Deep Thoughts on First in 40, The Story of the 2014-15 Warriors: the Finals MVP vote and the structure of scientific revolutions
I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now
Table of Contents
The Complete Documentary
The Warriors have completed the release of their four-part 10th anniversary documentary about the 2015 championship.
Some personal notes
The 2014–15 Golden State Warriors are a very important basketball team in my life. First of all, they were the first basketball team that I was following that ever won a championship. I started following GSW in 1991. The Warriors immediately broke up the most fun team in the NBA, the Run TMC squad, and then puked forth two and a half decades of really dreadful basketball with some occasional flashes of hope immediately extinguished by drama.
But most importantly, this specific team led me down a path that has culminated in my running sports websites and making eccentric but occasionally informative videos.
The team hired Steve Kerr in 2014 and I was fascinated to see what kind of offense he was going to introduce. Kerr himself had his career saved by being perfect for the triangle offense from the Chicago Bulls. I was a big anti-Michael Jordan fan, so it frustrated me no end that Coach Phil Jackson comes along and plugs in this annoyingly effective, weird offense that enables Mr. Sociopath to go from the guy who's too selfish to win to the eventual conventional wisdom that he’s the ultimate winner.
Then Phil Jackson goes to the hated Lakers, and the triangle offense there also is the perfect format for their dynasty. But everywhere else that Phil's disciples tried to install the triangle offense, the offense failed. It was too complicated for players to learn, it took too much buy-in, and it relied on too much cooperation across the whole on-court lineup. This was part of its spiritual power, but also a huge weakness if you couldn't get it to gel.
So I watched with great interest to see how Steve Kerr was going to install the triangle offense with the Warriors. As it turned out, Kerr did not install the triangle offense, though he took some of the big principles and blended it with the Spurs offense and the old seven-seconds-or-less Phoenix offense.
Anyway, this led me to write some super-intense and extensive pieces analyzing the new Warriors offense, which I posted as fan shots on the Golden State of Mind website.
Then this led to Nate P recruiting me and hiring me to join the main writing team, which then led to me creating Explain One Play in the summer of 2015, etc etc.
The 2014-15 Warriors had some luck and won everything. This team began a basketball revolution though people didn’t realize it at the time.
It was also the only team I’ve followed that won a championship.
I'll never forget after watching Finals Game 6 on TV, I sat in a giant beanbag with my kids, hugging them, and said, "I'm so glad I could share this moment with you. It might be another 40 years before we get another one like it."
That turned out to be false, but in any case, I'm so glad I get to share this moment with you today.
Apricot’s Very Organized Brief Notes on Watching Ep: 4
0.17. The press definitely works differently for the NBA Finals. There are so many more reporters there from all over the world, people who normally don't even cover the NBA. There are real interviews happening on the side and there are people from talk shows running around doing joke interviews. Instead of having press conferences in the little media rooms, they have these booths set up all over the basketball court so they can run six of them in parallel.
The players do practice at the arena, which is definitely different from their usual routine. But Steve Kerr gives the impression that there are open practices. They do let the press see the last half hour or practice, but it is completely vanilla stuff like a layup line. Absolutely no chance of leaking any kind of information.
The most informative open practices that I was at were in the 2019 Finals. Everyone was wondering whether Kevin Durant was going to come back for the finals. So those open practices were actually kind of interesting because we were trying to see if Durant was practicing and how he looked. And in fact, Klay Thompson was also injured in game two, so there was a question about whether he would play game three and game four, so there were a lot of tea leaves to read. (This was before Klay’s career-threatening injury in game six that everyone remembers. That team really fell apart physically.)
But anyway, usually those open practices are completely useless for information purposes, by design.
3.00. I admit that this is the first episode that I've watched. Did any of the previous episodes talk about how weird and awkward it was to have Mark Jackson announcing the team that had just fired him, and all of the passive-aggressive things he said, including how if you love the butterfly, you have to respect the caterpillar (him) and things of that nature?
5.14. I was at Game 1 (upper bowl diagonal), and I had a view in line behind Iman Shumpert as he shot that potential game-winning jumper. It looked for all the world like it went in and the game was over. I had to watch the player body language to see that it didn’t go in. What a relief.
5.34. One thing about being at the game is you miss a lot of little details like Kyrie Irving leaving the game for good. I don’t remember noticing that until after the game was over.
10.22. This is the rare sports documentary which underplays the great achievements of the protagonists. They make it sound like Game 3 was a Cavaliers romp, when in fact it was a tremendous Warriors comeback, down to a 1 point game with 2:23 to go when Matthew Dellavedova hits a fluke shot for a 3-point play on an extremely weak foul call (compare Steph’s typical treatment and the slide tackle mentioned next). Then with the Warriors storming back again at 1:00, Stephen Curry is running a fast break in chaos and, I say this with no trace of exaggeration, LeBron James slide tackles him. No foul.
