Golden State Headed to NBA Finals After Beating Dallas Mavericks

SAN FRANCISCO — When the game ended and the celebration began, Klay Thompson’s emotions overtook him.

He thought about the past three years of his life, the two serious leg injuries that required surgery, the days when he went to rehab even though he couldn’t bear it any longer. He thought about how this time last year he was just starting to jog again, and how his Warriors teammates sank to the worst record in the N.B.A. from the best in their conference while he couldn’t help. He thought about how lucky he was to have regained his explosiveness this season, how lucky he was to be able to play basketball for a living again.

He thought about it all as he sat at the podium after the game, wearing a 2022 N.B.A. finals hat that bore Golden State’s logo and a T-shirt that said they were the Western Conference champions. He said it felt surreal.

“I’m just grateful,” Thompson said.

Golden State will return to the N.B.A. finals for the first time since 2019 after defeating the Dallas Mavericks, 120-110, in the Western Conference finals on Thursday.

Golden State won the series with a victory in Game 5 behind 32 points from Thompson, and 10 points and 18 rebounds from Kevon Looney. They never trailed in the game, and staved off every Mavericks run.

Because of injuries, the Warriors had spent a couple of seasons wandering through the N.B.A. wilderness. But their celebrated core — Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green — is together again and playing some of its best basketball, no small achievement considering the team’s triumphant past.

“We are all extremely proud of what it took to get back here,” Curry said. “Yeah, it’s definitely sweet based on what we went through.”

Golden State won three championships and advanced to five straight finals from 2015 to 2019, before it all began to come unglued. While falling to the Toronto Raptors in the 2019 finals, Thompson tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee and Kevin Durant ruptured his right Achilles’ tendon.

It would get worse. A few weeks later, Durant, who had helped Golden State win two championships, left for the Nets. Four games into the subsequent season, Curry broke his left hand. Golden State finished with the worst record in the league, a humbling blow for a franchise that had seemed on the cusp of establishing itself as a dynasty.

Earlier this season, in a podcast interview with the former player JJ Redick, Green acknowledged his uncertainty about the future — both the team’s and his own — as Golden State labored through that listless 2019-20 season. Without Thompson, who spent much of his time rehabilitating away from the team, and Curry, who appeared in just five games, Green did little to hide his frustrations. He mentored some of the team’s younger players, but he also sulked and shot terribly.

“I couldn’t get myself going,” Green told Redick. “It was never a point where I felt that my window was closing because of my skills or because of what I bring to the table. But if we’re going to suck like this every year, then my window is closed because I can’t get up for these meaningless games.”

Thompson suffered another misfortune when he tore his right Achilles’ tendon in a private workout before the start of the 2020-21 season.

“You go through one injury: ‘All right, cool. We’ll get our guy back. We’ll pick up where we left off,’” Green said. “Then you go through another one. When I say you go through another one, I mean, Klay. Then there it is, it’s two years off. You realize how fragile it is.”

Behind the scenes, though, Golden State’s decision makers were building toward a future — one they hoped would resemble the team’s not-so-distant past. In February 2020, General Manager Bob Myers traded for Andrew Wiggins, the No. 1 draft pick in 2014, who had never quite fulfilled his seemingly vast potential with the Minnesota Timberwolves.

With Golden State, Wiggins would prove he could do a bit of everything: shoot, pass, rebound, defend. On Monday, Kerr described the trade for Wiggins as “the key to all of this.” Golden State’s depth at the wing position had evaporated after the 2019 finals. Thompson was injured. Shaun Livingston had retired. And Andre Iguodala had been traded to the Memphis Grizzlies.

“So the Wiggins trade allowed us to start to rebuild that wing defense,” Kerr said, “and Wiggs has just been so good. He’s gotten so much better over the last couple of years. He’s a perfect fit next to our guys.”

Thompson said he told Wiggins after Thursday’s game how grateful he was to have him on the team.

This season, Wiggins was a first-time All-Star as Golden State went 53-29, good for the third-best record in the West. There were other meaningful moments along the way. Curry broke the league record for career 3-pointers. Thompson, after 941 days away, made his long-anticipated return from injury, scoring 17 points — and even dunking — in a win against the Cleveland Cavaliers.

But Golden State did not exactly race into the playoffs. It took time for Thompson to regain his familiar feel for the game, and Curry missed the final 12 games of the regular season with a sprained foot. Over one particularly lean stretch at the end of March, the Warriors lost seven of eight games. It was far from assured that they were capable of making a deep run in the playoffs.

They needed just five games to eliminate the sixth-seeded Denver Nuggets in the first round, then six to take care of the second-seeded Grizzlies in the conference semifinals.

The Mavericks, despite the best efforts of Luka Doncic, were little more than a speed bump.

Dallas stole Game 4 of the series behind 30 points from Doncic, then Golden State returned home on Thursday to close out the series.

“It’s a beautiful story,” Wiggins said.

The celebration began with about a minute and a half left in the game. Golden State took its starters out so the crowd could shower them with love. Curry sat on the bench looking almost like he couldn’t believe it, then the buzzer sounded and he jumped up and down waving a towel in the air.

As streamers fell from the rafters, the Western Conference championship trophy was brought onto the court, along with the new Western Conference finals’ most valuable player trophy, which is named after Magic Johnson and was awarded to Curry. Thompson went around giving powerful hugs to his teammates. Green rushed into the stands with a stack of N.B.A. finals hats to give them to members of his family.

After the trophy presentation on the court, Green walked toward the Warriors’ locker room yelling, “We back!”

The core’s first playoff appearance together came in 2013, when they beat the Denver Nuggets in the first round before falling to the San Antonio Spurs in the second. They played in Oracle Arena in Oakland back then — all five of their prior finals series happened there.

“It’s like kind of time stopped there where you kind of understand what real basketball is like in the playoffs,” Curry said. “We were pups at the time, but definitely great memories of playing in Oracle, the Warrior chants 25 minutes before a tipoff, the haze in the building, if you know what I mean.

“To know where we’ve come from that year, everything that’s happened since — I can pretty much drop myself into any series and know what it felt like because we rely on those experiences so much.”

Thompson remembers the 2013 playoffs well, too.

“We were so young. We took an experienced and dynastic San Antonio team to a hard-fought series,” Thompson said. “After that I was like, gosh, we’re going toe-to-toe with Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. If we build on this, we could have a great future.”

If someone had told him then that he would spend more than a decade with this team and that they would make six finals appearances together?

“I would have never believed you,” Thompson said.

Now, he wants more.