ENDEAVOUR Hills has an NBA champion.
Andrew Bogut didn’t play a minute in the decisive Games 5 and 6 of the NBA Finals against the Cavaliers and the unstoppable force that is LeBron James, but the 30-year-old is an incredibly deserving owner of a diamond-encrusted championship ring.
The seven-footer was replaced at the centre position in the starting line-up by rising star Draymond Green, with rookie head coach Steve Kerr – a five-time NBA champion player in his own right – opting for a ‘small ball’ rotation.
Truth be told, the move was one that needed to be made. The versatile Green shone, as did David Lee and veteran swingman Andre Iguodala when the latter was inserted into the starting five.
The Warriors went into the series as red-hot favourites, and the odds shortened even more when the Cavs’ star point guard – the Melbourne-born Kyrie Irving – fractured his knee cap.
But the Cavs took a 2-1 lead in the best of seven match-up on the back of one of the all-time great individual finals’ series from LeBron James. League Most Valuable Player (MVP) Steph Curry and the other half of the ‘splash brothers’ long-range shooting tandem Klay Thompson were held to below their best, as the ‘Delyrium’ surrounding another Victorian – Irving’s replacement at starting point-guard, Matthew Dellavedova – took hold.
In Game 4, Bogut was replaced in the starting line-up and the Warriors stormed to a 103-82 win in Cleveland. It was the series’ decisive moment.
He could have easily sulked as he sat on the bench and ultimately found himself out of the rotation altogether… but he didn’t. That’s not his way. All the big man wants is to win, and this championship signifies a glittering crowning glory in a long, and at times frustrating road.
The sheer jubilation was etched all over Bogut’s face as he was one of the first to embrace Green and Lee after the nervy final few minutes of the Cavs’ 105-97 Game-6 victory.
The Warriors have won their first title in 40 years, and a big man from Endeavour Hills who was written off countless times throughout his formative years in the game will forever be remembered as an NBA champion.
Bogut was selected by the Milwaukee Bucks with the first overall pick in the 2005 draft and earlier this year passed Luc Longley as the Australian to play the most NBA games.
He has battled through a series of freakish injuries over his career to date but he has still played at least 65 games in seven seasons so far, and is regarded by many as one of the best passing big men of his era.
In the 2014/15 regular season he was named to the NBA’s All-Defensive Second Team after holding opponents to just 41.4 per cent at the rim (third best in the league) and being ranked third in defensive rating.
“While you’re resting, someone else is working,” Bogut said in an interview with one of the Gazette’s sister papers, the Berwick News, in 2013.
“I always had it in the back of my mind growing up that there was a kid elsewhere training right at that moment in either Europe or America,” he said.
“And I was competing with him.”
The Australian Boomers cornerstone was cut from multiple representative teams as a teenager – his unwavering competitiveness even then wrongly branded as an “attitude problem”.
Yet after the Warriors defeated the Houston Rockets in Game 5 of the Western Conference finals this season, iconic former coach Jeff Van Gundy said in his role as an ESPN commentator: “You don’t get to this level without talent, and habits… the Warriors have championship habits… when you combine great talent and depth with the right habits, you win big in this league”.
When Kerr stood on the dais after holding the Larry O’Brien NBA championship trophy, he said the key was simply sacrifice. Referring to the likes of Bogut, Lee, Green and newly crowned Finals’ MVP Iguodala his words were carefully spoken.
“It was all about sacrifice… they were all in it just to win… it’s the only thing that mattered.”
