The Road to 70 Wins

The Warriros are not going to win 72 games this year; they might win 70, but I would be surprised to see them better 69 wins – which is not a slight against this team, because they have so far been historically great and probably will continue to be.  Saying a team is going to win over 67 games means that they are already a historically great team, because only 9 teams have ever ascended above 67, and only 17 have ever won more than 65.  Only 2 teams – 1997-98 Chicago Bulls and 1971-27 LA Lakers - have ever won 69 games, and only 1 has ever bested 70 wins. 

As Dennis Rodman explained after that record season in 1996, “Most teams can’t handle the pressure of having to go out and win 72 games…”  And he is absolutely right.  No other team has even really come close – not even what was essentially the same Bulls team the very next year could manage 70 wins, ultimately failing due to injuries and fatigue.

November is not the time of year when the PRESSURE to win 70 games becomes apparent: that really comes in February, after you’ve played 60 games in the last 4 months and the season starts to grind along, and you’ve got another game against the Brooklyn Nets that you’re probably going to win…and then you come out flat, and somehow lose a game that you really should have won.  The mental strength that it takes to come prepared for just the extra 3 games that are the difference between 69 wins and 72 is unfathomably rare – as evidenced by the fact that only one team has ever done it, and even they couldn’t completely replicate it the following year; which, by the way, was after they got off to the best start which they had ever had as a franchise, which should also be a relevant consideration in the current discussion.

The NBA season is really long, especially if you are actually playing in the games rather than simply watching them.  It is a repetitive grind, a gigantic millstone of monotony constantly spinning and crushing your concentration and your focus down to a powder, and out of all of the great teams in the league’s history, only the 1996 Chicago Bulls – led by a pissed-as-hell Jordan who was determined to regain his status as the best player in the entire world, and forced the rest of the team to maintain that same level of focus – ever overcame it that natural inclination to just take a night off every once in a while.

Which, again, is not saying that the Warriors are mentally weak; what it is saying is that we don’t know yet whether anyone on the Warriors is maniacally competitive enough to still feel like they have something to prove in April, after building a 10 game lead with three weeks left in the season.  That’s ultimately what drove the Bulls to win 72 games: Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen decided that they wanted to win 70 games, and bent the entire season to do that.

Even then, they got just lucky enough to accomplish it, as the 1996-1997 season demonstrated, in which  they started the season even stronger than they had the previous year, but after suffering injuries to multiple contributors – including DennIs Rodman, Tony Kucoc, and Bill Wennington – their frontcourt was so decimated that they had to sign Brian Williams in the middle of the season, a player to whom no other team in the league felt like paying actual money to play basketball, until the Bulls were forced to do so.  That team still won 69 games, but really only because they made the conscious choice to try and win 70 games in consecutive seasons. 

Which is the final reason why the Warrirors won’t really challenge the record: because they are too smart of a team and organization to risk injury for the sake of what is really a meaningless achievement.  Say for the sake of argument, that they are sitting at 72-9 on the last night of the season, and have the top seed throughout the playoffs well-wrapped up, essentially having nothing substantial to play for that night…there’s no way in hell, even as a fan of the team, you want them playing Steph, Klay, and Dray in that game, and risk an injury that keeps them either out or ineffective for the most integral part of what could be another championship season.  Scottie Pippen injured his foot during that 1997 push to re-achieve 70 wins, which cost him effectiveness in the playoffs, half of the 1997-1998 season, and half a step for the rest of his career.  Do you really want to risk forfeiting a shot at repeating as Champion, just to win the last meaningless game of the regular season? 

 And the Warriors want to repeat, not finish with 70 or more wins; and then they want to put themselves in as favorable a position as possible to be the first team in over a decade to win three straight championships.  Continuing the hypothetical train of thought, assuming that they manage to achieve that extremely lofty goal, they would then be looking to do what no team since Bill Russel has done: win 4 straight.  If they want to pick an achievement to surpass Jordan’s Bulls, that’s the one they should be eyeing, not a single-season record which does, after all, not guarantee a championship.