Yes, I'm still bitter about it, especially because the last two minutes report claimed that this was a correct no-call. The L2M reports have never had any credibility with me since then.
Anyway, the game ended up being within 3 with 18 seconds to go, so that was a damn pivotal call. Anyway, yes we can laugh about it now, but with a tinge of bitterness.
11.56. That's a really amusing cut to Nick U’Ren. I don't think I registered until now that he is the GM of the WNBA Phoenix Mercury, who have a chance of being the first round matchup for the Golden State Valkyries if GSV are lucky enough to get into the playoffs.
13.43. Incredibly glowing praise for Steve Kerr’s ability to deal with people. This plus having the humility to bring in super-talented assistants have made Steve Kerr one of the greatest coaches of all time.
14.19. That's interesting stuff about the Spurs going small. I did not remember that. I have to admit that this whole decision seems more complicated than I assumed it was. My vague recollection is that the Warriors had already rolled out occasionally what GSOM called the Small Ball Death Squad.
This name was perhaps a little inappropriate, I'm just reporting. As you know, the national media ended up sanitizing this phrase into “the death lineup”.
To check my memory, I consulted the NBA lineup data, which says the SBDS had played 102 MIN in 37 GP during the season, so it wasn’t a brand-new idea from U’Ren. SBDS had even played in the previous 3 rounds, 9 MIN, 23 MIN, 9 MIN.
The low-key most daring part of the decision was doing it and not losing Andrew Bogut mentally. It looks like Bogut handled it very professionally, which is a credit to him. But many accounts say that NBA coaching work is (surprisingly) largely about planning around how players are going to deal emotionally with lineup / scheme changes.
Anyway, I don't doubt this coaching decision narrative as reported. But I do remember at the time thinking it was pretty straightforward and that Kerr was pumping up U’Ren as a way of spreading the credit. The team needed better spacing and their best 5 players on the court, and it was time to move the small ball death squad from occasional thing to a full-time starting lineup. I guess sometimes daring and innovative ideas make so much sense that they seem obvious in retrospect.
19.24. Haha, I remember how bad it felt at the beginning of Game 4. The Warriors made this bold starting lineup change, and they immediately got whacked in the first couple of minutes. There definitely was a whiff of doom watching it unfold.
21.08. Yes, after game four, it did feel like the Warriors had solved the Cavs. The game was not even remotely close after they settled down after the bad start.
22.51. It's fun seeing these alternate angles of these iconic plays, but if you've never seen the proper TV feed of this game, you absolutely must go watch a highlight reel to see the Steph mean mug he pulls after making that shot on Delly. There was extra venom because the whole rest of the series the press had been talking about how Delly was the Steph stopper. So you know Steph enjoyed that.
28.25. I remember from a basketball analyst point of view, it was pretty clear the Warriors were going to win. But from a fan point of view, the whole thing was terrifying.
34.27. I absolutely love that you can see the whole team going nuts and Andre Iguodala in the foreground NOT celebrating. Instead he’s tracking the high bounce of the game ball, and you can see him grab it in the next cut in the far distance at 34:31.
That Finals MVP vote and the structure of scientific revolutions
36.10. Okay, I have to do a deep dive into the Finals MVP vote. This documentary glosses over the ideological war that was happening around this team and their success. The FMVP vote is a fascinating study for understanding how people defend orthodoxy when it is being challenged by a paradigm shift as analyzed in Thomas Kuhn’s work.
This ideological struggle resulted in the bizarre Finals MVP vote (Iguodala 7 votes, LeBron 4 votes, Steph ZERO votes). Here is one contemporary reaction to the vote, written incidentally by an author who supported LeBron James for FMVP. But even they couldn’t ignore the absurd result that Steph was shut out.
When the Finals MVP ballots came in, the only players that garnered any votes were Iguodala and LeBron James. That’s right, Stephen Curry, who led all scorers for the Warriors, not only tying Iguodala with 25 in Game 6, but had 6 rebounds, 8 assists, and 3 steals, did not garner a single vote. Heading into Game 6 he led all scorers for Golden State with an average of 26.2 points per game, led the team in assists (5.8 per game) and trailed only Draymond Green in steals (averaged 1.6). Iguodala through five games averaged 14.6 points, 6 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.2 steals.
