Every time someone disputes which NBA team is the best, the number 73 comes up. However, those discussions seldom touch on the real texture of that season—the little things, the details that were missed, the records that had nothing to do with basketball. Fixing that is worthwhile.
Begin at the beginning. The Golden State Warriors of 2015–16 did more than just start the season strong. They had the best start in NBA history after winning their first 24 games in a row. However, the 1884 St. Louis Maroons baseball team, who had started the season 20-0, set a 131-year-old record that was also broken by that streak. In December 2015, a basketball team broke an 1884 baseball record. That is the kind of detail that is obscured by the greater narrative.
Another is the relationship between Steve Kerr and the record he ultimately broke. In 1995–96, the Chicago Bulls went 72–10, which at the time set a record for the most wins in an NBA regular season. That Bulls team included Kerr. He won a ring, played with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, and is well aware of the caliber of that team. Twenty years later, he watched his Warriors surpass that figure while seated in the head coach’s chair at Oracle Arena. The record of his own former teammates. It’s one of the stranger themes that runs throughout the entire season, so it’s not a minor irony.
While Kerr recuperated from back surgery, Luke Walton coached the Warriors for the first 39 games. Walton, who was an assistant at the time, went 39-4. One of the greatest starts any team has ever had was made by a coach who had never held a head coaching position. Although the team continued to win after Kerr returned in January, it is rarely acknowledged that Golden State’s record-breaking season was partially built under an interim coach.
A separate section should be dedicated to Stephen Curry’s individual stats from that season. In addition to winning the scoring title and averaging 30.1 points per game, he became the seventh player in NBA history to shoot 50% from the field, 40% from three, and 90% from the free-throw line in a single season—the so-called 50-40-90 club.
He was the first MVP to be chosen by every voter in the award’s history. However, 402 is the number that still seems almost unreal. He broke his own previous record of 286 three-pointers made during the regular season. He scored 46 points and made ten threes against Memphis on the season’s last night. On the same night, the record-breaking individual performance and the record-breaking victory took place.
Additionally, the team’s consistency is a fact that receives insufficient attention. The Warriors made NBA history by going an entire regular season without dropping back-to-back games. In 82 games, they never lost two straight. Additionally, they didn’t lose to the same team twice in a single season. When combined, those two facts reveal something particular about this team’s response to hardship, which makes the Finals loss to Cleveland even more difficult to comprehend.
The winning run at home is also noteworthy. From January 2015 to March 2016, Golden State won 54 straight home games during the regular season. The 1995–96 Bulls held the previous record of 44 consecutive home victories. They thus broke that team’s record twice in the same year, once for home victories and once for the total number of wins in a season.
73-9 might endure for a very long time. It is really challenging to duplicate the set of conditions needed—the right roster, the right coach, staying healthy, and the right system working. It’s evident that the season’s facts are more nuanced than the final figure indicates.
