Steve Kerr played for six teams and six coaches during his 15-year NBA career, but he never played for Don Nelson, the man who lingers like a specter over the Golden State Warriors’ franchise and even has his fingerprints on the future of the NBA. The Warriors had a lot of bad basketball teams between 1975 and 2015, but they were rarely boring and even more rare was for them to be offensively limited. Nelson became head coach in 1988 and they’ve largely been built in his vision of a five-out, fast paced offense ever since.

Nelson would regularly use smallball lineups in the early 1990s with the likes of Rod Higgins and Tom Tolbert as 6-7 point centers in an era of the NBA that featured David Robinson, Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing. If not for the miracle of Michael Jordan, the 1990s would have been completely dominated by big men, but Nellie had a vision 20 years before its breakthrough. The Warriors won 50 games in Chris Webber’s rookie season in 1994 despite Tim Hardaway missing all 82 games. Nelson thought a five-man unit of Webber at center, Billy Owens as a playmaking 4, Chris Mullin at small forward, Hardaway at point guard and Latrell Sprewell would make them instant title contenders and it might have if Webber had accepted playing center and Nelson hadn't been quite so inflexible. Take that team out of the 1990s and into the present and they probably win a title, especially if you could teleport the heart, grit and defensive play of Draymond Green to Owens.

Everything for an NBA champion begins and ends with their best player, but Draymond Green was unquestionably the Warriors’ good to great factor all season. Don Nelson even said as much himself after the series.

It took going small with Finals MVP Andre Iguodala to get those final three wins when it looked like Cleveland had Golden State figured out, but that was made possible by Green playing de facto center. There are many things on the margins that Kerr has done better than Mark Jackson, most notably hiring two of the league’s best assistants in Alvin Gentry and Ron Adams, but none of it matters without two critical yet related decisions:

1. Dared to ignore the conventional wisdom to pass on trading Klay Thompson for Kevin Love.

2. Insert Draymond Green into the starting lineup for David Lee.

Daniel Leroux was one of the first to identify how much better the Warriors would be on both sides of the floor with Green and his impact has gone well beyond what even the most fervent Draymond believers could have expected. Passing on the Love trade and rejecting the fetishism of multiple superstars being necessary to win a championship became justified by the player Green evolved into this season both as an individual and within the constructs of their system. 

Green allows the Warriors to stretch the floor at either power forward or center and also make plays out of the pick and roll on the bounce as a passer. Green creates space on offense while playing All-Defensive Team defense and even serving as a rim protector at just 6’6.

The Warriors are like pinball stylistically and they try to play the beautiful game. The Warriors were grinding out victories in Game 1 and Game 4 of The Finals, but it was clearly killing them to not be playing their suffocating style of offense until the fourth quarter of Game 5 when Stephen Curry began to hit those 3's. It is important for the players to express themselves, yet that style has finally been fine-tuned to also play a version of that position-less basketball on defense. The through-line of Nelson’s teams continued with Mike D’Antoni’s Suns and all of those that copied their fastpaced style on offense is obvious, but it is the type of defense the Warriors play with their long and athletic wings capable of switching onto just about any player that will be replicated widely and represent a true new direction that we’ll see become an aspiration for other teams.

Green was able to unlock that next level that the Suns couldn't quite get to with Shawn Marion playing a similar multi-dimensional, two-way role.

Golden State preferred to beat you playing smallball, but they could also grind out a series against physical teams. Andrew Bogut ultimately didn't have a place in The Finals, but he was needed against Marc Gasol and the Grizzlies, as well as Dwight Howard and the Rockets. The NBA is often a paper, scissors, rock league in terms of matchups, but the secret strength of the Warriors was their ability to have an adequate answer to any style during those rare instances when they couldn't dictate play.

The Warriors will almost certainly never have an easier path to the title as they had this season; no major injuries of their own, major injuries across the NBA, Clippers vs. Spurs in the first round, Clippers vs. Rockets in the second round, and finally a severely weakened Cavs in the Finals. But they also had to defeat all four of Curry’s counterparts on this season’s All-NBA First Team and they also had 40 years of history, as well as doubts about whether a three-point shooting team was #goink to be capable of winning a championship.

“We were fortunate in a lot of ways this year,” said Kerr after Game 6. “Maybe number one was health. And to win a title there's obviously a lot of work, but a lot of luck as well, and we had a lot of luck on our side this year. And our guys took advantage of it, and they were fantastic.”

This team was built largely through the draft and has a relatively young core that will retain this current identity for the next five to seven seasons with clear paths available to them to eventually replace Iguodala and Bogut.

Out of the eight Warriors who played more than 1,000 minutes during the regular season, there were three still on rookie contracts (Thompson, Green, Harrison Barnes), two make low eight-figures and are All-Defensive players (Bogut and Iguodala) and one is the best bargain in the NBA (Curry). There wasn’t a max contract on the Warriors this season with David Lee’s $15 million representing the highest salary.

The salary situation, however, changes quickly for the Warriors; Thompson already has his max extension kicking in and Green will gets his max next thanks to the Gilbert Arenas rule. Unless there’s a trade of Lee, which there should be considering the luxury tax implications, Curry will be the sixth highest paid player on the Warriors during the 15-16 season. That simultaneously shows how underpaid Curry is until 2017 and also that all of their depth comes at a price.

The Warriors had a historically great season with their league best defense, second ranked offense, all while playing at the fastest pace in the NBA and with their MVP and the league MVP being a point guard. All of these things, except for the offense, seemed inconceivable.