Rubino: 22 years since Warriors made back-to-back playoffs

The Warriors are in the NBA playoffs for the second year in a row. Because that's such a rare occurrence, the statement deserves repeating. The Warriors are in the NBA playoffs for the second year in a row.

How rare of an occurrence is it?

It hasn't happened in 22 years. And before that, consecutive appearances in the playoffs hadn't happened for the Warriors in 15 years, at the end of a veritable golden age for Golden State, when Al Attles coached the team to its third consecutive postseason and sixth in seven years, a giddy run of excellence that included the 1975 NBA championship.

So, the Warriors currently are making a playoff appearance in consecutive seasons for only the second time in 37 years. That qualifies as a wow. A big wow.

When the Warriors went into the playoffs for a second consecutive season in 1992, they were there for the third time in Don Nelson's fourth year as coach and had won 55 games in the regular season. That's more than any other Warriors team has won since, and the second-most wins in the franchise's 53-year Bay Area history.

Going into that 1992 postseason, Golden State was seeded third in the Western Conference, having tied for regular-season wins with the Utah Jazz and only two games behind the top-seeded Portland Trail Blazers. Besides Portland, only two other teams in the NBA had a better regular-season record than the Warriors — the Chicago Bulls with 67 victories and the Cleveland Cavaliers with 57. In the previous season, the Warriors had won 11 fewer games but still made it to the conference semifinals. So, yeah, the Warriors who came into the playoffs 22 years ago weren't just showing up to take a bow and go quietly into the offseason. They had ambitions.

They had Finals ambitions.

There were, though, discomfiting omens. The Warriors' last four defeats of the regular season were to Western Conference opponents, including back-to-back defeats on April 5 and 7 to the Blazers.

And there was this head-scratching statistic: The Warriors scored the most points in the NBA, averaging 118.7 per game, but they yielded the most, 114.8 per game. It was, alas, the kind of team that would come to identify Nellie Ball: exciting, high-flying, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink offense, with a defense whose existence was an unconfirmed rumor.

Chris Mullin and Tim Hardaway, both of whom played in 81 of 82 regular-season games and averaged more than 41 minutes, led the team in scoring, averaging 25.6 and 23.4, respectively. Hardaway also averaged 10 assists, and Billy Owens led in rebounds, averaging eight to go along with his 14 points.

Sarunas Marciulionis was almost always the first player off Nelson's bench, averaging 29 minutes and nearly 19 points. Among other key contributors were Rod Higgins, Tyrone Hill and Mario Elie.

The Warriors' first-round opponents were the sixth-seeded Seattle SuperSonics, a team that had been going nowhere in the first half of the season under K.C. Jones but turned things around under George Karl, an ex-Warriors coach who had been deposed by Nelson.

In getting outrebounded 52-34 in Game 1, the Warriors squandered home-court advantage in a 117-109 loss.

It Game 2, the Warriors bounced back behind Owens' 16 points and 12 rebounds, outscoring the Sonics by 20 points in the second half of a 115-101 win.

The best-of-five series shifted to Seattle, where once again the Warriors were outrebounded, this time 35-22, a key factor in their 129-128 loss, despite 27 points and eight assists from Marciulionis.

In Game 4, despite Hardaway's 27 points and 11 assists, and Chris Gatling coming off the bench to score 14 points and grab 12 rebounds, the Warriors lost, 119-116, and were ousted from the playoffs in the first round.

Two years later, the Warriors would be back in the postseason after another 50-win regular season, but again would be eliminated in the first round. Then came the dark ages, a 12-season playoff drought. A brief respite in 2007 was followed by a five-year postseason drought.

But now there's a second consecutive playoff appearance, a rare and wondrous thing in these parts.

So, let the good times roll.

But if history is any guide, fans might be wise to temper their expectations.

Robert Rubino can be reached at RobertoRubino@comcast.net.