Steph, Klay, and the rest of the NBA All-Finals Team

Playing in the NBA Finals is an amazing feat, not just because of the excellence, but equally as much because of the endurance. The season begins in mid October and Game 7 would’ve been played on June 19. For the players, it takes a bare minimum of 98 professional basketball games over an eight-month span to play in the NBA Finals, more than likely 105-plus.

The odyssey to get to that Larry O’Brien trophy is part of what makes the NBA playoffs such compelling entertainment. Staying on the court for a six-game run on the playground in the summertime is taxing enough to give a 15-year-old a charlie horse. Playing at NBA playoff intensity every other night for two months and change, all the respect to everyone on the Golden State Warriors and Boston Celtics. Even for the people who follow and/or cover the league, once the trophy is presented it’s time to take a deep, full body exhale.

However, without the players who fight through exhaustion to make spectacular performances it wouldn’t be worth watching. The bad knees, ankles, and backs these players fight through to put up 20 points in June is as good as sports get. While basketball is a team sport, the players who rose to the occasion in this series — whether their team won or lost — deserve to be acknowledged. So let’s show some love to the best players of the NBA Finals.

A heroic effort by the Boston Celtics’ second-team All Defense big man. Whether the Celtics should’ve waited until later in the postseason put him in the lineup is a different story, but he mostly delivered when called upon.

When he felt right, he was lob-catching, pick-and-roll defending, rebounding nightmare for the opposition. For people wondering if there’s still a place in the NBA for bigs who can’t shoot, if they play like Williams did in the finals, most definitely.

Ever since 2016 we’ve been a little iffy around Curry. When he returned from injury he wasn’t the same player in that postseason, and came up short against LeBron James with a team that won the most games in NBA history. Those two championships with Kevin Durant didn’t change the hesitancy, but dammit these NBA Finals did.

The Boston Celtics tried to corral him, but to no avail. He kept the Warriors in games 1-3 and delivered an all-timer in Game 4, and his 34 points and seven assists in Game 6 were a wave goodbye to his younger Easter Conference foes. He’s the smallest player ever whose sheer presence on the floor makes an offense function in a way previously thought impossible..Against an all-time great defense he took what he was given and brought a sack for the rest

No player has changed the narrative around him as quickly as Wiggins. After a head-scratching all-star starter vote, his performance crashed back to the mean the second-half of the season. However, he’s been strong in the playoffs and in the finals he was the Scottie Pippen that Curry needed.

Wiggins got his points where he could find them, but more than anything he was the best athlete on the floor every single night. It was a Usain Bolt type discrepancy. The Celtics couldn’t keep him off the glass, or away from wherever on the court that he wanted to go.

He did not play the same minutes that he was asked to play against the Heat, but he was on the court for all six games against the Celtics and he gave them whatever he needed. If he had to play defense alone above the break he did it. If they needed his shooting, 60.5 percent from the field, 62.5 percent from the 3-point line, he gave it to them.

Averaging 12.5 points per game and 8.5 rebounds in the NBA Finals in a losing effort will not be remembered 30 years from now, but Horford was the Celtics’ most consistent player all series. He gave what he had left in that 36-year-old body and helped keep his team in every game.

Should the Warriors go with Jordan Poole in crunchtime? It was a legitimate question at the beginning of these playoffs. He can be a sieve on defense, but when it comes to getting on a hot shooting streak if Curry can get up to broil, Poole can at least get to 400.

Well, when the Warriors needed a bucket outside of Curry, it was mostly Thompson that delivered. He made the big shots early in the fourth quarter of that Game 4 victory, and when Curry was off in Game 5, that 5-11 from three was one of the biggest reasons that the tide shifted in the finals. He missed 900-plus games in a row, but was there when the Warriors needed him in 2022.

They got it right this time. I’m just still baffled at how Andre Iguodala won Finals MVP 2015. My only thought is it’s justice for all the years he wasn’t named to an all-defense team and should’ve been. Maybe he world is a bit better balanced with that happening and Curry finally winning this award, but we need to get better about giving people their flowers at the right time.