from Curry to win a best-of-seven Western Conference finals series against the Thunder, a 55-win team that played its best ball of the season in a six-game destruction of the 67-win Spurs in the conference semifinals.
The glimpses of the Thunder being the one of the NBA’s quickest and most physical teams in the regular season have become their postseason identity.
The margin represented the third-worst rebound difference in a playoff game during the Gregg Popovich era and the worst-ever for San Antonio in a home playoff game during that span.
Kerr had 16 clips from which to choose to show Oklahoma City grabbing offensive rebounds Feb. 27, and the 30-rebound drubbing still haunts Green.
The Warriors dished out a franchise-record 2,373 assists — the 13th most in NBA history and more than 100 more than any previous Warriors team.
Many of those assists set up three-pointers as the Warriors set an NBA record by becoming the first team to make 1,000 long balls in a single season.