2018 NBA Champions: Golden State Warriors Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

2018 NBA Champions: Golden State Warriors Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman September 10, 2018

Outside of individual fandom of any given team in any given sport, that yearly yearning to see one's team hoist the trophy at season's end, league wide parity is perhaps the most desirable thing in sports, particularly at the league level. Dynasties will always exist, sure, some smaller market front offices will always outperform bigger ones, some players will exceed expectations and lead an otherwise middling team to glory, and the Cleveland Browns will always exist to man the bottom of the barrel, but the goal in sports, if one listens to the Rob Manfreds, Roger Goodells, Gary Bettmans, and Adam Silvers of the world, is for there to be a fairly regular turnover at the top. New teams in the playoffs, fresh faces making a run for the title: give some glory to teams like the Sacramento Kings or the Seattle Mariners of the world. But parity has eluded the NBA in recent years. The Golden State Warriors have been to four straight NBA finals and won it all in three of those four years, only once losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers, who have also appeared in the finals for four straight years. With only odd one-off winners in recent years like the Mavericks, Pistons, Cavs, and Celtics, the NBA title has recently been won by only a handful of teams: the Warriors, the Spurs, the Lakers, and the Heat. Going back to the year 2000, there have only been eight winners. There's only been one three-peat, but there's been three repeat winners. Point is, parity is not happening in the NBA. Where are the Wolves? Where are the Bucks? Where are the Magic? The big-market Knicks? That's great news for, right now, Warriors fans, but one must wonder whenever their window closes if a new super team will rise to claim the throne of the next dominant team on the landscape, or if, perhaps, there will be a more enjoyable annual shake-up at the top of the NBA heap.

The Warriors entered the season as the defending champs and a fixture atop the Western Conference, but the team, coming off of three seasons with insane winning percentages (.817, .890, and .817), would find that life in the increasingly difficult West wouldn't be so easy forever. By season's end, the Warriors had been eclipsed by the Houston Rockets. The team would slip to the conference's #2 seed, seven games back of Houston. The two would, of course, meet in the conference finals. Though Houston would jump out to a three-games-to-two lead, the Warriors would secure a 115-86 home win in game six and travel on the road to a hostile Toyota Center and defeat the higher-ranked club on the road by a score of 101-92, with Kevin Durant dropping 34 points to lead the team in the victory.

Maybe the grueling seven-game series against the Rockets was a motivator for these Warriors. The team entered the finals in familiar territory, at home against the Cleveland Cavaliers, with LeBron James -- widely considered one of the greatest basketball players in history, if not the greatest -- starring them down from the opposite bench. Game one would prove to be the Warriors' greatest test. The game will be remembered not for the Warriors' win or Stephen Curry's team-high 29 points but rather James' 51 and, infamously, the J.R. Smith maneuver which likely cost the Cavs the opportunity to squeeze out a critical win to start the series (and Smith has remained in the headlines in the off-season for the wrong reasons). In overtime, the Warriors would seize control of the game, and the series, with a 124-114 win that would all but suffocate Cleveland from the outset. Game two would again go to the Warriors, with Curry nailing a record nine three-pointers en route to a 122-103 victory. The action would shift to Cleveland for games three and four, but the results would be the same. The Warriors took a back-breaking 3-0 series lead in game three with 110-102 victory, including 43 points from Kevin Durant, and the team would celebrate on Cavalier hardwood with a dominant 108-85 win in game four to secure a third title in four years and the sixth in franchise history.

The film begins with a look back at the team’s ring ceremony and opening night battle with the deadly Houston Rockets, the Western Conference rival that spent the offseason trying to figure out a way to dethrone Golden State. It’s a game the Warriors would lose and that would establish a season-long rivalry on the court and in the standings that would ultimately lead the teams to clash in a seven-game series in the Western finals. The Warriors would drop several more early season games but find rejuvenating sparks in a mini youth movement the forms of rookies Jordan Bell and Quinn Cook. The team would limp into the playoffs, falling well behind the Rockets for the top seed, with Curry out with injury and the Rockets looming. The film explores the team’s run through the playoffs, including series against the Spurs and Pelicans in the first two rounds and the team winning both series 4-1 before running into the Rockets and Cavs. Much of the runtime is dedicated to those two series, with the latter earning about 25 minutes of the 59-minute runtime, or a little less than half. It’s a well-paced program, insightful into the season but focused on the playoffs and finals. It tells a familiar story but with the typical high quality NBA highlight packages and a rigorous dramatic current that runs through the show.

