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How old are the Golden State Warriors? When you scroll through sfchronicle.com’s excellent slideshow of the team’s playoff photos, you come across an ad for the Neptune Society’s “Free Cremation Cost Guide.”
well the warriors are on fire but not that type of fire. And do you know what it is to age well?
Your joy.
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Those intoxicating things get better with age, like wine and your high school sports career.
The Warriors are relatively old, as Memphis star Ja Morant said Friday night after the Warriors killed the Grizzlies with gum and sent them back to the barbecue kitchen for further seasoning.
“We are young and they are getting old,” said Morant, too young to remember that George Bernard Shaw said, “Youth is wasted on the young.”
The Warriors’ core group has aged. The team once jokingly referred to as Stephen Curry and the Screensetters has become Stephen Curry and the Sunsetters.
Maybe it’s because of that aging process, but the Warriors’ current run to the Western Conference finals — their sixth such trip in the last eight seasons — is more fun than the previous five trips.
The journey is more unpredictable and exciting than ever.
The first five times, the Warriors headed to the playoffs as the team to beat, and all five times they reached the NBA Finals. None of those triumphant seasons came as a surprise.
In 2015, the Warriors’ breakthrough attack had every other team hot on their heels. It was the Warriors’ first trip beyond the second round of the playoffs since times gone by, but that team established its dominance beginning in Game 1 of the regular season.
In 2016, the Warriors were still light years ahead of the pack, arguably the best team in Golden State (73 regular-season wins), and would have won it all had it not been for a suspension and injury.
In 2017, 2018 and 2019, the addition of Kevin Durant made it unfair, with only injuries preventing a hat-trick.
The current squad?
The Warriors have been difficult to read, from the beginning. Pundits agreed that the Warriors were no longer the elite and they weren’t dead yet, but somewhere in between.
There were encouraging signs and impressive runs, but at various times the team seemed too old, too young, too small, too frenetic, too passive, too sloppy, too beat up, too incomplete and/or too unfocused.
What did you think after the Grizzlies gave the Warriors an epic beating in Game 5 in Memphis? That the Warriors had finally hit a wall, or that it was a momentary slip?
I leaned towards A.
The third-seeded Warriors will face the winner of Sunday’s game between the No. 1 Suns and the No. 4 Mavericks in a best-of-seven series.
* – if necessary
So did the Grizzlies and their fans, who celebrated their advance to the conference finals too soon.
What was scary was that not only were the Grizzlies playing circles around the Warriors, but Memphis had co-opted the Warriors’ secret weapon: joy.
Then came Game 6, and the Warriors rediscovered their joy, and it was stronger than the Grizz’s joy because it’s been eight years (or more) in the barrel.
So far so good, if the Warriors are your squad, but the tension builds. They’re right back where they started at the start of these playoffs, with their entire mysteries up and down.
In the previous five races, the Warriors didn’t make it to the conference finals without knowing what their starting lineup would be. It might seem like Friday’s win cemented Kevon Looney’s place in the starting lineup, along with Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green and Andrew Wiggins.
But there’s a reason Looney was cut from the starting lineup, and the Warriors are one loss away from going back to the drawing board. That’s one thing that makes this race so much fun: Head coach Steve Kerr has shown all season that he’s not afraid to make dramatic changes, take one player out of mothballs and put another in them.
Jonathan Kuminga barely played in the first round against Denver, then started three games against Memphis and then didn’t play Friday. Looney was the surprise star on Friday with 22 rebounds in 35 minutes, but in the first five games of the series he averaged 15 minutes and had just 27 rebounds total.
Consistent excellence has been elusive for every other Warrior as well, with the possible exception of Wiggins, who has been rebounding, attacking and defending at a high level. And Gary Payton II, who is still out of action.
Was it more fun when you knew what you were going to get from the Warriors in each game, individually and collectively?
It was fun, but no so much fun This year there is more to talk, debate, reflect and worry about. The lows are lower than ever, and the highs are higher. Welcome to the roller coaster of joy. Buckle up tighter.
Scott Ostler is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @scottostler