Two Sides to the Golden State Warriors' NBA Record-Breaking Season

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

Honestly, any hint of drama about whether the Golden State Warriors would get their NBA regular season record-breaking 73rd win on Wednesday vanished about three-quarters of the way through the first quarter. A gimpy-but-game Memphis Grizzlies team was matching Golden State shot-for-shot, and you could almost imagine the them making a legitimate upset bid. And then, in the space of 57 seconds, Steph Curry hit three straight three-pointers, the lead ballooned from two to 11, Memphis called timeout, and the idea that the game would even be close vanished like a ridiculous hallucination. Destiny would not be derailed, not tonight.

Steph Curry entered the game needing an efficient 41 points to be the first person to average 30 points on 50 percent shooting from the field, 40 percent from the three point line, and 90 percent from the free throw line. And he needed eight threes to be the first person to make 400 three-pointers in a season, an unfathomable number given that he set the record at 272 only three seasons ago. It would need to be among Curry's best games, and it seemed pretty unlikely that Curry would be able to call up such a performance on command, especially given the context.

Curry hit 10 threes and scored 46 points on 24 shots. In 29 minutes. He didn't even play the fourth quarter.

And that's one way to tell the tale of this season, the Warriors displaying a dominance that made them seem almost untouchable. There were games in which it felt as if Golden State's true goal was beyond just defeating the team that happened to be suiting up against them, that their aims were loftier, more abstract. To extend the undefeated streak, to break the unbreakable record, to play unbeatable basketball. There were wins, like the 50-point shellacking of Memphis in the fourth game of the season, that served as a letter of notice to the rest of the NBA. The Warriors made the improbable look inevitable. And in that way, their last game felt like coming full circle.

Part of the pleasure in watching Golden State this season was the way they made basketball appear simple, and victory seem casual. In those games, the Warriors were a reflection of Curry, who wears greatness with a breezy, unforced confidence, somehow granted immunity from the fundamental physical rules of basketball. Those games felt like one long hot streak, all swishing nets and gasping crowds.

But then there were games like the one against the Grizzlies in Memphis last Saturday, a game the Warriors needed to win in order to keep their chances of getting to 73 alive. Games where transcendence, for whatever reason, was inaccessible, when you realized that basketball is a job and winning is hard. In those games, the Warriors instead adopted the persona of Draymond Green, a skillful player whose game nevertheless feels like the product of pure will: lunge and hurtle and dive and bang.

Golden State is a basketball team. It is not playing against abstractions. Night after night on the way to 73 wins, the Warriors were locked in battle against flesh and blood, and some nights, you could see it. The only goal was to grind out a victory, whatever it took, however ugly it got. In these games, Draymond games, everything was snatched loose balls and tapped rebounds. Nothing came easy, and everything was work.

It's a simplification, of course, reducing Golden State's season to swings between poles, and Curry and Green to archetypes. Green is a polished playmaker and Curry's seemingly effortless game is the result of relentless practice and physical conditioning. The Warriors' win in Oklahoma City, for instance, was a Draymond game that felt like a Steph game. Their win in San Antonio, on the other hand, was a Steph game that felt like a Draymond game. The two are sides of the same coin.

But it's one way to understand how the Warriors managed to break a record that seemed like it would last forever. Sometimes you don't fully appreciate that history is being made while it's happening—it sneaks up on you, or catches you by surprise. This time, happily, it was clear 10 games into the season that to watch these Warriors would be to watch something special happen, which gave us the rare opportunity to savor a legend even as it was written. That's what the Warriors have given us this season—a story that we'll repeat to each other, that we'll relive in clips and Vines and memories, a legend that will grow in the retelling even as we lose track of some of the details, a set of tall tales to bore our kids and grandkids with. No matter what happens in the playoffs, we'll have that.

But Golden State is not finished yet. They are 16 wins from turning the greatest regular season ever into the greatest season ever, no qualifiers necessary.

The Warriors are the prohibitive favorites to win an NBA championship. To knock them off, a team would need to beat them four times in seven games. Not only have the Warriors only lost nine games total out of 82, they haven't even been beaten twice by the same team, and they are an absurd 15-1 against the NBA's other top teams. For fans, it's an odd state of mind to be thinking of winning a championship as merely a capstone, a box that needs to be checked to finish everything off.

But for the Warriors themselves, it's more than just odd; it's dangerous. No team, however great, can afford to treat a championship so lightly, take winning it for granted. Here's the other thing: I don't think it's a bizarre idea to say that there's a chance that the Warriors have made themselves more vulnerable by trying for 73. How much more vulnerable, nobody really knows, but it's not normal to go into the playoffs both as the overwhelming favorite and after finishing the marathon of the regular season with a sprint.

It's not about physical exhaustion for the Warriors. Their older players have either taken the rest they needed or had been forced into it by injury; the young guys will be fine without it. It's more about mental tiredness, and the way the record has sapped up their attention in a situation in which they'd usually be relaxed and looking ahead to the challenge of the playoffs. That's why as proud Steve Kerr was of his team for trying for the record and breaking it, he had also been somewhat ambivalent about pursuing it and a bit worried about the toll it might take on the their chances to repeat.

Whenever you stretch yourself to reach for something, after all, you expose your flank. Maybe, in the end, it won't make that big of a difference, but the fact that the Warriors decided that basketball immortality was worth running the risk makes them all the more special. The next chapter of the legend of the 2016 Golden State Warriors opens on Saturday in Oakland, against the Houston Rockets, and we will see whether this turns out to be a fairy tale or a cautionary one.