Warriors equal historic 15-0 Rockets, but there's one major difference
Dominance isn’t a spontaneous action. It needs a stimulus.
When the Houston Rockets began the 1993-94 season with a record 15-0 start en route to an eventual championship, they were responding. To a disappointing previous season. To a history and public that said they couldn’t win it all because they never had. To a Seattle Sonics team that had beaten them in seven games during the second round of the 1993 Western Conference playoffs.
Their 15-0 start is still a record, shared with the 1948-49 Washington Capitols and now the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors. But the countdown to the dissolution of that history has begun. 15-0 could—and almost certainly will—become the second-best start in NBA history when the Warriors welcome the Lakers on Tuesday to go for their 16th consecutive victory to begin this season.
There are some similarities between the Rockets and Warriors. Houston was ahead of its time in 3-point rate, and Hakeem Olajuwon’s defensive versatility makes Draymond Green look limited by comparison. There’s one big difference between these two historic clubs, however. The driving force for the Warriors’ historic run comes from a far different place than the Rockets’ did.
In 2013, the Houston Chronicle’s Jonathan Feigan remembered the 15-0 start from ’93. Olajuwon provided the team’s mindset:
"I think it started before that, when we lost to Seattle in Game 7, overtime," Olajuwon said, via Feigan. "Coming back from Seattle, you could see the disappointment of all the players and all the coaches. The plane was so quiet coming back. I think that carried over that summer.
"Coming back in the preseason and the training camp, there was a bitter taste. You could see that determination from all the players for that season. We didn't know we would win 15-0, but from the disappointment in that previous year, what we had yet to accomplish the previous year, we knew we would have to go farther. We felt that in training camp. I know in the summer when I was training I felt very focused, knowing we lost a game we felt we should have won to go all the way."
But this isn’t what’s happening in Golden State.
The Warriors don’t need to be doing this. There’s no reason to be outscoring opponents by 14.4 points a night, 4.5 more than the Rockets did during their first 15 games in '93. Didn’t the Warriors prove everything they possibly could have last year?
They won 67 games. They rolled through the playoffs, annihilating just about everyone and everything in their path. They did everything an all-time team was supposed to do. Yet, they’re almost acting as if they lost. And opponents are taking note.
LeBron James is dropping statements such as, “The team that beat us [in the Finals] looks more hungry than we are.”
Blake Griffin flatly denied his Clippers’ antagonism toward the Warriors made the intercalifornian relationship a rivalry.
Rivals? That implies someone could actually give the best team in the NBA a modicum of competition.
Golden State could be coasting, trying to head to the postseason with any seed and then taking over from there. That’s a theme we’ve seen from defending champions time and time again in the past, including the ’95 Rockets, who followed up the organization’s first championship with a second consecutive title but became the first squad since the merger to win it all after finishing outside the top-10 in defense during the regular season. That group notoriously cruised through the regular season, and it was mostly the same collection of guys who galvanized that 15-0 (and later 21-1) start to ’93-’94.
When you don’t actually have the doubters, manufacturing the motivation might be the next-best thing. We still hear about that “the Warriors got lucky” story line all the time. But when you dig deeper, you have to realize who’s pushing the narrative most: the Warriors. It was true even after Doc Rivers’ relatively tame original comments got tossed around the news cycle almost as quickly as Golden State swings the ball around perimeter. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Actually, it’s kind of brilliant.
Draymond Green went off on the luck narrative. Klay Thompson joined. One of Andrew Bogut’s most expressive fingers did the talking for him.
In reality, Rivers probably didn’t mean much when he generally explained that champions need luck to win. But the Warriors didn’t drop it. They feasted on Doc’s words as if they were one of their helpless opponents.
Thompson saw this coming. Maybe not an undefeated record, but certainly the attitude that might be most responsible for it.
“We won’t be complacent. I’ll tell you that,” Thompson said in September, via the San Francisco Chronicle. “These guys are too competitive. We’ve tasted winning, and we’re kind of addicted.”
If you're Steve Kerr or Luke Walton, why wouldn’t you want to foster an environment that keeps a group of unnaturally competitive personalities addicted to the water that seeps through the team’s soil?
Coincidentally, the Rockets teams that won back-to-back championships in 1994 and 1995 have also had the luck label draped onto them—winning in ‘94 with Michael Jordan out of the league and in ’95 with, as many would like you to believe, Jordan not at 100 percent, even though he was dominating come April on a Jordan-led Bulls team that ended up losing in the second round of the postseason. But the old Rockets’ luck narrative has far more external routes than the one sprouting out of Oakland.
The Warriors are dominated by their obsession with domination. That’s about as healthy as a team environment can get. Led by Curry, they've repeatedly said that they're embracing the challenge of breaking records. Whether to themselves or supposed doubters, there's still a lot to prove.
If their contemporaries won't offer resistance, the Warriors will seek competition against history.
Famed MLB executive Branch Rickey is often quoted as saying, "Luck is the residue of design." And when you design the perfect team, the good fortune that follows is often part of the plan. It almost seems like the Warriors don’t need the luck. They’ve been so dominant they’ll keep winning without it.
Fred Katz covers the NBA for FOX Sports. Follow him on Twitter: @FredKatz.