2018 NBA Champions: Golden State Warriors Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

This 1080i, 1.78:1 presentation delivers relatively healthy and enjoyable video. Colors are bright and bold, with various team attire, floor paint, the orange basketball, the rim, advertisements around the arena, essentially everything appearing vivid and full, well saturated, generally, and relatively true to life. Skin tones can push a little warm in interviews and the occasional shot here and there on the court. The image boasts commendable texturing, with quality details the norm, whether slow-motion footage that looks like it may have been shot on film or some silky video-sourced game footage. Viewers will see essential, distinguishing skin characteristics such as facial pores, hair, and tattoos with ease. Jerseys don't reveal supremely intricate detail even in some close-ups, but definition is stable even several rows back into crowds. The image does suffer from some noise, occasional but not all that obvious bouts of aliasing, and a little blockiness here and there, but nothing proves particularly debilitating. This is hardly a top-tier image but it handles essentials well across a spectrum of styles and inherent qualities.

2018 NBA Champions: Golden State Warriors Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

2018 NBA Champions: Golden State Warriors features a relatively straightforward DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless soundtrack. Without question, the track's inability to offer a more expansive, immersive stage is its greatest setback, but two-channel audio is fairly standard with these types of programs, anyway, and most that offer a more expansive channel selection do so largely on the spec sheet only, delivering tangential improvements over more modestly configured presentations, such as this one. The track images its core elements to the center, notably dialogue, whether that be player and staff interviews, courtside commentary, or narration. Clarity is never an issue, and words never stray from that desirable phantom center position. Music offers a little more width. Clarity is decent, but the absence of a dedicated low end channel limits the some of the more would-be potent beats. The track offers little else; scattered on-court action or environmental ambience filter through with decent clarity and adequate width as necessary, but things don't expand all that much from speech and music.

2018 NBA Champions: Golden State Warriors Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

2018 NBA Champions: Golden State Warriors contains a dozen extras, outlined below. The release ships with a DVD copy and also ships in a standard DVD case, so don't be alarmed when opening that package from Amazon or Best Buy.

• The Rookie - Jordan Bell (1080i, 2:14): A quick look at the second-round pick and his play on a championship team.
• New Arena Tour - Chase Center (1080i, 2:34): Not a tour of the unfinished building but a look at some high tech concepts and the construction site.
• Quinn Cook's Journey (1080i, 2:24): The G-Leaguer makes his Warriors debut.
• Steph Curry Interview with Grant Hill (1080i, 4:04): The future hall of famer sits down with the current hall of famer.
• Kevin Durant Interview with Dennis Scott (1080i, 4:29): The ex-Thunder talks about his success with the Warriors.
• Golden State's Motivation (1080i, 1:57): A look at what really drives the team.
• Draymond Green Interview with Kristen Ledlow (1080i, 3:33): The big man discusses his place on the team.
• Draymond Green's Grind Week (1080i, 2:45): A short look inside Green's grueling workout sessions with other players from around the league.
• Hashtag That with Andre Iguodala (1080i, 2:27): The Warriors player hashtags a few photos.
• Kevon Looney's Development (1080i, 2:34): The young front courter's rookie season is explored.
• Klay Thompson's Love of the Game (1080i, 1:52): The star discusses his father's influence on his game and life.
• Kevin Durant - Community Assist Award (1080i, 0:27): The star is rewarded for giving back to the community.

2018 NBA Champions: Golden State Warriors Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It seems like there's no stopping the Warriors. Though the team had its lowest regular season winning percentage in 2017-2018 of the four years the it has made the finals, there's a core in place that seems primed to keep things going for at least another season or two, not to mention some high impact young guns who got their feet wet during the season. The West did get more interesting in the offseason with LeBron James switching to Lakers yellow and purple, and a James-led team has made the finals every year since the 2010-2011 season. If that trend is to continue, then the Warriors will find themselves on the outside looking in come next year's finals. This Blu-ray delivers unremarkable, but adequate, video and audio. Supplements are made entirely of brief, minutes-long interviews and featurettes/fluff. Obviously a must-own for Warriors fans and die-hard basketball fanatics. There's not much here to entice casual viewers. A set featuring all four games in their entirety would have been nice.