Over the next few weeks, NBC Sports Bay Area and 95.7 The Game (KGMZ-FM) will be re-airing several classic Warriors games on nights they were scheduled to play before the NBA suspending it’s season indefinitely amid the coronavirus pandemic. Warriors head coach Steve Kerr spoke with the Bay Area News Group about his memories from those games.

The Warriors took some 2,900 3-pointers and won 83 regular-season and postseason games. Stephen Curry broke his own 3-point shooting record, scored 2,500 points and garnered 100 first-place votes on his way to earning MVP. The 2014-15 Warriors dazzled and destroyed en route to claiming their first championship in 40 years, and embarking on a five-year dynastic run.

Without Kyrie Irving, who went down with a fractured kneecap in Game 1, and Kevin Love, who suffered a dislocated shoulder in the first round, LeBron James led the Cleveland Cavaliers to a 2-1 series lead. However, the Warriors made key adjustments to help them win three of the final four matchups, defeating the Cavaliers in six games to win the 2015 NBA Finals.

The most important adjustment was made ahead of Game 4, when Kerr started forward Andre Iguodala in place of center Andrew Bogut, beginning games small with Draymond Green at center. Iguodala, who was responsible for guarding James, went on to be named Finals MVP.

“He saved this series for us,” Green told reporters after Game 6.

Starting Friday and continuing into next week, NBC Sports Bay Area will re-air each of the Warriors’ wins from the 2015 NBA Finals. Here’s what Kerr had to say about Golden State’s first championship during his tenure.

The Cavaliers won Games 2 and 3 without Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving. What do you remember being the most challenging thing about that Cavs team in those games?

I felt like we were a little nervous before Games 1 and 2 at home. You know, the Finals are just a different spectacle, and we hadn’t been there before. As much as I tried to prepare the players based on my own experience as a player, you just have to get your bearings with the Finals. All the extra media, everything, even the court looks different, and there’s just all this fanfare and I felt like we were nervous the first two games. And then Game 3 I think was more strategic in terms of they really had us bottled up and we couldn’t get our offense on track and that’s, I think, when we made the decision — kind of late in that game — to go to David Lee at the five. We had made a really good run at one point and, even though we didn’t win the game, we saw how it opened up the floor. So Game 3 was the impetus behind our own strategic shift for the rest of the series.

And you felt like maybe around then is when the nerves kind of shook off?

Yeah, I thought the nerves shook off sometime during Game 3. We were losing, we were down 2-1 at that point, and so we needed to do something to change the vibe of the series on the court. But I also felt like that’s around when the guys started to get comfortable with the whole Finals scene and, at that point, we locked in and started playing our game.

Then it was Game 4 when you made the decision to start Andre Iguodala. Obviously you were just trying to find an advantage in the series but, looking back, that’s been considered a real inflection point for the league. Do you ever think about that?

We had done a lot of that during the season, it wasn’t like that was the first time we tried that lineup. We played that small lineup quite a bit during the season for short bursts just to just to give us a spurt. So when we went to it, we felt comfortable with it because we had done it. But I do think that, because we did that in the Finals and the spotlight was on us, I think it got a lot of attention. And when you win, people in this league tend to copy — it’s a copycat league. The game was already trending that way. Miami was playing pretty small in their Finals games. So I think that was another step in that direction in terms of the way the league was heading anyway.

With that said, do you anticipate playing small to continue to be important for you guys going forward?

Oh, for sure. Even watching games from that 2015 Finals to now, everything has changed so much. I mean, Cleveland was routinely playing two bigs, the floor was clogged, there was not a ton of room for LeBron to move, and that was only five years ago. And within two years, by the ’17 Finals, Cleveland looked totally different with shooters everywhere and all kinds of room for LeBron to move. I think things started to shift pretty rapidly at that point.

You broadcast a lot of LeBron’s games when he was in Miami and then you obviously played him in the Finals all those years. Do you have an opinion of when you think he was at his apex? In 2015, that was the year he got the four Finals MVP votes despite being on the losing team.

He was fantastic but I think we made him work for everything in that series. I think it’s an interesting thing for our fans who are watching the games to look at Cleveland’s spacing in that ’15 series compared to just a couple years later, how different it is. But we were able to hold LeBron in that series to 36% shooting, I think (note: it was 39.8%, compared to his regular-season mark of 48.8%). He was phenomenal but we made him work for everything and he didn’t kill us. He was still really hard to defend, but if you compare that to even two, three years later when he had all that room, he became so much more difficult to guard. To me, the best game I’ve ever seen him play was Game 1 of the ’18 Finals. I think he had 50 points or 49 points or something (note: he had 51). So you can see just looking at Cleveland’s team, watching those Finals games, it’s pretty easy to recognize how different they look the first year we played them and in the last year. They morphed from one year to the next into a smaller, faster, better shooting team.

This interview has been edited and condensed.