Few franchises carry a lineage as long or as geographically restless as the Golden State Warriors. The club has won championships in three different cities and under three different names, bridging the pro game’s earliest professional era and its most analytics-driven modern peak. This is a reference account of that title history and the records that surround it, checked against the league’s official ledger.
The Warriors count seven league championships: two in the franchise’s Philadelphia infancy, one after the move west to the Bay Area, and four in the Stephen Curry era. That total places them among the most decorated teams in the sport, and the spread of those titles across the decades is itself unusual.
The Philadelphia beginnings: 1947 and 1956
The Warriors were charter members of the Basketball Association of America, the league that would merge into the NBA in 1949. Coached and run by the pioneering Eddie Gottlieb, the Philadelphia Warriors won the very first BAA championship in the spring of 1947, defeating the Chicago Stags in the Finals. Joe Fulks, the jump-shooting forward who was one of the era’s great scorers, led the way. That inaugural crown gives the franchise a claim few can match: a title in the league’s founding season.
Nine years later the Warriors were champions again. The 1955-56 side, built around Paul Arizin and rookie playmaker Tom Gola and coached by George Senesky, took the NBA Finals over the Fort Wayne Pistons. It would be the last title the club won while based in Philadelphia. In 1962 the franchise relocated to the West Coast as the San Francisco Warriors, and in 1971 it adopted the regional “Golden State” identity it still uses.
The 1975 upset and the Al Attles era
The franchise’s third championship, and its first on the West Coast, remains one of the great Finals surprises. The 1974-75 Warriors, led by the brilliant and cerebral Rick Barry and coached by Al Attles, were heavy underdogs against a Washington Bullets team that had dominated the regular season. Golden State swept the series 4-0. Barry, who had returned to the club after a spell in the rival ABA, was named Finals Most Valuable Player.
That title stood alone for a long time. The decades that followed brought flashes of quality, including the run-and-gun “We Believe” playoff team of 2007, but no return to the Finals until a young core matured in the 2010s.
7League championships won by the franchiseThe Curry dynasty: 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022
The modern Warriors were reshaped around a homegrown backcourt of Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, the forward Draymond Green, and, from 2014, head coach Steve Kerr. Their brand of spacing, ball movement and volume three-point shooting reset how the sport was played.
The breakthrough came in 2015, when Golden State beat LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers 4-2 in the Finals. Andre Iguodala, moved into the starting lineup during the series, was named Finals MVP. The following season produced one of the most remarkable regular-year campaigns in league history, and then a painful ending, which is covered below.
The arrival of Kevin Durant in 2016 lifted the ceiling further. Golden State returned to the Finals and beat Cleveland 4-1 in 2017 and 4-0 in 2018, with Durant taking Finals MVP honors both times. After Durant’s departure and a stretch of injury-hit seasons, the original core reassembled for a final act: the 2022 championship, a 4-2 Finals win over the Boston Celtics. Curry, long questioned for never having won the series award, was at last named Finals MVP.
| Year | Franchise name | Finals result | Head coach | Finals MVP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1947 | Philadelphia Warriors | def. Chicago Stags 4-1 | Eddie Gottlieb | Award did not yet exist |
| 1956 | Philadelphia Warriors | def. Fort Wayne Pistons 4-1 | George Senesky | Award did not yet exist |
| 1975 | Golden State Warriors | def. Washington Bullets 4-0 | Al Attles | Rick Barry |
| 2015 | Golden State Warriors | def. Cleveland Cavaliers 4-2 | Steve Kerr | Andre Iguodala |
| 2017 | Golden State Warriors | def. Cleveland Cavaliers 4-1 | Steve Kerr | Kevin Durant |
| 2018 | Golden State Warriors | def. Cleveland Cavaliers 4-0 | Steve Kerr | Kevin Durant |
| 2022 | Golden State Warriors | def. Boston Celtics 4-2 | Steve Kerr | Stephen Curry |
The 73-win season and the record book
The 2015-16 Warriors finished the regular season 73-9, the best regular-season record in league history, surpassing the 72-10 mark set by the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. In a twist that reference writers are obliged to record honestly, that team did not win the title: it lost the Finals to Cleveland in seven games after leading the series 3-1. The 73-win season therefore stands as both a landmark and a cautionary tale about the gap between the regular season and June.
Individual records from this era are just as striking, and most of them belong to Curry. He was named regular-season MVP in 2015 and again in 2016, when he became the first player to win the award by unanimous vote. During that 2015-16 campaign he made 402 three-pointers, shattering his own single-season record. In December 2021 he passed Ray Allen to become the league’s all-time leader in made three-pointers, a mark he has continued to extend.
Thompson holds his own piece of history: on 23 January 2015 he scored 37 points in a single quarter against the Sacramento Kings, a league record for points in one period. Together, Curry and Thompson formed the most prolific shooting backcourt the game has seen, and the volume of their long-range production is a large part of why the sport’s shot profile changed around them.
Where the franchise sits in history
Seven championships is a total bettered by only a small handful of clubs. What sets the Warriors apart is the reach of that success across eras that barely resemble one another: a title in the two-handed set-shot age of 1947, another in the 1950s, an upset sweep in the mid-1970s, and a four-title run in the 2010s and early 2020s that defined its decade. The through line is not a single style but a franchise capable of reinventing itself around exceptional talent, from Fulks to Barry to Curry.
For the record book, the essentials are clean: seven league titles, the best single regular season ever posted, the career and single-season three-point records, and a modern core that turned a long-dormant franchise into a dynasty. The Warriors’ story is a reminder that championship history is measured in more than trophies. It is measured in the seasons that reshaped how the game is played, whether or not they ended with a title.