…
Iguodala garnered 7 votes from Sam Amick (USA Today); Ken Berger (CBSSports.com); Hubie Brown ( ESPN Radio); Jason Lloyd (Akron Beacon Journal); Rusty Simmons (San Francisco Chronicle); Marc Spears ( Yahoo ! Sports), and; Marc Stein (ESPN.com). LeBron James got 4 votes from Steve Aschburner (NBA.com); Howard Beck (Bleacher Report); Zach Lowe (Grantland), and; Jeff Van Gundy (ABC TV).
It is worth trying to understand the reasons for this retrospectively astonishing result of Steph getting zero votes. It’s one thing for an individual voter to not vote for Steph. But for NONE of them to do so is evidence of powerful groupthink.
A look at the statistics and the film and the importance of Steph Curry to the team's offense show that Steph was highly worthy.
The historical precedent is to default to giving the Finals MVP to the best player / highest scorer on the winning team. It’s not as strong a precedent as the regular season MVP but it’s strong. So you have to work really hard to not give FMVP to Steph.
The historical precedent is to never give the Finals MVP to a player on the losing team. It has only happened once in 1969. In fact, this is the only example I can find of a losing player receiving even a single vote for FMVP. That’s how strong this precedent is and how wild a vote this is.
Now, LeBron did definitely do as well as someone can in a very difficult situation with two of his co-stars injured. However, when it comes down to it, LeBron in the heliocentric post-up offense racked up a lot of points, but he had abysmal statistical efficiency. It’s not a criticism of LeBron, but it's hardly a performance worthy of an extremely rare Finals MVP for the losing team. At least Jerry West took it to a close 7 game series. The 2015 Finals, after the lineup change, wasn’t remotely close. GSW led the rest of the games by double digits.
A common explanation is that “all the voters were idiots”. That’s not a theory to be taken seriously (and also has no predictive power… why this particular brand of idiocy?). The voters were very seasoned and respected members of the media and they are not idiots.
My explanation is that the voters had spent years operating in a discourse that was strongly shaped by an orthodoxy and the voters followed its logic to the bitter end. Some of them were trying to defend the orthodoxy. The others had their thinking shaped and limited by the orthodoxy.
First, the whole basketball analysis industry (commentators, coaches, analysts, consultants, development teachers) was deeply invested in the widely-held idea that a jump-shooting team that plays like the Warriors, with a star that plays the wrong way like Steph Curry, can never win the title.
This is a multi-generational concept that was consistently brought up; for instance, for the GSW Run-TMC or the Denver Nuggets run and gun team or the Seven Seconds Or Less Phoenix Suns.
It’s okay to give the regular season MVP to the cute kid with the three point gimmick, but when it comes to the serious work of winning a championship, you need a real manly star like LeBron to play with direct force and score inside.
This was solidly part of NBA precedent, as Steve Nash got his MVPs but PHX’s playoff losses were held up as the key cautionary tale in the NBA culture that you can’t win as a running, jump shooting team.
Therefore, GSW could not be seen as deserving this title. It was a lucky fluke that only happened because of opponent injuries. Therefore all the players on GSW especially Steph were not worthy of Finals MVP.
(Spoiler: the next season ended up proving the doubters completely wrong.)
(Teaser: This itself is worth a future essay I’ve been dying to write… about how anti-jump-shooting connects to all sorts of fascinating ideology across all American sports, including why offsides exists, forward passes were once banned, and how WW I started changing ideas of wartime valor and masculinity. But that’s for another day.)
Second, there was also a very strong economic interest for Nike that their lead athlete LeBron be hailed as the undisputed greatest player in the league. And similarly, that the lead athlete of a Nike rival, Under Armour (Steph Curry), should be disrespected. Nike was and remains one of the biggest sponsors of NBA players, coaches and the media.
To put Steph and LeBron in the same tier is to endanger your relationship with Nike and with everyone else who benefits from Nike, which is to say most of the influential people in basketball. It can be done, but there is a lot of incentive not to, and the incentive also has a network effect.
Third, the #1 TV commenting team had a deep conflict of interest that prevented them from properly analyzing the Warriors.
The most obvious question that every NBA fan wanted to understand was why the Warriors suddenly had a historically good record. GSW had just fired Mark Jackson as head coach and a no-experience head coach had stepped in and, without any changes in personnel, transformed a 51 win team into a 67 win team.
I write this as, relatively speaking, a supporter of Coach Mark Jackson. We hashed this out a few years ago in My Worst Take: Coach Mark Jackson should not be fired. There are ways to analyze GSW without discrediting the previous coach.
