The Warriors haven’t been as lucky during the playoffs as you might think

Kawhi Leonard left Game 1 with an ankle injury on Sunday, suffered after being undercut by Zaza Pachulia on a jump shot. Leonard first rolled the ankle in the last series and is now questionable for Game 2. Certainly, he won’t be 100 percent for at least one game.

That injury ostensibly led to “proof” that the Warriors are lucky as hell. Here’s one tweet that made its way around the internet.

The only problem is that, well, it’s slightly wrong. In chronological order, here are starters who have missed time against the Warriors in the past three postseasons.

For a full game, we couldn’t find opposing starters who missed any time against the Warriors during the 2016 postseason except for Motiejunas and a single game from Kevin Love. (It was a game the Warriors lost anyway.) However, Stephen Curry did miss time in two series that postseason.

Still, the Warriors did have eight series where a opponent missed time, which is still a big number. The question is whether it means anything.

If you’re wondering, no, the Warriors aren’t secretly hurting all their opponents. None of the injuries except Leonard’s could be construed as questionable, and most of them happened before their respective teams played Golden State.

They’ve only lost one playoff series in the past three years, and it took Andrew Bogut missing the final two games and Draymond Green missing one, albeit to suspension not injury. Stephen Curry didn’t miss any games, but he also clearly wasn’t right throughout the 2016 playoffs. We watched him tear up the league for 82 games en route to unanimous MVP, and that consistently didn’t happen.

Winning a title takes luck. It’s a prerequisite for any team to end the season as champions, and you can find a hundred instances throughout professional sports where some small, lucky detail could be changed and we would have a totally rewritten history.

In most of those cases, though, the injuries suffered by the Warriors’ opponents wouldn’t have changed anything. They would have won most of those series regardless. Beverley alone wouldn’t have changed the 2015 Western Conference Finals. They nearly lost to the Thunder in 2016 with no injuries, and then did lose to a healthy Cavaliers team while being beat up themselves. Besides the 2015 finals, the Kawhi Leonard injury looks like it might be the most impactful injury out of them all.

However, we overwhelmingly predicted the Warriors to beat the Spurs, and one great half from Leonard and the Spurs doesn’t change those predictions. If Leonard doesn’t get hurt and the Spurs pull out the win, it would be a wake-up call but probably not anything else for Golden State.

You don’t need to exaggerate stats about their playoff opponents. They signed Stephen Curry for millions less than he’s worth because he had suffered ankle problems, ones that have nearly completely gone away as he rose to winning consecutive MVPs. They stumbled on Draymond Green in the second round and unlocked his excellence in the starting lineup thanks to a David Lee injury. They signed Kevin Durant because of an unprecedented jump in the salary cap that really never should have been allowed.

In the grand scheme of things, the Warriors have seen more “lucky” things go their way than against them, but this is how the league works. No other championship team has bothered apologizing for good luck, and Golden State won’t be the first.