Cavs won, end of story. No one cared about last year's narrative of us missing guys, no one is going to care about what happened during the series other than we won after being down 3-1.
Not directing this at you, but comparing what happened to us last year and the Warriors this year is a
false equivalency.
I don't mean to get off on a rant here, but ...
Kevin Love struggled at times in the 2016 series, but he is still fundamentally vital to the way our team is structured. Even if he isn't hitting shots, when he is not on the court, it makes the others easier to guard ... especially when his minutes are being divided between James Jones and Shawn Marion.
Love's ability to spread the floor and still be a bull on the glass cannot be replicated. Toss in his other assets like very good vision/ability to keep the ball moving and that alone was a massive loss for an entire seven game series. Just like what happened in 2016, if he would have played in 2015, he would have had his spotlight moments. And, the rest of the time, he'd be quietly playing his role and making things easier for our other guys.
I would argue that Love would have been even more important last year, because the Warriors didn't really figure out the "lineup of death" thing that gave him so many problems until we were up 2-1. It was a desperation maneuver that, luckily for Kerr, worked out far better than he ever dreamed.
But, prior to that, when they were more of a conventional lineup, Love would have had a much easier time playing against them.
We missed out on all of it and there was not even a semi-suitable replacement.
Then there was Kyrie Irving. As we saw in 2016, he is completely indispensable and, with his injury (missing 6+ games in the series), it meant the end of any real chance we may have had with just Love out of the series. Delly did an admirable job, but he isn't close to Kyrie Irving, isn't used to being leaned on for heavy minutes and we had no backup point guard to help replicate the things that he would bring the team off the bench.
Throw Iman Shumpert in that injury pile too, and he had been having a very good playoffs up to that point with his pressure defense, ability to create turnovers translating to running opportunities and even a pretty consistent offensive contribution. He was also clearly playing injured with a pulled groin and an ankle (iirc) problem.
When people say things are now "even" and "well, we dealt with things last year and they had problems this year," they're completely bailing out the Warriors or attempting to cloud the reality.
The Warriors were as good as they were all season because of their depth. That's the first thing they had going for them this year that we did not last year.
Secondly, the injury problems and missed games weren't even in the same stratosphere.
They lost Green for one game, Bogut for 2 games and Curry was playing at something below 100%, apparently. The Green thing was completely his own doing and that's the price you ought to pay when you have a reckless athlete playing a huge role in your team's destiny. He should have been suspended in the OKC series, but justice finally found him. That is his fault and the Warriors' fault for relying on a guy like that... never once reining him in. Hell, he kicked Kyrie in the waning seconds of Game 7. The guy is flat-out reckless and he is going to seriously hurt someone at some point.
Bogut, while one of maybe 10-12 important cogs in their rotation, is unarguably not one of their most important five guys. He was averaging 11 minutes a game in The Finals prior to his missing the last two.
Curry was out there playing and doing 360 dunks in warmups.
Textbook false equivalency that the national media will no doubt continue to exploit.
