How old are the Golden State Warriors? As you browse through the excellent slide show sfchronicle.com of the team’s playoff photos, you’ll find an advertisement for Neptune’s “Free Incineration Cost Guide.”
Well, the Warriors you on fire, but no that kind of fire. And do you know what aging means well?
Their joy.
Those intoxicating things get better with age, like wine and high school sports careers.
The Warriors you relatively old, Memphis star Ja Morant said Friday night after the Warriors killed the Grizzlies and sent them back to the grill kitchen for more spices.
“We are young and they are getting older,” said Morant, who was too young to remember George Bernard Shaw saying, “Youth is wasted on young people.”
The main group of Warriors has aged. The team once called Stephen Curry and the Screensetters jokingly became Stephen Curry and the Sunsetters.
Maybe because of the aging process, but the current Warriors’ race to the Western Conference Finals, the sixth such trip in the last eight seasons, is more fun than the previous five.
The journey is more unpredictable and more exciting than ever.
The first five times, the Warriors went to the playoffs as a losing team and all five times reached the NBA Finals. None of those triumphant seasons were a surprise.
In 2015, the Warriors’ revolutionary attack put all other teams on the line. It was the Warriors’ first trip since the second round of the old playoffs, but that team has established its dominance since the first game of the regular season.
In 2016, the Warriors were still light years ahead of the group, probably the best Golden State team ever (73 wins in the regular season) and would have won everything but a suspension and injury.
In 2017, ’18 and ’19, the addition of Kevin Durant made it unfair, and only the injuries prevented a peat of three.
The current team?
The warriors were hard to read from the beginning. Experts agreed that the Warriors were no longer elite and were not yet dead, but somewhere in the middle.
There were encouraging signs and impressive runs, but at times the team seemed too old, too young, too small, too frantic, too passive, too careless, too shaken, too incomplete and / or too focused.
What did you think after the Grizzlies gave the Warriors an epic battle in Game 5 in Memphis? That the Warriors had finally hit a wall, or was it a momentary slip?
I leaned toward A.
The third head of the Warriors series will face the winner of Sunday’s match between Suns no. 1 and Mavericks no. 4 in a series of the best of the seven.
* – if necessary
So did the Grizzlies and their fans, who celebrated their promotion to the conference finals too soon.
What was frightening was that the Grizzlies were not just playing in a circle around the Warriors, but that Memphis was co-opting the Warriors’ secret weapon – joy.
Then came Game 6, and the Warriors rediscovered their joy and it was stronger than Grizz’s joy as he aged eight years (or more) in the barrel.
So far, so good, if the Warriors are your team, but the tension is growing. They immediately returned to where they started at the beginning of these playoffs, with their positive and negative mysteries.
In the last five rounds, the Warriors have not reached the conference finals without knowing what their starting lineup will be. It may seem that Friday’s victory cemented Kevon Looney’s place in the starting lineup, along with Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green and Andrew Wiggins.
But there’s a reason Looney was moved from the starting lineup, and the Warriors are on the verge of returning to the drawing board. That’s what makes this race so much fun: Head coach Steve Kerr has shown all season that he’s not afraid to make dramatic changes, take a player out of the mothballs, and put another guy in them.
Jonathan Kuminga barely played in the first round against Denver, then started three games against Memphis, then did not play on Friday. Looney was the surprise star on Friday with 22 rebounds in 35 minutes, but in the first five games of the series he averaged 15 minutes and had only 27 total rebounds.
Consistent excellence was also elusive to all other Warriors, with the possible exception of Wiggins, who returned, attacked and defended at a high level. And Gary Payton II, who is still out of action.
Was it more fun when you knew what you were going to get from the Warriors in each game, individually and collectively?
It was fun, but it wasn’t so much fun. This year there is more to talk about, debate, meditate and worry about. The lows are lower than ever, and the highs are higher. Welcome to the roller coaster of joy. Tighten it.
Scott Ostler is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: sostler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @scottostler