On Sunday night, the Cleveland Cavaliers made history and completed an unprecedented comeback to win the 2016 NBA Finals and give the City of Cleveland their first championship. LeBron James and Kyrie Irving shone brightest of all the stars on that night, putting to rest any questions about James and his ability to deliver on the biggest stage.
However, not everything was put to rest. While the Cleveland drought has ended and Kevin Love, Kyrie Irving, J.R. Smith and Matthew Dellavedova are now all NBA champions, the Warriors are feeling the pains of unfinished business.
After storming to a championship in 2015, Golden State picked right up where they left off. They actually improved over their 2014-15 performance and surpassed the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls for the best regular season record in NBA history at 73-9.
Despite their amazing performance, it seemed that at least one player from every major team over the past several decades chimed in with their opinion on how this historic Warriors team would have fared in another era or against their teams.
King James Gospel
While it is completely ridiculous to compare the Lakers of the 1980s or the Orlando Magic of the mid-1990s or the Los Angeles Lakers of the early-2000s. There was one team that was untouchable by any of those squads. Until this current Golden State team.
The 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. Now, the Warriors are the team that will stand as the greatest regular season team to ever play the game. It took 20 years for someone to surpass the Bulls and it is entirely possible that as long as the NBA has an 82-game schedule it might never be matched again.
After Golden State failed to win back-to-back titles on Sunday night, the door closed on all the questions being asked of the Cavaliers and James. However, all the questions of the true greatness of this Warriors team are wide open. Former Bulls player Dennis Rodman, member of the 1995-96 champion team, had a little tweet of congratulations. And salt.
Congrats @cavs for winning @NBA title. @warriors u had a great regular season. But the greatest team of all time is the 95-96 @chicagobulls
— Dennis Rodman (@dennisrodman) June 20, 2016
And so it begins, immediately after Golden State suffers the agony of defeat. Rodman has officially trolled the Warriors in the most brutal way possible and I have zero doubt that he loves every moment of it.
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The ’96 Bulls are no longer in the record books with their 72-10, but they hold the distinct privilege of having completed that season with a championship and right about now I’m sure that Draymond Green, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson would all gladly trade a couple of regular season wins to be celebrating another title right now.
Rodman is clearly being inflammatory and his tweet garnered over 22,000 retweets in just two hours, but there is some fun and totally irrelevant debate to be had thanks to the totally unnecessary revelation. A tweet like that has to be a real kick in the pants for the Warriors right now and James is, at least temporarily, freed from the burden of being compared to Jordan and the mantle will be passed to Golden State. In defeat, they are now haunted not just by the inability to close out a series with a 3-1 lead, but now hot take internet will hold them up as the new Bulls comparison and that is probably a fate worse than losing a title on their home floor.