Warriors oust Rockets to reach fourth consecutive NBA Finals

HOUSTON - The Golden State Warriors spent the past seven months telling the world they would be fine.

With 24 minutes to go in Game 7 of the Western Conference final, though, everything was decidedly not fine. The Warriors found themselves trailing by 11 points to the Houston Rockets, and they had spent the first half of the biggest game of the season looking lethargic and apathetic.

It appeared, finally, that the Warriors’ hubris was about to catch up with them.

But it didn’t. So again, Golden State is back in the NBA Finals.

Thanks to their usual strong second half - along with the Rockets completely forgetting how to shoot - the Warriors emerged with a 101-92 victory to earn their fourth consecutive Western Conference crown.

Trailing 54-43 at halftime, Golden State looked dead. But Stephen Curry scored 14 of his 27 points in the third quarter, helping Golden State - the league’s best third-quarter team under coach Steve Kerr - to a 33-15 advantage in the period.

The Warriors flipped an 11-point deficit into a seven-point advantage, a lead they wouldn’t relinquish thanks in part to Kevin Durant scoring 11 of his game-high 34 points in the fourth.

“We were lucky to escape out of here,” Kerr said.

Curry said someone asked him after the victory if it’s still special to get to the finals when it’s the fourth time in a row.

“Yes,” he said, “because it’s really hard.”

Golden State played better in the second half, but was helped by the Rockets attempting to break the backboards at Toyota Center. Houston finished the game 7 for 44 from 3-point range, including a remarkable stretch of 27 misses in a row from the 7:07 mark of the second quarter through the 6:21 mark of the fourth. The Rockets made exactly one of their final 30 3-point attempts for the game.

Already facing a small margin for error without the injured Chris Paul, Houston shot itself out of any chance of beating the defending champions, who were more than happy to capitalize.

Golden State’s victory means it will return to the Bay Area and, for the fourth consecutive year, host the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals, which begin Thursday night.

“It’s amazing how long the NBA game is,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “Forty-eight minutes, it lasts a long time and there’s so many opportunities to get yourself going as a team. And with our team, there’s just so much firepower that at some point, we’re going to get going.”

The Cleveland-Golden State matchup was widely expected to happen when this season tipped off seven months ago. The way it came to be, however, did not meet those expectations.

While Cleveland has gone through one crisis after another to make it back to this point, Golden State was always supposed to get this far. From the very first day of training camp, the Warriors have operated under an assumption that this season would be exactly like last year, when they cruised to 67 regular-season victories before stampeding through the playoffs with 15 consecutive wins - ultimately winning the title with a 16-1 postseason record.

That hubris led to Golden State looking somewhere between mildly engaged and completely disinterested for all 82 regular season games - and, frankly, the first two rounds of the playoffs, as well. Mix in some injuries, most notably to Curry, and it left the Warriors with possibly the most uninspiring 58-win regular season in NBA history.

Even after all of that, it took a team as talented as the Rockets - which led the NBA with 65 wins this season and constructed a roster built to challenge Golden State - to finally make the Warriors look vulnerable. Between a comfortable victory here in Game 2 and a pair of fourth-quarter comebacks in Games 4 and 5, Houston took a three-games-to-two lead in this best-of-seven series and then built a 17-point lead at the end of the first quarter in Game 6 in Oakland.

But with its season on the line, and with Paul watching helplessly from the bench because of a strained hamstring suffered in the final minute of Game 5, Golden State finally woke up over the final three quarters of that game, outscoring Houston by a staggering 93-47 margin to win by 29 points. That momentum carried over to Game 7, which Paul was also forced to miss.

“Everybody came to the same conclusion,” Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said before the game. “There was just no way” Paul could play.

The Rockets certainly didn’t look like they felt sorry for themselves when the game started. Just as it did in Game 6, Houston set the tone from the beginning, playing with far more aggression, discipline and effort. That allowed the Rockets to collect 11 offensive rebounds in the first half while forcing the Warriors to commit 10 turnovers and shoot just 6 for 21 from three-point range.

As a result, the Rockets took their 11-point lead into the halftime break - leaving them just 24 minutes away from the Finals, even as one of the game’s best players next to D’Antoni on the bench, rather than next to James Harden (32 points) on the court.

Instead, after seven months of insisting everything would work out just fine in the end, the Warriors ensured that it did.

Now the Finals await.

NOTES

Green and Durant were barking at each other several times during the game when things weren’t going well for the Warriors.

“I was cussing him out,” Green said. “He was cussing me out when I was wrong. I was cussing at him out when he was wrong. But that’s what we do. I am the guy who calls him out and he is the guy who calls me out. It’s great. You have to have that on your team.”

Curry went to the locker room with trainers between the first and second quarters, but returned to the bench with about 10 minutes remaining in the second quarter and soon returned to the game.