Neutral analysts would be trying to understand one of the greatest leaps in NBA history, and what Kerr was doing right in contrast to what the previous coach had done. To my knowledge — and I think I watched all the national telecasts — this topic was not discussed once. You could praise players for their personal growth and leveling up, and how mice Steve Kerr is, but open discussion of the coaching change was self-censored. It’s too bad, because Mark Jackson would have been the most qualified person to explain the differences.
BUT this was socially impossible given that the previous coach, Mark Jackson, was ON the commenting team and had just been bitterly and controversially fired by GSW. Jeff Van Gundy was his long time friend and coach in the NBA, and was probably pretty tweaked off that MJ got fired. Mike Breen had been close to both since their work together starting in 2006 as a broadcasting team.
This was commercially impossible as ESPN would not want the credibility of their announcing team to be hurt by the idea that their lead analyst had been dramatically holding back one of the best teams in history.
As a secondary effect, anyone who did do this analysis would risk their relationship with these powerful media members.
All Warriors fans of the time can remember the weird awkwardness of the broadcasts. Imagine the painful grudging praise of someone forced to talk about their ex’s raging success without them. The broadcast team couldn’t dispute the record, but they could politely imply that it’s a regular season illusion, that it’s a fluke, that it’s not sustainable basketball, and that it wasn’t THAT big a jump from the previous coach’s regime.
I can’t exactly blame the broadcasting team for their conflict of interest, but ESPN should not have had them covering Warriors games. But if they didn’t, then that would have called more attention to the elephant in the room.
It’s true that there was a compelling story about how LeBron kept fighting on alone despite losing his two injured co-stars and how LBJ led all teams in scoring to drag his undermanned team to a noble 6 game series loss. Voters love a good story.
However, one doubts that was really the decisive factor, because in an extremely parallel situation, there was no analogous 2019 Finals MVP buzz for Steph Curry about how he kept fighting on alone despite losing his two injured co-stars and how Steph led all teams in scoring to drag his undermanned team to a noble 6 game series loss. Voters love a good story, but only when it doesn’t go against the orthodoxy.
A brief summary of Thomas Kuhn’s work, Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
In short, every field has an orthodox way of thinking. These theories are defended by people and organizations that benefit from these theories. Change only happens when anomalies accumulate that can’t be explained by the old theory. New theories are suppressed by the powerful people in the field. This happens until there are so many anomalies that there is a crisis and then after a struggle, there is a reorganization of the field.
In this case, the new theory is that jump shooting and shooting threes is more effective winning basketball. Anomalies began with the Spurs-Heat Finals but the jump shooting could be ignored because both teams had powerful inside scorers. The Warriors were the most direct challenge to the orthodoxy and the Finals MVP vote is the suppression of the new theory.
When all these structural forces flow in the same direction, it warps the national NBA media conversation, and specifically, the NBA Finals MVP debate. There is a lot of anomalous data (Steph as the ultimate jump-shooter led his jump-shooting team to a victory over the highest form of good basketball, LeBron), and those who think within the orthodox ideology are compelled to defend the old concepts and marginalize rival approaches.
One might say, who cares about what the media thinks inside their bubble. I should say clearly that every single Finals MVP voter is a senior member of the media, so for this topic it is in fact the most important factor.
So, it was difficult to imagine giving the MVP to Steph Curry, so there was a strong movement to give the MVP to LeBron in a losing effort. But that would break an iron-clad tradition of five decades. Therefore, the only way out of this mental conundrum was to give the MVP to Andre Iguodala, who had done a great job defending LeBron James. This would give massive reflected glory to LeBron James.
So, looking back, the Finals MVP vote was a reaction by the establishment to the first high-profile anomaly to challenge orthodoxy. To continue the story of the revolution, the first anomalies were the success of Heat / Spurs and then the more severe anomalies were the Warriors titles. But these could be dismissed as flukes plus Kevin Durant’s treachery, or as only possible because of Steph Curry.
But quietly the real crisis began when 2017-18 and 2018-19 Houston’s success gave teams a model that could be copied, and after a long struggle/transition, the 2024 Celtics title may have been the final nail in the coffin of the old ways. The revolution is complete. Now all teams gear their offense to shoot as many threes as possible, for better or worse. For worse, in my opinion. But that’s another essay.
Thank you for attending my TED Talk.
Steph’s not receiving Finals MVP was a key part of the anti-Steph campaign for years (until all those narratives were suddenly dynamited in 2022). But we can’t blame Andre for that.
Anyway, I'm still really happy that Andre Iguodala won Finals MVP, even if it was for indefensible reasons. Giving up his starting spot so Harrison Barnes and the team could thrive, then getting rewarded… that’s such a powerful example that the Warriors and everyone else can use in the future.