kodo wrote:Nobody remembers or even cares about differential stats.
Off the top of your head without looking it up on the internet, what was the season differential of the Kobe/Shaq Lakers threepeat team? I have no idea.
GSW will win at least as many games as the 09 Cavs (66) or 07 Mavericks (67) and nobody really cares or brings up those teams as historically significant teams.
What people are saying is true, lasting historic significance only comes from the postseason.
As veterans say, the real season only starts in April.
Fundamentally my issue with this thinking is this:
The drunk at the bar deserves no voice. We all know that there are tons of sports fans around, and most of them are idiots. Not in their every day life, but when it comes to sports, very few actually apply their brain to doing anything more than parroting narratives other people came up for them. I don't care how many millions of them there are, their opinion matters no more than my dog's.
By that same token, it matter not if none of us remember what a particular differential was, our memories don't define how good a team was, their play does.
You want to say the Warriors won't be remembered as all-time great by most because most will simply go by W-L record, that's fine, as long as you follow that up by saying: "but of course, I don't limit my thinking based on anything so superficial."
None of this means I disagree with the statements about the post-season though. People go a bit overboard with narrative finding a way to pull apart teams simply because they happened to lose, but when we talk about GOAT teams, it's something of a given that they have to take on all comers.
And this is especially true for any unorthodox team. Draymond Green is the main guy I'm looking at here. He's done phenomenal as power forward for the Warriors this season, but if in a 7-game series opponents can adjust and bully him, and this means the Warriors end up losing to, say, a team like the Grizzlies with two very strong bigs, well then it's tough to look at them as historically great.
Last note: Losing to the Spurs shouldn't necessarily be seen in the same category. Obviously if the Warriors lose that's a knock, but we've seen how good the Spurs got last post-season. If they play like that again, then people shouldn't talk about the Warriors disappointing, they should talk about the Spurs' greatness. Conceivably the Cavs could fall under the same umbrella, though I'm not willing to say that yet.
