Finals Game Six: Steph's Recognition Finally Comes

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Golden State Warriors won Game Six of the 2022 NBA Finals by a score of 103-90, clinching the franchise's seventh NBA Championship overall, their fifth since moving to California's Bay Area, and their fourth in the last eight years. The Warriors became the first team to win (at least) four championships in an eight-year span since the legendary Chicago Bulls teams of the 1990s, and regarding this year, it was a return to the top after a brief period away from playoff prominence following their loss in the 2019 Finals to the Toronto Raptors.

The Celtics started Game Six up with a 14-2 lead, but all positives for that team ended there. The Warriors went on a 25-8 run which included scoring the quarter's last 11 points, and once they took the lead, they never looked back. Golden State led by 15 at halftime, and they led by as many as 22. Bottom line, once the Celtics lost that early lead, they lost literally all of their momentum and their home court advantage in the process. Boston could not stop turning over the ball, which was a problem for them all series. They were also dominated by bench scoring, outscored 21-5 in that category in Game Six. To put it bluntly, the Celtics literally had no chance after losing that early lead.

Stephen Curry had been called many things in his NBA career, but one label that always avoided him was Finals MVP. That changed with this win. In Game Six, Curry scored 34 points and was 6-for-11 from behind the three point line, coming after actually missing all nine of his threes in Game Five. Overall, Curry averaged 31.2 points per game in the Finals, and made an average of five shots from behind the arc. Very hard to believe that Curry had never been Finals MVP until this year, but that was exactly the case. In 2015, Andre Iguodala won that honor, and it was Kevin Durant who earned the nod in 2017 and 2018. Curry is the second-oldest player to win his first Finals MVP, and the first to have won both MVP awards (league and Finals) unanimously.

For the Celtics, well, this was quite disappointing. They started this Finals so well, taking Game One in comeback fashion on the road, and even leading 2-1 after three games. So how did they lose this? They blew a golden opportunity in Game Four, they went cold in key parts of Game Five, and Game Six saw the Celtics (on their home court) basically give up. A lot of blame has been aimed at Jayson Tatum, who only averaged 21.5 points in the Finals--two less than Jaylen Brown. However, both Tatum and Brown have had moments where they have disappeared at the wrong time, so I would chalk this Finals loss up to the team just flat out losing their steam once they took that 2-1 lead.

Speaking as an NBA fan, I'm not really thrilled with this result. When the Toronto Raptors won in 2019 over the Warriors, I was elated. I was happy because it was a first time champion, but also because I thought we would seem something resembling parity in the NBA. 2020 saw the bubble year that ended with LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers winning, and even though LeBron is part of the disparity problem, I accepted it because he's more of a likable choice. The Milwaukee Bucks' win in 2021 returned that hope that we'd see parity, but in all honesty, Golden State's win marked the return of the NBA's "status quo." Hopefully that doesn't last too long. Maybe other teams will become deep enough to pull off upsets, but for now, we have another Warriors championship to end the NBA season.

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