The Golden State Warriors dominated the 2010s in a fashion like we haven’t seen before. Making five-straight Finals, and 3 NBA Championships, the Dubs experienced unprecedented success behind the play of Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Kevin Durant.
Today, even amid difficult times, the Warriors are considered one of the great dynasties of the modern basketball generation.
But, according to Mike Conley, he and his Grizzlies nearly defeated those Warriors, and it’s a moment that he still thinks about to this day. In an appearance on the “Old Man & The Three” podcast, the star guard described his experience against the Golden State dynasty, and lamented how close he and his team came to taking them down.
“That series is our What if I think more than anything because if we win that series who knows if the Warriors are the warriors dynasty of you know that everybody knows you never know?
To begin the series I had just got the orbital fracture and the or the previous series, so I miss game one. Came back for game two we won and a winning at home again go up to one and like, we’re like, Hey, we we got these guys we know we got to do we know you know, we know what needs to be done.
Steve Kerr started making it like huge adjustments. I mean huge adjustments in game for you know, he put Andrew Bogut on Tony Allen and kind of cross match, you know, just kind of threw us all for a loop. And like, we just were like running in mud at that point.”
And at the end of the day, like, you look back at and it’s like, man, if one of two things were different if we win that game four if, you know, I was 100% you know, healthy, you know, there’s so many things if Tony didn’t, you know, have a hamstring injury and game five or six, you know, there’s so many thoughts that go through my head.But you know, like you said, you know, we did a lot of great things, but not enough to win and it’s unfortunate.”
The 2015 Western Conference Semi-Finals was a hard-fought 4-game series that featured Curry and his crew during their first title run. Conley and the “Grit and Grind” Memphis team didn’t have enough to compete with the Dubs offensively, and Golden State would go on to win the Chip.
Had things ended up different, who knows where the Warriors could be today? Would they have made changes? Would their beloved core of stars have remained intact?
We’ll never know, but it’s not ridiculous to hope and dream. For Mike Conley, who is hoping to achieve some successes with the Jazz this season, that’s all he’s really got.
