Tomorrow 'Til Infinity

Coming off a historic playoff stretch and their second finals win in three years, the golden state warriors are just now hitting their peak. And we have a feeling they’re going to be staying at the top for a while.

- Ryan Jones

Watching the 2017 NBA playoffs, and the much-hyped but ultimately lopsided Finals in particular, there was a feeling that was impossible to shake.

What did we just watch? We watched the Golden State Warriors sweep to the Finals before dominating in three of their four wins against the defending champion Cavaliers. We saw the two guys responsible for the previous three League MVP awards, neither of them yet 30 years old, surrounded by a “supporting cast” that included two other All-Stars and a seemingly weakness-free mix of young dudes and vets, all of them happily sharing the ball and buying in defensively and generally just having a hell of a good time. We watched them go 31-2 over the final two months of the season, playoffs included. We watched LeBron James average a 30-point triple-double against them in the Finals, knowing all along it wasn’t nearly enough.

We watched all of this, and whether we enjoyed it or not—a complicated question depending on your rooting interests and your definition of the phrase “super team”—nearly all of us experienced that same feeling: that this Golden State squad was just getting started. That they had quite literally changed the game, climbing a notch higher on basketball’s evolutionary ladder than the rest of the League was yet ready to reach, and that barring injuries (or an ego-clash that, on available evidence, seemed highly unlikely), they had just claimed ownership of the League. That at their best they were literally unbeatable—and that there was every reason to think they’d remain so for the next four, five or six years.

In essence, these Warriors are the future, and that future is now—and for the rest of the League, the foreseeable future is bleak.